I worked for an MFA Graduate Run lit mag and interviewed w. LMN in December. What I can't remember if we touched on or not in that conversation is the kinds of administrative pressures that limit or enable the lit mag to have the resources it needs to follow through on its promises!
On one hand, a past masthead for our mag lobbied the Eng…
I worked for an MFA Graduate Run lit mag and interviewed w. LMN in December. What I can't remember if we touched on or not in that conversation is the kinds of administrative pressures that limit or enable the lit mag to have the resources it needs to follow through on its promises!
On one hand, a past masthead for our mag lobbied the English Department to make a line of funding available for a Social Media Manager so that we had someone devoted full time to our Instagram and Twitter presences.
On the other hand, the second or third person elected to that role shirked their responsibilities, and majorly dropped the ball on promotion of a) new issues and b) our contest and submission periods. As a result, our subs were down the following year, we brought in way less money to cover overhead, contributor pay, and printing costs, AND the University took away the line for SMM since that editor had essentially wasted that line.
I think our example opens up the dynamics of social media professionalism on multiple fronts: the individual responsibilities, the institutional responsibilities, the actual Abilities of editors (does an editor have the skills to make up for the lack? even the skill of social media content management?). But the example from the reader in this post draws a fine bottom-line for me: if a magazine makes a promise, it needs to follow through. I daresay, (especially if a contract has been signed between the mag and the contributor), that the contributor has a right to complain, or have their work retracted and submitted elsewhere.
I worked for an MFA Graduate Run lit mag and interviewed w. LMN in December. What I can't remember if we touched on or not in that conversation is the kinds of administrative pressures that limit or enable the lit mag to have the resources it needs to follow through on its promises!
On one hand, a past masthead for our mag lobbied the English Department to make a line of funding available for a Social Media Manager so that we had someone devoted full time to our Instagram and Twitter presences.
On the other hand, the second or third person elected to that role shirked their responsibilities, and majorly dropped the ball on promotion of a) new issues and b) our contest and submission periods. As a result, our subs were down the following year, we brought in way less money to cover overhead, contributor pay, and printing costs, AND the University took away the line for SMM since that editor had essentially wasted that line.
I think our example opens up the dynamics of social media professionalism on multiple fronts: the individual responsibilities, the institutional responsibilities, the actual Abilities of editors (does an editor have the skills to make up for the lack? even the skill of social media content management?). But the example from the reader in this post draws a fine bottom-line for me: if a magazine makes a promise, it needs to follow through. I daresay, (especially if a contract has been signed between the mag and the contributor), that the contributor has a right to complain, or have their work retracted and submitted elsewhere.