n Friday, Sept. 13, I put the finishing touches on the latest edition of SCI FI magazine, a massive issue which, in addition to its usual 80 pages, will also feature a 32-page insert devoted to SCI FI Channel's epic miniseries Steven Spielberg Presents Taken, as well as a bound-in CD-ROM—but due to the standard amount of lead time it will take to print and bind and distribute and/or mail, you won't get to see the fruits of our labors until a month from now, on Oct. 15. Whereas this editorial for Science Fiction Weekly, which I'm still tinkering with on Sunday, Sept. 15, will be readable by you the very next day.
Ah, the wonders of the Web!
The convergence of these two deadlines of mine dredges up the memory of certain past missed opportunities. I can't tell you how many times, back when I was editor of such print SF magazines as Science Fiction Age or Sci-Fi Entertainment or Sci-Fi Universe or Sci-Fi Flix (whew!), that I'd get a call from a television publicist offering me an interview with an intriguing guest star on that week's upcoming episode of their show, and I'd have to explain the realities of publishing to them.
Perhaps newspapers could respond to such a short deadline, but not most magazines. "See, today is Monday, that episode will air on Thursday, and even if we could interview your guest star today, once the earliest issue that could possibly contain that interview hits the newsstands, that episode will be two to three months old, and will no longer be news." Over the many years of editing print magazines, I've had to skip dozens of such interviews for that very reason.
Internet publishing's big "but"
Today, now that I'm editing an Internet magazine, I can respond to any such emergency, and we've both benefited from that. In this wired world of ours, reviews, interviews and news stories can be read by you mere hours after they are written and edited.
On the other hand, as I discussed with my fellow Web publishers during a panel on electronic magazines at the recent World Science Fiction Convention, there's a certain lack of respect shown to the words that appear solely on the Internet. It's never really spoken aloud, but the bias is there. Even though over 300,000 of you subscribe to Science Fiction Weekly, some publicists would rather have their interviews appear in a glossy print magazine which has fewer subscribers, just so they can have a physical tear sheet to hand to their clients.
Even so, I can see that attitudes toward new technologies are changing—but, as always, never as swiftly as the technology itself.
So—is there anything we can do to promote a change in those attitudes and gain that respect? Well, yes and no. There are two important things which must happen—but unfortunately, only one of these things is within our control.
First, the action: We who work on the Web must do what we've continually been doing here at Science Fiction Weekly—our best. We have to show that the attributes of professional journalism aren't a monopoly owned by those who work in print.
The second thing that must happen, however, involves patience. Time must pass. The struggle of the Web to earn respect is, to a great extent, a waiting game. We must outlast the dinosaurs—for eventually, newer generations will see no difference between information obtained via pixels on a screen or ink printed on dead trees.
It's only a matter of time.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His science-fiction short stories can be found in the recent DAW anthologies Mars Probes and Once Upon a Galaxy.
