Forward Features lists

One of the tech journo industry’s leading lights recently forwarded this email to me on the subject of Forward Features lists…he is intending to put it on his magazine’s blog. It makes excellent Bad PR reading.

----- Original Message -----
From: A.N. Esteemededitor
To: All his colleagues
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 1:54 PM
Subject: A Writer Rants

I finally got round to writing a rant to put on the blog bit of he website as a semi-serious answer to the plague of calls. If nothing else, it's something that I can point them at with an automated email response.

Bit worried that it might be a tad over the top, and long. Any thoughts, or should I publish and be damned?

Features synopses, and why they are hard to come by ...

The single most common request - Top of the FAQs - we get at Our Magazine is from PR people looking for synopses based on the Forward Features list.

The single most common answer isn't really fit even for the web, so I thought it might make some sense to set out some of the reasons that it's not a good question: for a start it hasn't got a single answer.

Firstly, magazine forward features lists were historically created for the advertising and sales side of the operation. Editors hate them: at best they are done out of a grudging recognition that the sales people have to eat (and if they don't eventually we all starve); at worst they are done in a spirit of parody.. One of my predecessors calls it the Forward Features Lies, and he has a point.

The simple fact is that no journalist has any idea what they are going to be writing about in a year's time in anything other than a vague way. Sure, BBC Good Food Magazine <http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/content/magazine/good-food/> will be doing something on al fresco dining in its July issue; but other than trade shows and conferences, us trade 'n' tech hacks haven't got much each month.

Which brings us to the second aspect of the Forward Features list, which is its role in the media pack. Writing down all the things that a mag might possibly cover that advertisers and subscribers might be interested in - why else put them in the media pack? - is a way of setting out the stall.

The US phrase "Editorial Calendar" adds another twist here, as some people seem to assume that those subjects only get covered if they are mentioned in the FFL - sorry, I even got fed up typing it's name - and we have conversations along the lines of "I see you're writing about Blah in November ..." to which the only answer can be, "We're Blah Monthly. We write about Blah every issue."

Thirdly, from a writer's point of view, there really is no such thing as a feature: they are all just pieces. Different lengths, different deadlines, different subjects - that's all. The basic thing is to talk to people - on the phone, in the pub, whatever - and write down what they say. Then the next time you talk to someone about that subject, you have a little more knowledge and the story grows, especially if there is any discrepancy between them. And so it goes.

So when people ask for a synopsis for a particular feature, it's pretty hard to answer honestly without being patronising and rude - and quite frankly, if you phone up looking for a synopsis of a feature called something like Vienna: A Guide to the City's Irish Pubs and ask "what angle are you taking?" then you'll be lucky to get away with being rudely patronised, even before lunch.

Which brings me to the fourth - and last, for now, point: you don't really care what the angle is anyway - what you want to know is if there is any chance that your client can get a mention in the upcoming supplement on the Irish Bars of Venice, or whatever garbled nonsense has turned up on the various feature compilation services that abound.

The answer to that is simple: does the client have an Irish Bar, in Vienna?
Really? Then you'd better tell us all about it ..