When I first started at my job, I edited New Orleans Homes and Lifestyles, which was monthly, and Louisiana Life, which was quarterly – 16 magazines a year. A few months in, we took Louisiana Life up to six times a year – and then a few months after that, when everything started plummeting economically, we scaled back Homes and Lifestyles to twice a year. To make up for the 10 magazines a year I was losing, I took over as Web editor. It was a job I learned to love but one I never felt I could get a handle on.
There are days that I open the door to Ruby’s room intending to clean it, and instead, I just look at it for awhile, quietly shut the door and back away slowly because it’s so messy that I’m too overwhelmed to even start. (I do the same thing with my car.) That’s how I felt with the Internet – there was always more I could do, should be doing.
Jordan DeFrank, however, gets jazzed up by these possibilities. She has singlehandedly built our Twitter following to one of the largest in the city, makes our Facebook fun to read, stays on top of our Top Events and contributes some great blogs herself. That’s why I’m delighted to announce that she will be taking over as Web editor.
What will I be doing? I’ve gone back to the much more manageable (for me) world of paper – back up to 16 magazines a year, in fact. Renaissance Publishing recently acquired Acadiana Profile, which was started and run for many years by the Angers family, and I am honored to have a chance to work on such a well-established magazine and also cover such a rich and diverse area. On our most recent issue, I got to spend an entire afternoon fact-checking a story about boudin – that’s hard to beat, as jobs go.
Please go check it out and let us know what you think – and if you don’t already follow us on Twitter, you should. I think that encapsulates pretty well what we do here at Renaissance: We preserve the heritage of the state by purchasing one of the oldest regional glossy magazines in the country, and we tweet about it.
