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Welcome to the new Golfdom

By |  January 1, 2010

A 1964 Chevy Impala. Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Cameron Diaz in “The Mask.”

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All things that greatly please my eye.

Add to that list the new Golfdom.

Look, no one has ever asked me to judge a fashion show (are fashion shows even judged?). I can’t tell you how many times my wife has stopped me before leaving the house to warn me that the two (or three or four) colors I’m wearing don’t go together. I know I’ve got no style.

That’s why I’m glad I have people like Pete Seltzer and Carrie Parkhill Wallace working with me, people who know how to make a magazine look good.

The new look of this magazine— from the bolder logo on the cover, to the improved look of The 19th Hole Q&A on the back page — is all their handiwork. And I want to congratulate them on doing one heck of a job.

As I mentioned last month, this is the first time Golfdom has had a redesign since the magazine relaunched in 1999. I know a lot of readers have been with us since then, so hopefully the new look is a welcomed change. As your host of this magazine, let me officially welcome you to the new-look Golfdom by pointing out some of the changes we’ve made.

Our front-of-the-book news section, now called Starter, features shorter stories and a more whimsical attitude. You’ll even find a golf joke, submitted by a reader, every month. Superintendent Joe Stribley gets us started off with a doozy. If you’ve got a good one, I’d ask you to email it to us at golfdomjokes@northcoastmedia.net for a future issue.

We welcome a new columnist to the magazine, Matt Neff, an assistant superintendent in Ohio who will be penning the appropriately named Assistant Living column. We want to support our assistant superintendent readers out there, and Matt’s column will help serve this purpose.

Among our new departments is My Second Office, where one of our readers gives us a tour of his office. Bob Rogers at Big Spring CC in Louisville, Ky., was gracious enough to be our first Second Office interview. Just like we’re looking for your good golf jokes, we’re also looking for readers who would like to let us into their offices — again, shoot us an email.

The Golfdom Gallery, unveiled a few issues ago, will be a more regular feature in the magazine. We like to show off the places we’ve visited each month, so be prepared to see us snapping photos at a cocktail hour near you. Or, as we did in this issue, even include a shot taken from inside a men’s room. (Hey, it’s not often we see Britney Spears in the men’s room.)

Perhaps the most startling change is our research section.

Beginning with this issue you’ll see a clear effort to have the best research section in the industry. We feel that since we already have two of the most respected turf researchers in the nation as regular contributors — Clark Throssell, Ph.D., and Karl Danneberger, Ph.D. — we might as well swing for the fences. And that’s what we’ve done.

We’ve taken the risk of ditching the old comfortable title of Turfgrass Trends in favor of a new title. Our new research section is now called Super Science, and includes a combination of current news, in-depth research, commentary and questions and answers. Throssell holds the keys to that section, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have behind the wheel. Watch and see and tell me if it isn’t something bold, something to be proud of.

I like to joke around here in these pages, but I assure you we take this job of publishing a quality magazine very seriously. I welcome your feedback on our new look. I may be lousy at dressing myself, but my magazine is dressed to impress.

This article is tagged with and posted in Columns, People

About the Author: Seth Jones

Seth Jones, a 18-year veteran of the golf industry media, is Editor-in-Chief of Golfdom magazine and Athletic Turf. A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Jones began working for Golf Course Management in 1999 as an intern. In his professional career he has won numerous awards, including a Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association (TOCA) first place general feature writing award for his profile of World Golf Hall of Famer Greg Norman and a TOCA first place photography award for his work covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In his career, Jones has accumulated an impressive list of interviews, including such names as George H.W. Bush, Samuel L. Jackson, Lance Armstrong and Charles Barkley. Jones has also done in-depth interviews with such golfing luminaries as Norman, Gary Player, Nick Price and Lorena Ochoa, to name only a few. Jones is a member of both the Golf Writers Association of America and the Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association. Jones can be reached at sjones@northcoastmedia.net.


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