Diversity Almost Done!

While I hope readers are busy devouring all things pet in our current issue of Madison Magazine, my staff is a little busy on the next issue. Thing is, it’s not just any issue, it’s two magazines in one. For more than a year now we’ve been planning for a new, 68-page magazine celebrating diversity in the Madison area. It’s called Spectrum Magazine, and the organization we’re producing it for is the Madison Area Diversity Roundtable. They are an amazing group of Madisonians I’ll blog about later, but for now I want to brag about the writers and designers who are, like I said, B-U-S-Y putting this important publication together.

Laura Salinger, who has deftly covered a broad range of issues and topics for The Madison Times, Capital City Hues and Asian Wisconzine, wrote most of the major articles, and a whole slew of smart, talented people, including all of our editors, designers and more than a dozen area freelance writers and photographers, have been laboring to make this magazine matter in a community that embraces diversity but doesn’t always follow through in executing it. (More on that later, too.) For now, just know that I can hardly think straight, much less blog straight, because I’m so nervous and excited about sharing Spectrum with you.

It’s been hard and exhilarating to help birth a new magazine … and remarkably, the labor has been longer than my seven-year-old who took her own sweet time in production. But in a few short weeks Spectrum Magazine will ride along with the January issue of Madison Magazine, which we’re dubbing “Big Ideas.” The Spectrum concept is a perfect fit for a magazine about what our city and its people can accomplish if we set our minds to it. Because we all know that ideas are only as good, or as big, as those of us willing to work to make them happen.