The risk well taken

On a day that found me a few thousand miles away from headquarters, and on one of the few days in 2009 that I didn’t have my mind focused on work at all, I actually learned the same lesson twice in the span of a few hours while attending a Dolphins game in Miami – and interestingly enough, that lesson applies squarely to what you can expect out of iProng in 2010. Allow me to try to explain.

Of the twenty-seven issues of iProng Magazine we released this year, the majority of them featured musicians on the cover who were widely considered household names at the time. It’s something we’re often congratulated for, but the truth is that even famous folks tend to make themselves available when they’ve got something to promote; our job, then, is to figure out which folks are worth talking to at any given time, based on the quality and significance of their latest project, how interesting the conversation with them is likely to be, and most importantly, how satisfied you guys are going to be after having read the interview. That last part might theoretically suggest that we go out and get the biggest name possible for the cover of each issue. But as it turns out, the relatively few times we’ve gone in the other direction have ended up netting us (and by extension, you) some of the biggest payoffs.

Some of these decisions have been very, very easy for us. The chance to interview Carlos Santana and put him on the cover? Your pet dog has enough IQ points to know enough to greenlight that one. Black Eyed Peas? Ditto. And sometimes you admittedly get a little lucky. Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were both pitched to me before their debut albums had even been released, the album advance I’d been sent having caught my ear in both instances, and in the relatively brief period in between conducting the interview and the scheduled publication date, each had risen quickly enough that putting them on the cover at that point was not that difficult of a decision – even though in both instances we were the first magazine to put either one of them on the cover.

Perhaps the biggest risk we took in all of 2009 came back in November when we decided to put a then-little-known guitarist on our cover by the name of Orianthi. It’s not like we discovered her or anything – by that time she’d already been tagged as the “next great guitarist” by Carlos Santana, Carrie Underwood, Steve Vai, and Michael Jackson – but I’d be willing to bet that at the time we published that issue, more than ninety percent of our readers looked at the cover and wondered who she might be.

Yet since that time, I’ve gradually received more feedback about Orianthi than just about any other cover we’ve ever done. And it was all positive; no one wrote in to complain that we’d finally put a musician on the cover who wasn’t famous. Instead, the feedback was along the lines of “Thanks for telling me about her” and “Glad I heard about her from you early on” and even “I wondered who that blonde guitar player was in the Michael Jackson movie, thanks for filling me in.”

Of course the Orianthi cover was greenlighted in the first place because we thought she’d probably be a household name eventually. And while I’m often too far on the inside of the industry beltway to be able to judge just how far into “household name” territory someone has or hasn’t reached, it was a fairly obvious indicator today when it was time for the national anthem at the Dolphins game and onto the field walked Orianthi with her guitar.

The payoff for you is that, as our readers, you get to hear about (and hear from) someone like that before just about anyone else does. And the payoff for us is that we get to make you happy. But it’s a risk, and while I’m very proud of what we delivered to you in 2009, that’s the kind of risk that we didn’t take as often this past year as I wish we had. Of course the only reason for not taking those risks is that you don’t want others looking back later on and second-guessing why you put someone on the cover who was ultimately never heard from again. But that’s nothing more than ego, isn’t it?

As I was chewing this over, as if on cue, the other half of today’s lesson presented itself near the end of the game. Football coaches are routinely lambasted by observers if they go for it on fourth down and don’t convert it; in fact one of the game’s most accomplished coaches was roasted earlier this season when he went for it in a scenario where all the math in the world said that it was the only logical decision. Punting would have all but guaranteed a loss, going for it on fourth down gave his team a greater than 50-50 chance of winning, so there was no way anyone could claim that he made the wrong decision – yet everyone did just that. And this is a guy who’s won several Super Bowls this decade.

So sure enough, the Dolphins coach finds himself in a situation late in the game today where going for it on fourth down would have given him a chance to win but punting basically guaranteed he would lose, and yet he punted anyway. How certain was it that this cowardly call cost his team the game? After the punt, half the fans in the stadium got up and left, because there was nothing else to watch at that point. It was a logicless enough call as to border on temporary insanity, one that effectively ended the Dolphins season today, and one that gained the coach nothing beyond being able to dodge outside scrutiny. If he’d gone for it on fourth down and failed, the armchair analysts would have lit him up for it. So instead he punted, knowing that he’d lose for sure, simply because he knew he’d take less blame for losing in that manner than if he’d had the guts to make the move that would’ve given his team its only chance to win.

My learned lesson for 2010, then: don’t ever be that guy. Don’t ever back down from taking an editorial risk worth taking, simply out of fear of looking foolish later on if the risk ends up not paying off. In the span of three hours today I saw someone else not have the courage to take a risk that needed to be taken, with the result being that a year’s worth of his team’s effort went down the toilet – and on that same field I saw evidence that one of my own relatively few major editorial risks in 2009 is going to pay off for us in spades. So if a risk is worth taking in 2010, and the only downside is the potentially wounded pride of guessing wrong, then we’re going to go for it. We owe you that much.

And it’s not just about who goes on the cover, either. One of the reasons why we began releasing issues on a more frequent schedule in late 2009 was so we could push more content out the door without making each individual issue too long. Our plan is to use that extra flexibility to bring you more kinds of content in each issue so that you’ll find the issue worthwhile and entertaining overall even if you’re not a fan of who’s on the cover – or perhaps haven’t yet heard of them

There’s more coming down the pike and it’s a long year, so I won’t tease you with too much future-speak that we’re not ready to put in front of your faces yet. Don’t worry, we’ve got interviews with plenty more household names, living legends, and super-hot artists coming your way throughout the year. But don’t be surprised if you see us doing more things that surprise you.