Making Beautiful Music

For a publisher, the joy of being in the magazine business comes when each new issue arrives hot off the press and is being held in your hands, the creative process complete and displayed in all its colorful glory. I cannot remember deriving such pleasure from any other job I’ve had; for example, finishing a legal brief, while satisfying in other ways, was never this much fun. The only greater joy is when what’s been created is uniquely special, both for its content and the way it came together, and in this month’s issue we have such a piece: our special promotional section on the Filipino Centennial in Hawaii.

As even our most casual reader has undoubtedly noticed, rare is the month in which an issue does not contain at least one special advertising or promotional section; it’s what we do to derive revenue. When my Ad Director Bobby Senaha came up with the idea of a special section on the Filipino Centennial being celebrated this year in Hawaii, I knew immediately he had hit on something that was unique and had great ad sales potential; after all, it was an event that only happens once every hundred years, and community pride would certainly make this a good sell.

As a business publication, we decided to focus our special section on Filipinos in business and in the workplace, and our first step was to find partners in the Filipino community. Bobby, who is active with the Filipino Jaycees, brought together a small group of Filipino business leaders from the Jaycees and the Filipino Centennial Celebration Commission and the Filipino Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii who liked the idea and provided their thoughts as to what and whom such a piece should cover. They also brought an invaluable rolodex of contacts in the business community whom we could solicit for ads to support the section. With that basis of potential support, we decided to move forward with the project.

For special sections like this, we generally bring in non-staff, freelance writers and designers to create it. We wanted, however, to use writers and designers who would be sensitive to the special nature of a piece celebrating the history of a unique group of people, and as luck would have it we found them in our project coordinator, writers, designer and photographers, several of whom were of Filipino ancestry. Their personal interest in the subject shone through in their writings, photos and designs, and suddenly we realized what a truly special section we were creating, one that told the story of a people and their experiences, history, and future, a tale of a unique ethnic group to be sure yet one that would resonate in all of us.

So this project which started out as a nice, commemorative piece through which we could sell some ads suddenly became a story for the ages, one in which all involved are proud to have been a part. For me, a not especially artistic person, this is as close as I get to being involved in creating art, of helping to make beautiful music as it were. At least not until our next issue, that is, when I’ll have the pleasure of seeing again what some truly talented people can create.

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