Confessions of Student Cover Designers

“Forty seconds left,” Michael Freidson, Editor-in-Chief of Time Out New York, said to our group as he came around collecting sketches of everyone’s  ideas for  the cover of TONY. We quickly scribbled our names on our group’s sketch and handed it in.

When we were initially invited to visit the office of Time Out New York last week, we thought we were just going on one of the educational field trips the M.S. in Publishing program at NYU-SCPS offers to help students  learn more about the media industry. Little did we know that  Freidson and Design Director Adam Logan Fulrath would turn a part of the visit into a real cover design session—and that our idea would be selected to appear on this week’s (October 7-13^th) issue of Time Out New York!

On the Inside at Time Out New York

Time Out New York Editor Freidson with M.S. in Publishing students

The Students of the M.S. in Publishing program at NYU-SCPS ventured this week to the place that helps turn events into hot parties and couch potatoes into busy bodies: Time Out New York (TONY).

Michael Freidson, editor-in-chief of Time Out New York, welcomed us in an industrial-chic conference room with whiteboards covered in notes about cover and story ideas. Freidson, in beaten denim jeans and a sharp powder blue dress shirt, began with the history of the weekly print magazine. Englishman Tony Elliott created Time Out in his bedroom in London in 1968 because, said Freidson, “there wasn’t a resource that could digest all of the events going on in London at the time.”

SPI Media Moments

Rodale's Mary Ann Bekkedahl speaks about the role of a publisher

By Andrea Chambers

“You guys are killing us. You’re the generation that won’t pay for anything!” griped Mary Ann Bekkedahl, EVP and Group Publisher for Rodale, www.rodale.com.

The 100 students staring her down did not look chagrined, perturbed or even ruffled. By now, week two in the Summer Publishing Institute, these recent college grads are getting used to being defined (and gently maligned) as game changers who are shifting the face of media. “You are ‘screenagers.’ You are born into the digital industry,” said Robert (“Bo”) Sacks, media commentator and creator of a widely read eponymous newsletter www.bosacks.com.  Once again, the students sat serenely, secure in their newfound sphere of influence. They registered more concern about Sack’s comment that half the information they learned in college was obsolete by the time they graduated.