Why have a celebrations issue?
The answer is threefold. Since this will be our fourth issue together, perhaps you are interested enough in The Catholic Echo at this point to be curious about some of the “hows” and “whys” behind this publication—so I’ll give you the sentimental and practical reasons behind this issue:
1) Sentimentally, we have a lot to celebrate this year in the Diocese of Youngstown—and I mean A LOT. If you count, you’ll see 12 parish or church anniversary stories alone in this issue. Each of these is a story worth telling, and just like The Catholic Exponent did, we’d like to tell these stories in print.
2) Practically, we’ve budgeted to release a 36-page magazine 10 times per year. You’ll see that this one is 44 pages and does not include some of our “standard” content. That’s because we’ve managed to cut some costs elsewhere in our budget—and secured some fantastic new advertisers—so that we could make room for all the things we’re celebrating this year.
3) Also practically, this format gives us the time we need to properly plan for a magazine. Magazines are different from newspapers in several ways, but one of the mostly unknown differences is in deadlines. Magazine printing generally takes many weeks. When I wrote this note, it was July 28—our August issue was hitting homes—and this was one of the last pieces of content we needed before the issue could go on to the proofreading stage. Because we knew we were dedicating an entire issue to celebrations, we’ve had many months to consult with parishes and our diocesan archivist, Joan Lawson, to create a comprehensive content plan and then make assignments to ensure we would have everything covered and that the magazine would hit homes in time for September.
If you’ve been to www.CatholicEcho.org, you may have noticed that we’ve been featuring “Celebrations” stories on our homepage since the beginning of the summer. So, if you want more stories like these, you can always check there.
Without further ado, please enjoy this first special issue of The Catholic Echo! There’s a lot of history, events and good news ahead.
Until next month,
Katie Wagner
