The Four Questions with Bryan Welch, Publisher/Editorial Director, Ogden Publications Inc.
Earlier this year Topeka, Kansas-based Ogden Publications Inc. acquired Utne and Natural Home & Garden, since renamed Utne Reader and Natural Home, respectively. Utne Reader has a paid circulation of 225,000, the second largest Ogden title, Mother Earth News being the largest at 325,000, according to Bryan Welch, the company's Publisher/Editorial Director. Of its dozen titles, Ogden's oldest magazines are Grit and Capper's, which he pointed out have been published since 1882 and 1913, respectively. Ogden's magazines focus primarily on the sustainable lifestyle, rural lifestyle and collectibles. Welch practices what he preaches: He and his family raise organic, grass-fed cattle, sheep and goats on a 50-acre farm near Lawrence, Kansas.Q. Your magazines cover subjects long considered outside the mainstream—from green living and hybrid cars to solar power and global warming. But lately those topics have moved closer to, if not into, the mainstream. Why do you think that's so? For example, Al Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth was excerpted in Mother Earth News and the spinoff film version grossed nearly $24 million at the box office. Also, Leonardo DiCaprio is producing a reality TV series, E-topia, about the eco-friendly reconstruction of a town.A. Well, we've certainly received a lot of attention from certain high-rent quarters, in Hollywood, that is. But judging by the size of the audience, we're still not in the mainstream. We'd like to be, for our sake and the planet's, but we're not. With our aggregated audience of about three million people among our conscientious-lifestyle titles, we're hardly competitive with categories like sports, fashion or mainstream shelter/home titles. Still, we feel the momentum shifting our way. We're excited about the potential.Q. Have some of your titles reported on the viability of corn as a fuel source? Might that become an increasingly crucial alternative now that the U.S. has just topped 300 million people and China and India are likely to "supersize" pollution as they become more industrialized and use more cars?A. Biomass-based fuels are, indeed, an interesting and important alternative. However, compared with wind and solar, such fuels are still inefficient. Long-term, there are no real answers to our environmental and natural-resource problems except conservation and, of course, controlled human population. Q. An "Editor's Notebook" in the September issue of Ogden’s Capper's bemoaned the gradual disappearance of good penmanship and letter writing. CBS News' Katie Couric in her own radio "Notebook" feature last month made a similar point. Does that strike you as one of the more surprising side effects of the computer age?A. Personally, I am deeply thankful that penmanship has declined in importance. No one has worse handwriting than mine. That said, I'm a prig for grammar. If you want me to read your email, then punctuate! I actually feel that people are communicating through the written word a lot more than they were 25 years ago, even though there are very few great letter writers. There always were very few great letter writers. There are great bloggers in the world today, and I love the idea that so many people want to communicate with the rest of humanity, not just their closest friends.Q. Three philosophers in New Jersey recently came up with a list of the "101 most influential people who never lived"— with the Marlboro Man, Big Brother, King Arthur, Santa Claus and Hamlet rounding out their top five. Who would YOU put at the top of such a list?A. I can't be sure any of my candidates never lived. Grendel, the monster from "Beowulf," springs to mind but he seems so real to me. Especially with politics being the way they are these days. Anyway, King Arthur lived. So did Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The stories are fictional but the characters are real. Again, kind of like politics.
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