Join us for a hands-on workshop where we'll explore the making—and re-making—of a magazine. This session will dive into ten key areas of magazine design—ranging from editorial concept and typography to way-finding and grid systems—showcasing how design choices shape reader experience and enhance the institutional brand.

Participants will be invited to evaluate their own publications through these lenses, gaining practical insights for making impactful changes. Whether you're refreshing your magazine issue by issue or planning a full redesign, this session will inspire you to elevate your editorial strategy and design.

In today’s multimedia-driven world, storytelling is no longer confined to the written word. A powerful narrative now includes an array of elements: print and online text, photography, video, sound, and interactive media. Managing the development of these diverse components can feel like running a bustling kitchen, with multiple chefs and ingredients all needing coordination to create a cohesive final product.

This session is designed to offer practical strategies for managing the complex relationships and workflows involved in producing multimedia content for university magazines. From the initial concept to the final piece, this session will cover how to ensure that each element — whether it’s a video, photo spread, or article — enhances the central vision or theme. We will explore how to streamline collaboration among different teams, maintain creative cohesion, and avoid common pitfalls, ensuring that each contributor can shine while staying aligned with the project’s goals.

The session will blend case studies, practical advice, and interactive discussion. Attendees will leave with concrete strategies and tools they can apply immediately to their own projects, along with real-world examples of both successes and challenges in multimedia storytelling.

Only older alums are interested in reading a print magazine, right? Wrong. In this session, we’ll demonstrate how Michigan Alum challenged that convention by writing a cover story on a recent grad who is a social media influencer. We’ll break down how we turned that one profile into our own social media campaign and caused a stir on campus by holding a live event that sold out within minutes.

Creating a truly keepsake anniversary issue — beyond tired timelines and rehashed founder profiles — requires editorial vision, a collaborative process, and creative writing and design. This session will take you behind the scenes of Kenyon College’s massive “200 things to love about Kenyon” issue to celebrate its bicentennial. We’ll share the surprising techniques that helped the issue wow readers from the moment they pulled the issue from the mailbox, and the under-the-hood processes and collaboration that helped make the issue a success. We’ll also discuss examples of other anniversary issues and projects that offered inspiration and insight as we mapped out an issue that felt authentic to the institution. If you’ve got an anniversary on the horizon, this session will be packed with actionable insights and inspiring examples.

How can your magazine serve as the bridge between your university and the city or town that surrounds you? Seizing the opportunity to connect stories with the hearts and minds of your local residents can expand your recruitment and fundraising efforts while also strengthening relationships with community leaders. The editorial staff of The University of Texas at San Antonio will lead a session demonstrating some of the Sombrilla Magazine stories that have strengthened the deep ties that the university has with the diverse population of San Antonio. We will explore how the magazine has showcased the Hispanic heritage of the city, the ways that athletics serves as the city’s “front porch” to the university, and how the students are being prepared for the workforce needs of the city’s business community. In this interactive workshop, you will have an opportunity to learn from each other and walk away with story lead ideas that can broaden your audience and increase your magazine’s relevance to target key stakeholders beyond the boundaries of your campus.

Packages are among the most impressive and effective pieces you will include in your magazine. They can also be daunting and unwieldy, especially if you're new to taking the package approach. In this session, an art director and an editor provide you with five fully baked approaches to packages that you can take away and apply to your next issue. We walk you through choosing the right package for the right strategy, planning tips and pinch points for each approach.
Bring your problem, priority or pending stories and we will discuss which ones would benefit from a package approach!

Join this conversation between Robyn Ross, freelance writer based in Austin, and conference co-chair, Maureen Harmon, as they take a look inside the writing process and explore how you can dig deeper to make the most of your stories.

As a reporter, Dan Solomon has spent his career focused primarily on two subjects: Deeply reported investigative features that expose sexual predators and tell the stories of their survivors, and the dumbest stuff a person can write about. In this session, he'll explain why they both serve readers, and how the two wildly divergent areas of focus inform one another.

Great work sprouts from a great idea. But when deadlines are looming, who's got time to seek inspiration? Join the 2024 Editors Forum Content Committee as they share some of their favorite stories and the unique ways they were inspired. They’ll then open the floor to you! Participants will have the opportunity to share some of their own favorite stories and what sparked the initial idea. We’ll send you off with a jolt of an inspiration as we wrap up the conference.