On the Level: Two Magazines, One Mission

In my 13 years with this magazine, I’ve never written about the magazine itself. You’ve never had to hear about how we tweaked the fonts, leading and kerning to spiff up our look. All that rubbish is inside baseball in my book. This is a woodworking magazine, and you pay me to write about woodworking.

But this issue features changes that are so radical that I’d like to take a few minutes to explain them. If you’d like to turn the page and get to the woodworking stuff, I totally understand.

For those of you still with us, here’s the deal: Starting this issue we’ve combined Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine into the publication you are holding. It might look like we’ve just closed one magazine, but that’s not right. Read on.

We’ve taken the best parts of each and combined them into Popular Woodworking Magazine, which will be published seven times a year. (The details of what this means for your subscription are addressed on the cover wrap around this issue.) We took the best writers from Popular Woodworking, including Adam Cherubini, George R. Walker, Bob Flexner, Mike Dunbar and David Charlesworth for this new magazine. From Woodworking Magazine, we took a lot of the physical appearance and no-crap reporting. Plus, this new magazine has bigger, thicker and brighter paper.

You might wonder if this is a desperate act to stay in business. Hardly. Both magazines posted solid profits year after year and are some of the best-performing publications for our parent company. Instead, it was the staff of the magazines who decided to make this change to ensure we will be profitable next year and in 10 years. In short, we will branch out even more into the Internet, DVDs, podcasts, social media and book publishing.

The magazine is still the heart of the business – my veins are filled with ink and sawdust. But we know we need to adapt to grow.

I won’t kid you – some changes might unsettle you at first. Woodworking Magazine readers might be shocked to see ads and color photos. Popular Woodworking readers might stumble when they encounter our willingness to trash conventional wisdom.

But rest assured, I think you’ll like the result. This magazine is put out by the same staff who produced Woodworking Magazine and Popular Woodworking. There have been no staff changes or reductions. I’m still the editor. Steve, Glen, Bob, Megan, Linda and Drew are all sitting at the same desks and doing their damndest to inform you.

So take a close look at this issue. Read the stories. Check out the boxes at the end of each article that point you to the vast amount of woodworking knowledge we’ve dug up on the Internet for you. And let us know what you think. It’s easy. That’s because there’s one thing about us that will never change – our willingness to answer every e-mail and phone call.

When it comes down to it, we’re just passionate woodworkers who want to continue writing, building and reading about woodworking for the rest of our lives. And with your support, we’ll all get to do that until they scrap the printing presses for good.