Day 1, Wednesday, March 24

1:45-2:00 PM
Welcome and Introductions From Your Co-Chairs
Paige Parvin, Editor, Emory Magazine and Shawn Presley, Director of Public Affairs & Editor, Kenyon Alumni Bulletin (2009 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year)

2:00-3:15
Creating the Must Have Alumni Publication: Lessons from the Newsstands
How do you get someone's attention? How do you keep someone's attention? With more than 20,000 magazines on the market today, getting and keeping someone's attention can be a matter of life or death for a commercial publication. But what about college and university magazines who are competing right along with commercial ones for a reader's attention? With more than 30 years of consulting and research experience, Samir Husni knows what it takes to make your alumni magazine go from just another magazine in the mailbox to a publication that speaks directly to your readers.
Presenter: Samir Husni, "Mr. Magazine", Director of Magazine Innovation Center, University of Mississippi, School of Journalism

3:15-4:00
Networking Break featuring:
• magazine exchange room
• meet the exhibitors

4:00-5:15
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
In the Magazine Business
Times are hard for magazines, with newsstand ranks dwindling and beloved household names disappearing, it seems, every month. If anyone has perspective on the value of print magazines these days, it's Adi Ignatius, editor of the Harvard Business Review and former deputy editor of TIME magazine. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor for TIME, TIME Asia, and the Wall Street Journal, Adi has taken the helm of a publication that spans two worlds: business and academia. Based at a prestigious university, the Harvard Business Review is also a mainstream and commercial success, reaching the alumni audience and beyond with its real-life relevance and market savvy. Find out how Adi draws on Harvard's intellectual capital to sustain a nationally respected business magazine.
Presenter: Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Business Review Group

5:30-7:30
Networking Reception

Co-sponsor of the Networking Reception: Lane Press

7:30
Dine Around Cambridge & Boston
Join your colleagues for informal networking dinners in and around the Boston area. Dinners are dutch-treat and not included in your conference registration. More information will be available at the CASE Registration Desk.

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Day 2, Thursday, March 25

7:30-8:45 AM
Continental Breakfast & Roundtable Discussions
Join your colleagues for informal roundtable discussions during breakfast.

Sponsor of the Breakfast Roundtable: Quad/Graphics

9:00-10:15
Making Science Make Sense
Scientific research and discovery can make for riveting reading, or it can induce glassy-eyed stupor within minutes. That's why science writing is a specialty that's increasingly in demand-particularly for university publications where research is a major beat. Thomas Levenson is an award-winning science journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, and head of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing. His latest book, Newton and the Counterfeiter, is a shining example of how science, economics, crime and brilliant personalities can combine with dogged reporting to become a page-turning story. Tom is uniquely qualified to offer some practical advice on how to approach a science topic with confidence and creativity.
Presenter: Thomas Levenson, Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; award-winning science writer

10:30-11:30
ELECTIVE SESSIONS (choose one)

• Print's Charming: What You Need to Know Now About Ink, Paper and Print Production
  Love your printing! Learn about the latest trends in green printing, how to use increasingly popular uncoated papers, tricks to optimize printing results in a time of shrinking budgets, and much more. Now more than ever, you need to get the biggest bang for your printing buck. We'll tell you how.
  Presenters: Pam McGuire, Print Production Manager, Mohawk Fine Papers, and Brian Barry, Sales Representative, Brown Printing
  Moderator: Amy Blumenthal, Deputy Editor, Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin
• Useful, Usable and Used: How Refrigerator Journalism Can Make Your Magazine a Better Publication
  The best chance you have to get readers to read is to give them something helpful. Remember, the opposite of useful is useless. Service is the name of the game. Magazine copy should be given a useful slant and presented in such a way that readers can grasp it quickly and easily. They should want to clip it out and stick it on the refrigerator. Information is useless unless readers use it. This lively interactive seminar will end with a group demonstration of how brainstorming a topic will make it dance and sing.
  Presenter: Don Ranly, Professor Emeritus, Missouri School of Journalism
• Blood, Sweat, Tears and Luck: Building Great Stories
  In the minds of non-editors, we spend our days waiting for perfect story ideas to land in our laps and write themselves. In reality, our job is to build stories from scratch. Kathrin Day Lassila of the Yale Alumni Magazine (who has had three perfect story ideas fall into her lap in 16 years as an editor) shares methods for coming up with great topics, finding the good stories hidden in important but oh-so-boring topics, and developing the best presentation for each story.
  Presenter: Kathrin Day Lassila, Editor, Yale Alumni Magazine
• Hard Science, Great Stories: Producing Great Science Writing
  Science challenges us as storytellers. The experiments and findings and theories can be hard to comprehend and harder to explain. Plus the scientists can be difficult: wary, opaque, impatient, even hostile. And how do you take topics from quantum physics or molecular biology or igneous petrology and uncover the human narratives at the heart of all great magazine stories? Easy it is not. But this panel of seasoned science writers and editors will apply their considerable experience to demonstrate how to approach science stories with confidence, turn scientists into willing collaborators, and produce stories that engage readers.
  Moderator: Dale Keiger, Associate Editor, Johns Hopkins Magazine
  Panelists: Michael Penn, Director of Communications, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and Editor, Grow Magazine, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Tom Levenson, Professor of Science Journalism in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

11:45 AM-12:45 PM
ELECTIVE SESSIONS (choose one)
All 10:30 AM sessions repeat

12:45-2:00
Networking Buffet Luncheon

2:00-3:00
ELECTIVE SESSIONS (choose one)

• The Medium Is Not the Message: Effectively and Efficiently Publishing Your Magazine Online
  It's clear by now that our magazines need to be available online, but navigating the ever-changing digital environment can be intimidating, especially for editors used to working primarily in print. Don't be daunted by the diversity of media now available-it's still the message that matters most. This session offers tactics and strategies for avoiding common mistakes when moving between print and digital media, examples of magazines that are doing it well, and methods for making the most of the online environment, whatever your resources. The session includes an overview of various online formats such as blog programs (i.e., Wordpress), html sites, and flipbooks, as well as tips for using social media (Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) to enhance your pages and engage your audience.
  Presenter: Ann Wiens, Director of Communications and Editor, DEMO Magazine, Columbia College Chicago
• How to Rock a Redesign: The Experience of CASE Grand Gold Winner Sarah Lawrence Magazine
  Before readers read, they look. And they can tell a lot about your magazine just by glancing at it. A strong design doesn't just look good; it reinforces and expands on your editorial mission. A redesign can do much more than freshen the look of your magazine. It's a chance to evaluate your goals, rethink the kinds of stories you tell, and refine or even rebuild the structure of your book to better support your editorial content. Explore the foundations of a successful redesign process, using the redesign of Sarah Lawrence magazine-the 2009 CASE grand gold winner for periodical design. Learn when and why to redesign; how to evaluate your magazine's personality, structure and function; how to build a cohesive and flexible design; and how to navigate the politics of creating buy-in and securing approvals on campus.
  Presenters: Hannah Fichandler, Senior Art Director, Taylor Design and
  Suzanne Gray, Associate Director of Creative Projects, Sarah Lawrence College
• Front and Center: Making the Front of Your Book Stand Out
  Do you struggle to come up with engaging content for your magazine's Front of the Book (FOB)? Do you find that producing your FOB is often an afterthought, left to pull together at the last minute and seen as a place to dump recycled press releases? Are you, right now, wondering what the heck an FOB is? If you answered yes to any of those questions-or if you're interested in replenishing your editorial toolbox with fresh FOB ideas-then this session is for you. In this interactive workshop, we're going to define just what the FOB is, explain why it's as essential to your magazine architecture as the feature well, and (here's the best part) explore all of the ways you can make this section accessible, fun and impossible to ignore. Come armed with ideas, questions, and pen and paper because you will leave with a notebook full of tools to take home with you.
  Presenter: Matt Jennings, Editor, Middlebury Magazine
• Magazine Idol Critique
  Ever wish Simon could weigh in on your editorial content, or Randy on your choice of cover photo? Well, we have the next best thing: a panel of industry experts who will provide direct, immediate feedback on what they like-and what they don't-about your magazine. Alumni may have the final vote, but our panelists-Teresa Scalzo, Emily Aldrich, and Billy Howard-are among the best in the field, and they aren't afraid to cut to the chase in front-of-the-room, five-minute-per-magazine critiques. The pace will be quick, and the panel will be moderated by Emory Magazine associate editor Mary "Seacrest" Loftus. Bring your latest issue and be prepared.
  Moderator: Mary Loftus, Associate Editor, Emory Magazine
  Critics: Teresa Scalzo, Director of Publications, Carleton College; Emily Aldrich, Freelance Designer and Designer for the Carleton College Voice; and Billy Howard, Photographer

3:15-4:15
ELECTIVE SESSIONS (choose one)
All 2:00 PM sessions repeat

4:30-5:45
Transforming the Personal into the Professional: Discovering the Passion in Your Work
Good photography is born of skill, hard work and a little luck, but great photography comes from a meaningful connection between photographer and subject. Billy Howard brings it all to his work as a documentary and commercial artist whose passions are education and international nonprofit photography. Whether shooting smiling college students or children with cancer, Billy will show you how finding a reason to connect with the subject in a substantial and personal way can help create a more powerful image.
Presenter: Billy Howard, Photographer

5:45
Conference Adjourns for the Day
Dinner on your own

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Day 3, Friday, March 26

7:30-8:45 AM
Continental Breakfast/Roundtable Discussions

9:00-10:15
Truth Telling: Ethics and Institutional Journalism
When Barack Obama was a law student at Harvard, he likely never knew his basement apartment in Somerville lay at the edge of Ten Hills Farm, on ground that for 150 years was home to slaves. One of the owners of that farm, a man named Isaac Royall Jr., owned scores of slaves and used part of his fortune built upon the trade to found Harvard Law School. Royall's attorney was a man named Simon Tufts and Ten Hills Farm abutted land that would one day become Tufts University. And the list goes on-Princeton, Bowdoin, Brown, Yale, to name but a few. As chroniclers of institutional history, how do we handle the hard truths that are integral to the university's past-and the equivalent stories of the present? Catherine S, Manegold, a former reporter with The New York Times and author of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, will explore the complex ethics of alumni magazines as they tangle with difficult, but critical, subjects. For those of you who don't see your institutions on this map-don't get too comfortable.
Presenter: Catherine Manegold, former reporter New York Times & author of In Glory's Shadow (about the first female student at the Citadel), and journalism professor at Mount Holyoke

10:15-10:45
Networking Break featuring:

• Book signing with Catherine Manegold
• Magazine exchange room

10:45-11:45
Alumni Magazine Readers: A National Survey
The CASE Members Magazine Readership Survey, launched in February 2009, gives the first comprehensive national data on magazine readers' habits, likes and dislikes. Each institution that participates in the Web-based research receives its own report about the readers of its magazine. In addition, all results are added to a national database that allows individual schools to benchmark against the aggregate. As of fall 2009, more than 100 independent schools, colleges and universities have used the survey, with nearly 30,000 individual readers responding. The results are a compelling argument for the effectiveness of magazines in engaging our constituents-with an added message about the importance of serving the interests of readers with believable and credible content. Attendees will also learn how they can conduct their own survey and add to the growing national data base.
Presenters: Jeff Lott, Director of Publications, Swarthmore College; and Rae Goldsmith, Vice President of Advancement Resources, CASE

11:45 AM-NOON
Conference Wrap Up

NOON
Conference Adjourns

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