By Viv Robins
With any luck by the time you read this Tony Blair will finally have left the stage. But his will not be the only protracted goodbye of 2007.
At last month’s editorial meeting I told the board I wanted to step down as Editor at the end of the year. It’s been great fun and a privilege to be the Newsletter’s first Editor, but as some of you may know I also have a home in London and have been rather neglecting my life there because of my commitments in The Lee, which now of course also include the Parish Council.
The reason
for such a long period of notice is to try to find some-one else who can work
alongside John Fortgang to produce 10 Newsletters a year. Indeed with the
odd starry guest appearance from Gilbert Nockles (we hope he will be editing
the September edition) it could end up being fewer than that.The job habitually involves a couple of days of reasonably intensive activity in the middle of the month. Editorial planning meetings are usually held around the 12th or 13th, with the deadline for copy to our setter, Andrew Burnett, fixed at the 16th of the month. In the interim the function of the Editor is to bully or cajole contributors to come to the wicket, re-shape or shorten their pieces as necessary and where possible put an eye-catching headline on them.
You don’t have to be a journalist to do the job, as John and before him Barnaby Usborne have so ably demonstrated. But in case any potential editor has doubts, Andrew and I – but mostly Andrew – have compiled a style guide which seeks to codify the rules and practices which have evolved over the past six years.
If you are interested, the best approach would probably be to edit one Newsletter under the aegis of John or me and see how it goes.
I’m sure you wouldn’t regret it. As some wag once said about sex, Dungeness and Fernet Branca (whatever that is): "everyone should experience them at least once".