When I was in high school I published an article in a small-scale model train magazine, Southwest Prototype Modeler. It didn’t pay anything, but to see a four-page article with my byline in a magazine with 5,000 paid subscribers was pretty cool.

Because of my love for writing and magazines, my Dad thought I should go to college and become a writer or an editor. However, my high school English teacher Mrs. Mitchell thought there was no way I could be writer, given the competition (this was in the late 1970s). Since the only magazines I knew about in Chicago were Playboy, Chicago and Ebony, I figured she was right and entered the University of Illinois at Chicago’s accounting program. (Of course, neither one of us knew that Chicag o had trade magazine companies like Cahners Publishing [now Reed Business Information], which published 60 or more books.)

For the first five years of post-college life, I worked my way up the corporate accounting ladder of Zenith Electronics, before I decided that bean-counting wasn’t my thing. I then returned to writing, first as freelancer covering trade shows and speaker presentations for the plumbing industry’s American Supply House Association, then as an associate editor and senior editor at Building Design & Construction (a Cahners’) book and finally as the managing editor and executive managing editor of Plant Services (Putman Publishing), a trade journal for facility engineers at large-scale process plants (chemical, oil, pharmaceutical). Each job paid better than the last, and soon I was making more money (adjusted for inflation) than I did as a supervisor of financial consolidations at Zenith (where I supervised two financial analysts). I got up every morning and actually looked forward to coming to work everyday. I thought—and still do—the coolest thing you can do in the world is be paid for working on a magazine, doing writing and editing.
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In 2002, I returned home to my alma mater to edit UIC Alumni Magazine, not so much for the pay but for the opportunity to write human-interest stories versus articles on how to maintain equipment (compressors, pumps)without blowing up your plant.

However, I have lots of former colleagues who have felt the impact of changes in the way information is delivered. And this concept of free content—something that’s being done increasingly at paid consumer books via their websites—only conditions people not to pay. For example, why pay $16 a year or more for a subscription to Playboy when you can read the entire Playboy Interview with Hugh Laurie for free on playboy.com? It also has me wondering aloud: How do we pay for the writers, the editors, the photographers and the graphic designers to produce the content? Especially, when advertisers would rather throw their limited ad dollars into places such as Myspace and Facebook? If content is king, as everyone tells me, and that we need to be platform neutral, then why are us content providers being left behind?