One from the storehouse
I’ve always thought of magazines as being far more musical than mathematical.
Listening to Eric Clapton’s guitar weep or Miles Davis’ trumpet wail isn’t twin to flipping through a publication, but culture-rich periodicals do feel more like albums than they do newspapers.
Like a good record, an effective magazine lives and breathes on the energy of its curated experience. Page after page, it’s a rhythm of words and images. Go head, plow through an issue of 225 in one sitting. Meet your city at this very moment. Read it with your morning coffee or your evening wine. Or digest it over time, glance by glance.
Let it live on your coffee table or the dash of your car. Allow its themes and voices to sink in, all the way down to the place where you think honestly about yourself and the world around you.
Or, you know, don’t. Enjoy the gorgeous food photography and people portraits and flip through it with little more on your agenda than taking in eye candy and planning your next month of exciting events in the Capital City.
Honestly, that’s okay, too.
From the Arabic, via French, the term “magazine” means “storehouse.” Now the concept of a magazine means more in 2014 than the paper it is printed on. As 225 marks its 100th issue, we are a company that hosts and sponsors dozens of events each year, supports charitable efforts across the community and, of course, produces a raft of timely and engaging multimedia content and online products.
But while technology is changing the way readers want to interact with publications, there is yet to be an app or invention that can effectively replicate the power of storyour story.
As a magazine editor, I live and work by that truth, but I firmly believe that here in Baton Rouge our pride of place will be more robust, more productive, only if we as a city embrace it, too.
This narrative is ongoing, and it ought to be told in a way that has impact, that moves minds and bodies alike. That’s been our mission for each of the 100 issues published under the 225 banner so far, and it’ll be our mark for the next 100 and beyond, whether our content is produced on paper or for tablets or through a hologram downloaded directly to the brain.
Fielding “100 things to love” from readers was more surprising than I expected. Having grown up in Baton Rouge I was shocked to see listed a restaurant I’d never even heard of, much less visited: Dorothy’s Soul Food Kitchen.
There on Gardere Lane, I found, finally, this humble bastion of home cooking. Its Southern sides and blue plate classics were a joy to behold. What a great reminder that there is so much to discover in this city, and I promise 225 will help you do so.
Just as a rainbow is a complete circlethe horizon creates the illusion of an archer’s bow across the skythis community we belong to is, thankfully, far bigger than each of our comfort zones. Its challenges and charms stretch farther than the eye can see.
When NASA’s instruments spy an entire rainbow from above, they call the circular phenomenon “glory.” The grass may indeed be greener somewhere else, but know that if we look a little closer, it is greener here, too. And that’s a glory to call our very own.
