I find it helps to mention the people you meet through
your chess activities. I’ve held free rated G/10 tournaments
the past three years at the Salvation Army in Marshalltown,
Iowa (pop. 25,000), on Thursday nights and I try to work in
references to the people I play and meet at the tournaments.
Relating my chess battles and offhand conversations with
Dave the barefoot chess player, Joe from Waterloo, fellow
blogger Dan Troxell, etc., builds a sense of community between me and my readers and gives a sense of continuity to
my blog, even when I go ‘off-topic’ and devote an article to
political events, sports, my two beagles, or Cheetos Puffs (the
best snack food in the world). Giving your readers a glimpse
in your world will help them relate to you and remove the
sense of distance inherent in a one-way conversation.
I’d like to close this edition with one last piece of advice.
Delegate the job of being your worst critic to someone
other than yourself. Writing is like exercising for the nonprofessional blogger. As you write more and more, you will
get better and better at it without even noticing the improvement. Resist the urge to judge each individual post as
soon as you write it. Leave yourself a reminder to read your
first two or three months’ worth of posts in one sitting. I
promise you will cringe at some, take pride in others, but you
will see your improvement.
A New Jersey native transplanted to Marshalltown Iowa, Hank is a
Senior Tournament Director who runs free weekly blitz tournaments in
Marshalltown and monthly family chess tournaments in the Des
Moines area. Hank is a Class B chess player who won national class
championships in the 2006(C) and 2007(B) US Game/30 tournaments. Hank has written the Broken Pawn chess blog
(brokenpawn1.blogspot.com) since 2009 and also self-published the
children's book, The Adventures of Bulldog Beagle. Broken Pawn
was the winner of the 2011 CJA Best Chess Blog award. A programmer by trade and Yankee fan by blood, Hank lives with his wife
Kathy, sons Matt and Ben, and a house full of pets including two
beagles, Daisy and Baxter. Visit Hank Anzis’s award winning blog,
Broken Pawn, at http://brokenpawn1.blogspot.com/
See you next issue. l
NEWSLETTER OR MAGAZINE, continued
The ex-editor notes that there were objections to this ambition among some members. He supports the effort and asks
members to give it a chance, then goes on to explain his decision:
[I]f The Chessman is to succeed, it will do so only with an
editor who can devote more time to it than I can. My
prior commitments and activities do not allow me to
spend the amount of time on the Newsletter as is necessary to produce the type of publication that we have
come to expect and damand [sic]. Editing the Newsletter
and turning out high-quality work causes more problems
than I can cope with, and, in my opinion hinders our
progress forward on the magazine.
The ex-editor assesses what is needed to move from a newsletter to a magazine and honestly admits his inability to fulfill
that need. Interestingly, though, he still refers to it as “the
Newsletter,” indicative, perhaps, of a certain mentality that
had not and would not become fully engaged in the new
magazine for him.
President Morrison pressed ahead bringing together other
state chess associations and, through a series of editors,
forged The Chessman into a regional chess magazine that, at its
height, represented seven associations from Pennsylvania to
Florida. The Chessman peaked near the end of its first year
with a slick thirty-six-page illustrated production (albeit in
black and white) with corporate advertising. The following
issue, however, looks like the wreck of the Hindenburg. What
happened? “After pouring a great deal of his own time and
money into The Chessman, our editor… has resigned,” the new
acting editor writes. “[He] received little in the way of contriFall 2011
butions from those state officers responsible for submitting
material and co-ordinating the publishing of this magazine.”
There was a high level of commitment at the top, but not at
the lower levels. There was vision and ambition and enough
energy to keep The Chessman going for three years. In the end,
however, the Georgia Chess Association reverted back to a
newsletter, although something of the quality of The Chessman remained, vibrant or latent, depending on the quality of
its editor. Another ambitious GCA editor was Daniel Lucas.
He, however, over seven years transformed Georgia Chess from
a newsletter into a magazine. And so it remains.
This leads to a final point. A newsletter can conveniently
be the work of a single editor with a day job working at leisure in evenings and on weekends. A successful magazine
usually requires a highly-committed team to function, from
coordinating with tournament directors to get crosstables and
games, creating databases for columnists to use to write about
local games, to photographers, to volunteers to write reports—this on top of the need to network to get decent feature articles and news.
The Chess Journalists of America does not discriminate
between newsletters and magazines. Were I a judge I would
not hesitate to award points to a well-produced newsletter
over a poorly-produced magazine. Apart from awards, however, this organization is at the service of all editors, and our
common goal is to improve the work we do.
By the way, The Chess Journalist is neither newsletter nor
magazine. It is a journal. If it’s not, that’s how I like to think
of it, and, as an editor thinks, so the publication will go. l
The Chess Journalist
11