About that cover…

By now you’ve seen the cover of the October 2013 issue of Golfdom.

Hopefully you had a chuckle. And hopefully you peeled right into the magazine, to check out our cover story.

In case you’re wondering, the headline of this issue was written by me. The story was assigned to Stacie Zinn Roberts, an exceptional journalist, a winner of multiple TOCA awards, and a frequent contributor to Golfdom. I think she did a great job on the story.

However, right away I killed her title and gave it the “5 Keys” title.

The original title was “Play like a girl.” I looked at that and thought, “Hmm… that’s not really what the story is about.” Plus, I don’t want to play like a girl (although from the tee, I already do.)

I thought hard about the story. What was it really about? It’s about adding rounds to your course. It’s about picking up more women golfers. And that, my friends, was when the light bulb went off.

Everyone wants to be clever in this magazine business. You can probably tell when reading an issue of Golfdom that I go for a few snickers in every issue. Sometimes they hit, sometimes they’re duds. Such is the life of a magazine editor.

This one I felt was a hit. But then I wondered: was it too much? Was I being insensitive to our female readers?

Clearly the cover is tongue-in-cheek. But I wanted to be sure it was received that way. I ran the new headline by Stacy. She loved it. She ran it by the National Women’s Golf Alliance. Their response: Where can we get additional copies? That alone sold me on it. But we also ran it by dozens of women in the industry. In every case, we got a thumb’s up from our trusted advisers.

But between 17,000 and 38,000 people will see this cover in the next few days. I’m bound to get some negative reactions.

I  decided, so be it. I’m trying to instill a personality in Golfdom, a sense of humor… a pulse, if you will. This cover tells you what the story is about, I think, but it does so with life. Boring is not allowed here. I want to compell you to read this magazine.

So if you laughed with me, awesome. If I made you cringe, sorry.

But hey… you’re all going to love next month’s cover. I promise!