Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 14 February 2003, 6:03 PM
Thursday
Thursday 13/02/03
From across the country they come, raddled old journalists, bright young production people and those whose true nature has never been determined. It's the night of the big party! PC Magazine's reunion bash kicks off.
The affair is funded by PR firm Hill and Knowlton, who seem curiously keen to pour beer down the throats of people who are in many cases no longer directly connected with the business of writing about H&K's clients. It's obviously by way of showing how much the company has changed since the uneven days of the early 90s, when the US parent was involved in rather over-promoting some aspects of Desert Storm. But the Knowltonians mix amiably with the rest of us, and all is fine.
It's amazing how strongly the team spirit has survived the intervening years, which has seen the once mighty magazine reduced to the status of a PDF file languishing on a Web site so miserable I cannot bring myself to type its name. At one end of the bar, the truly gorgeous usability editors (why are they always women with a strange fascination for geeks? Didn't they realise they were being thrown into the lion's den?); at the other, the frankly mixed bag of Senior Editorial Figures wavering slightly in the breeze. Could it be true that ex-labs director Ed Hennings is devoting his time to writing the canonical book on the Buddhist calendar? And which hyper-hip flame-haired editrix is now working for Double Bassist magazine, and loving it? Not to mention Simon Blackwell, whose stint on production at PC Mag obviously prepared him well for his current job of writing jokes for the BBC.
Mixed feelings, certainly. But by the end, we were ready for our original leader, Bill Ziff, to reappear waving his chequebook, singing our favourite refrain "Religious overspend on editorial", and kicking the whole lot off again. The team was back in town.
If anyone wants an expert magazine creation squad, we're your men. And women. And lab rats. Forward into the future!
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