Monday, October 13, 2008

He Got Cut!

Peter was supposed to be in November's issue of Money magazine. It came in the mail last week, and when he looked through it, not only was there no mention of him, but the article by the writer who interviewed him wasn't even there. (Peter works for Prudential Financial doing retirement planning...a couple of years ago he and his boss came up with a patent-pending way to maximize Social Security payouts when you retire...pretty boring, I know, but it's exciting stuff in the wonderful world of retirement.) So anyway, there was a brief mention in an article about Prudential's approach, which Peter had discussed with the writer, but that was it.

I told him not to take it personally. I know magazines. Back in my professional career days I took a Magazine Editing class at NYU, and I learned all about magazines and how they get made. So much stuff gets cut from each issue because space is at such a premium. I had to do assignments in which I had to cut material from an article for publication, a lot of material to make it fit into the allotted amount of space. It was hard! (As an interesting aside, my instructor of that class is now the Health Director at Reader's Digest magazine. Oh yeah, I got connections!) Also, I suspect that the current financial crisis pushed aside a lot of the material that would have otherwise been published in November's issue of Money. They needed a lot of space to cover that. So Peter, even though you ended up down on the cutting room floor, so to speak, after being unceremoniously deleted by one of the editors, don't worry. You'll have your chance again and eventually I'm sure you'll evade the editor's red pen of death!