Note:
The cover image today is taken from a portion of the wall of our
office at the World Headquarters of Meridian Magazine in the Washington,
D.C. Metro area.
By Maurine and Scot Proctor
Meridian Magazine is seven years
old this week.
An Idea
Meridian Magazine began as an idea
that wouldn't leave us alone. We'd settle into bed at night, desperate
for sleep, and a flood of thoughts would come that kept us talking
for hours. We'd go out for a date together and end up talking
magazine. Something was happening.
Instead of dwindling beneath us,
this thing had a life, unseen but tangible. It grew bigger as
we talked. Windows in our heads flew open, one after another,
letting in light, exposing vast corridors and directions. It was
not just a fresh breeze of ideas blowing through our minds, but
a gale.
What if? It was the "what
if" that intrigued us. What if we could pull together a brain
trust of some of the brightest and most articulate writers in
the Church in a variety of disciplines and talk together about
the issues of the world that we must negotiate every day? Could
you imagine anything more fun than to invite the likes of a Wally
Goddard, Truman Madsen, Marvin Payne and Anne Perry into your
home and listen to them talk about their areas of expertise?
We came to realize that we could
invite them in — in the pages of a magazine. And it wasn't just
about entertaining us — or only about expanding our minds. It
was to give us a Latter-day Saint perspective, a thread of light
in a darkening world. Someone could give us insightful, up-to-the-minute
articulation on the issues and currents that swept across our
times.
Every day we were reminded that those
who talked to us through newspapers, magazines and television
came from a set of assumptions sometimes vastly different from
our own. Drummed at us was entertainment that assaulted our values,
and then was labeled "riveting, clarifying, a must-see."
News screamed at us hostility toward religion, family and traditional
values. We had been journalists long enough to know that editors
choose what news is important, and what stories will be thrown
away, and we had the sense that much that mattered to us as a
people was never making it from the editors' slush pile.
Was anybody anywhere talking much
about the consequences for the future of our world if we abandon
family values? They certainly were, but their findings didn't
always make it to the front page. Didn't anybody care that we
were selling our children's minds and souls for the price of a
movie ticket? Yes, but you wouldn't hear about it on “Entertainment
Tonight.” Had we all bought the secularist worldview that life
is ugly, that God is dead, that in each of us is a heart of darkness?
Who, we wondered, was celebrating the virtuous, lovely, or “of
good report”? Who was noting the praiseworthy values and lives
of our time?
Arch Madsen
This mattered to us because we knew
that the war in heaven was a battle for the mind. Our friend and
mentor, Arch Madsen, founder and former president of Bonneville
Communications said, "At this moment, the most fierce and
destructive ideological war in all human history is being fought
and is escalating hourly. We are waging it with the sharpest and
most powerful communications weapons ever produced. What is this
struggle? It is clearly a continuation of the war in heaven —
in dimensions far beyond anything mortal man has ever before experienced.
It is a battle for the hearts and minds of people. God would have
us understand truth and be able to make our choices based on that
enlightenment, while Satan seeks to destroy us with lies and illusions.
This battle has produced more casualties, more suffering, more
destruction of property than all physical warfare since time began."
Because the deepest thing we know
is our love of God, we wanted to continue to be a part of that
battle here. We could not sit around in false comfort any longer.
So, we would start a magazine — different
in content because it would be a lens on the world, and different
in reach, because we could only accomplish the level of excellence
we envisioned with a large audience that, in turn, could pull
the best writers. However, this is much easier to conceive than
to achieve. It is one thing to see the mountain crest in the distance,
another thing altogether to climb there.
From Idea to Product
For months we worked with our colleague
Cheri Loveless, carefully trudging through the process of identifying
and articulating the magazine's standards, approach, editorial
processes. Those months turned into years as we worked on raising
money, traveled to New York for conferences on magazine publishing,
found a magazine consultant to walk us through the intricacies
of budgeting and schedule. We could see our dynamic, compelling
print magazine coming closer to fruition.
Sometimes our family ate macaroni;
sometimes we wept in frustration. The tension was great, the disappointments
frequent. We'd look at each other and joke, "Who thought
this up anyway? Was it you?" And sometimes we couldn't joke
because it seemed we'd put our family's security on the line for
a pipe dream.
Others joined us in the vision. Adrian
Pulfer, a brilliant creative designer, jumped on the team, spinning
his own dream of a really beautiful print magazine. We did dummies;
we did sample table of contents. We had dabbled with names like
Onward, Susquehanna, The Morning Star. He
came up with Meridian, which captured the mission of the
magazine. It means the highest point of light (as in noon or the
time of greatest light); a line or circle taken around the earth
(taking a measure of the world), and the time of greatest prosperity
(looking towards Zion).
Looking back, we can see that every
piece was falling into place, but it didn't feel like it at the
time; anything but. We had felt so inspired and passionate, yet
what was the meaning of these endless obstacles? We hadn't hit
the worst yet. When we were about four months out from what would
have been our first print issue of Meridian, everything changed.
Our funding source dried up, and instead we got an opportunity
suggested to us by our mentor and friend, Brad Pelo, who at that
time headed Bookcraft. Why not take our first issue and put it
on the Internet?
That seemed a heresy to “print people”
like us. We had written books, edited magazines — products with
substance, weight. Why would we ever take our hard work and send
it out into cyberspace like so much debris floating in space?
But Brad made it seem like an opportunity — not a disappointment,
and so with some trepidation we started: February 12,
1999 at 5:35 PM on LDSWorld, an Internet site that would soon
be purchased by the Church.
To announce Meridian, we started
teasing the audience for several days at LDSWorld. "News
Update on the War in Heaven: It's been moved to earth." "What's
a good member of the Church like you doing in a world like this?"
"Do you want to shape the world your family grows up in —
not just be shaped by it?"
People like Pulitzer Prize winner
Jack Anderson, Academy Award winner Kieth Merrill and astronomer
John Pratt had caught the vision and were with us from the first.
That they would bother to lend their names and their thinking
to an upstart Internet publication will always strike us as a
remarkable act of generosity. LDSWorld supplied Dallas Petersen
as webmaster — a remarkable young man who stayed with us for many
years. He was a dream colleague — completely reliable, a
steady problem-solver, smart. It was hard not to call him "Radar"
— well, in fact, we did.
The Blessing of the Internet,
Amazing Writers and Friends
What surprised us most is this:
what we thought was a curse turned into a boundless blessing.
The Internet was much better designed to accomplish the very thing
we desired than print ever could be — access to the issues and
news of the day, a quick connection to readers, the chance to
talk to one another about the things that matter. Day by day we
were sometimes discouraged, but looking back we can see that Meridian
built up a head of steam in a relatively short period of time
so that at seven years old we have more than 500,000 readers in
all 50 states and in more than 198 countries, and we hear from
our readers at the rate of untold hundreds of letters per day.
We can see, too, how often we were
blessed. Maurine "just happened" to sit down next to
Wallace Goddard at a family conference and began talking about
the new magazine. "We want to look at the false philosophies
of men that creep into our minds with their media repetition,"
she said. Wally pulled from his brief case pages of issues he
had outlined from this same perspective. Seventy-five major articles
later, Wally is still with us — and has fresh, powerful new insights
every month. Each writer came because he or she felt she should;
wanted a place to have a voice.
What has happened is that Meridian
has taken on a life of its own, quite apart from us. Looking back,
we must admit it probably always had its own life. We didn't "own"
it those nights we lay in bed talking about it. It owned us. It
always belonged to everybody. Every writer contributes because
the same vision owned them — the chance to be a part of a platform
for excellent thinking and sharing with members of the Church
who share the same concerns wherever they are.
What of the Immediate Future?
We used to ask my brother, Kirk,
what’s new? What’s up? He would often say, “Just M.O.T.S. (more
of the same).” Is that where we’re headed? We think not. So
as we stand at the pinnacle of seven years — where do we go from
here? Here’s a brief view of what’s in store:
New Design — We have been
working with a fabulous designer on a whole new look, feel and
functionality for Meridian. We call it Meridian 3.0 (three-point-oh).
It will be so much more user friendly, so much better for the
writers, so much more full of powerful information, better organized
and more easily accessible, and, in fact, it will be better looking.
Major categories, like Arts and Entertainment (to try to contain
the likes of Kieth Merrill), will have their own pages and look
and feel. It will be like launching 35 new magazines at once.
Don’t let that sound overwhelming. You’ll love it. Our immense
archives, with more than 12,000 articles, will be organized and
accessible as never before. Reader-feedback mechanisms will be
smooth and powerful. In short, we’re creating a world-class Internet
magazine. Have any suggestions for 3.0? Click
here and let us know what you would like to see:
Family Leader — After publishing
untold hundreds of articles on “our times,” we were thronged with
letters asking, “What can we do?” This past year we launched
the Family Leader Network and Foundation. Here we stand up in
the public square for family, faith and freedom. We are helping
form grass-roots organizations in every state to protect and defend
traditional marriage and the foundations of the family. These
organizations are natural spin offs from Meridian because so many
have wanted to know where to put their energies, their influence,
their network of friends. This is the place. Family Leader will
continue to grow and become a powerful force for good here in
Washington, D.C., all over the nation, and eventually in many
places all over the world. We encourage you to get involved by
having the Family Leader e-mail sent to you. Click
here to sign up.
Meridian/Cruise Lady — Meridian
has recently joined with Diane Lovell, The Cruise Lady, to bring
you the best in LDS cruises and travel. We will take you all
over the world with some of your favorite Latter-day Saint hosts
like Michael Ballam, Joseph Fielding McConkie, Jeffrey Marsh,
John Bytheway, Susan Easton Black, Jack Marshall, John Lund, Marvin
Goldstein, Vickey Pahnke Taylor and many more. If you’re planning
to go to the Caribbean, or Alaska, or Hawaii, or Tahiti, or Europe,
or the Holy Land, or on a Church History tour, or to the lands
of the Book of Mormon, or to Australia and New Zealand, why not
come with us? Click
here for a full schedule of upcoming trips.
Meridian Cares — In the coming
months you will become familiar with Meridian’s efforts in the
area of humanitarian service in a new effort called “Meridian
Cares.” Working in joint effort with Reach
the Children, the purpose of “Meridian Cares” is to do
our part to help make the world a better place through practical
solutions to real-life situations. Articles, human-interest stories,
and photos submitted by participating organizations will be placed
on “Meridian Cares” and will help persuade readers to donate to
and/or participate in humanitarian efforts in which they have
interest. Donations and funds received from corporate advertising
on these website pages will be donated to participating humanitarian
organizations. We believe that, with the awareness “Meridian
Cares” will provide, individual readers and corporations will
support this effort to help those in need. If you may have interest
in “Meridian Cares” or learning more about it, please
click here to e-mail us your contact information.
My Home Library — Meridian
will highlight and recommend certain books in various categories
to help build your home library. We will start with six essential
church history books that each of you should have. We will then
recommend some books for your study of the Old Testament and other
scriptures. We will explore other categories as well. All books
may be ordered through Meridian Magazine. The first article on
this will appear this month.
New Writers — We are currently
in various stages of negotiations, encouragement and agreement
to bring on board more than 30 new writers on Meridian. Though
we can’t mention their names we think you’ll be thrilled as you
hear their powerful voices and glean from their insights. Keep
watching (actually, keep reading).
New Products — In addition
to the recently released Witness
of the Light DVD, a two-hour, sixteen minute documentary
production on the life and times of Joseph Smith, Meridian will
be offering other original and wonderful products to the our readership.
The sale of these products will help fund the new design and back
end of Meridian 3.0 and allow us to continue to keep our finger
on the pulse of the Church throughout the world.
Photography Contest — As part
of our birthday celebrations during this next month we will soon
open a very special photography contest with prizes for
various winners. If you have a leaning for photography or want
to participate in something really, really fun — stay tuned.
Membership Drive — To encourage
more people to sign up for the daily e-mail send (that’s how we
bring Meridian Magazine to you for free every day), we will have
a membership drive with a chance to win a free digital camera
and other wonderful prizes. If you haven’t signed up to receive
Meridian in your e-mail box, why not do it today. Click
here to sign up.
And there will me much, much more.
Special Thanks
To our writers and staff — now more
than 90 strong — must go our most profound thanks. They are what
you love about Meridian. Who can count the hours that they have
given you out of sheer generosity? To list them all seems too
much; to not list them at all seems absurd. We thank each one
(in alphabetical order—these are our current writers):
The Writers
