St Louis Magazine / August 2010 / From the Editor: Make It New

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From the Editor: Make It New

In April 2009, I wrote an editor’s note in this space called “Reintroducing SLM.” Our staff was spent, but psyched to be relaunching a rebuilt and refreshed St. Louis Magazine—a new logo, a revised departmental structure, unified fonts...a hundred changes big and small. Fast-forward to a recent June morning. If you heard some fifth-floor cheers as you drove past our office on Brentwood Boulevard, here’s the reason: We’d just learned that our 2009 redesign had been named the overall winner in the Redesign category of the City and Regional Magazine Association’s awards competition. We were thrilled with the national gold medal—it’s a 25-year-old competition with judges from some of the country’s most respected publications (Sports Illustrated, Esquire, The New York Times). Our art director, Kevin Goodbar, would have been forgiven if he’d up and left the office for a celebratory concrete. But alas...

...he was knee-deep in our latest relaunch project: stlmag.com. Right about the time this August issue gets into your hands, our editorial, art, and Web teams will be flipping the switch on the relaunch of our website. There’s so much that’s new, starting with the name—
the St. Louis Magazine logo up top has been replaced by stlmag.com, a more appropriate title for a Web publication with a great deal of daily content that’s independent of the magazine. We’ve introduced a clean new color palette and a front page that offers clear routes to the
St. Louis–related stories that are heating up the Web; the latest posts across six editorial blogs; additional photo and video slideshows; and more opportunities for readers to weigh in on what they’re doing, seeing, or eating around town. Two areas we’re especially excited about are the amped-up Look/Listen arts blog—where a newly assembled team of established St. Louis voices will offer daily reviews and articles—and our new Health section.

Speaking of which: The issue you’re holding contains the most ambitious and comprehensive health-related project we take on each year, online or in print. This is our most popular issue with readers, who value not just the most current list of peer-recommended physicians (“Best Doctors 2010,” p. 89), but also the array of medical articles and interviews published alongside it. I hope you’re among the many who anticipate this issue each year.

If you’re not, there’s still good news: For all of the health coverage in this issue, it also contains more non-health-related articles than any other issue of the year. That’s what happens when an issue pushes 400 pages: We produce twice as many departmental articles (including
Stefene Russell’s fabulous “Just One More Time, Lord,” p. 74); our regular restaurant review becomes a triple-decker special (“Haute-tel Dining,” p. 354); and our feature well’s home not just to a colorful profile (“This Man Will Eat Your Car,” p. 176), but also to a 7,000-word special report on a near North Side school (“Tough Kids Turning,” p. 170). We feel about as exhausted as we did upon that 2009 relaunch, but we’re quite pleased with the heft of the result. It’s a kind of supersizing of which even our Best Doctors can approve.