Keeping GCM in focus

Casual readers of GCM might not know this — heck, it might have slipped past even the most voracious readers of the magazine — but each issue of the magazine is wrapped in a specific editorial focus, a topic that we attempt to dissect in at least a couple of different vehicles.

Some months, the focus is more obvious than others; for example, it’s pretty clear that the focus of our January issue is the GCSAA Education Conference and Golf Industry Show. And it’s tough to miss our focus on golf and the environment in February.

How we tackle that focus can vary from month to month. It might be in the form of a pair of longer feature stories that examine issues such as water and irrigation, our editorial focus for June. We could use a single feature story and one of our regular monthly columns to turn our attention to emerging trends in the golf course management industry, the focus in November. Or you might find shorter, more pointed items scattered throughout the magazine that delve into a subject like turf equipment, our focus in May.

I bring this to your attention not as some cheap ploy to send you scurrying through the pages of this month’s magazine on a Where’s Waldo-like search for the monthly focus. Instead, our unique treatment of that focus — which is disease and pest management, by the way — and some discussions about the future of our editorial focuses has brought the matter into better focus (sorry ... a terribly obvious and undeserved pun).

Thanks to the hard work of GCM’s science editor, Teresa Carson, we’re presenting this month’s focus exclusively through our industry-leading research section and Inside Your Turf, our regular monthly column that examines all things agronomic. All three pieces deal with the groundbreaking work being done by a large group of university researchers studying two perplexing problems that face many superintendents who maintain annual bluegrass — anthracnose and annual bluegrass weevils.

Carson talks about this unique group of researchers in her Inside Your Turf column, which can be found on Page 42, while the research section kicks off on Page 86.

Meanwhile, the staff of the magazine has been engaged in some wide-ranging discussions with the members of GCSAA’s Strategic Communications Committee about our current editorial focuses and whether that set continues to meet the needs of our readers. Based on their feedback and the results from a pair of recent readership studies that we’ve commissioned, we think we’re largely on target with our content, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see a few tweaks when we wheel out our editorial content for 2009, a task we’re beginning right now.

As always, I’d like to encourage interested readers to join in those discussions. You can check out the list of our current editorial focuses online at www.gcsaa.org/cm/gen/industry_generated_pages/Editorial_calendardeadlines_m11.html then e-mail me your thoughts on what works for you and what doesn’t at
shollister@gcsaa.org.