Dear Reader,
Years before I landed a job at The Sun, I slipped into a booth at a California restaurant and discovered a slender black-and-white magazine left behind on the table. I opened it, began to read, and soon felt as if I were surrounded by big-hearted, unpretentious, insightful companions who were sharing secrets. I was hooked.
As a new employee of The Sun, fresh from graduate school and brimming with ideas for how to make my favorite magazine grow, I asked founder and editor Sy Safransky if we could schedule a marketing meeting. Sure, he said with a wry smile. First item on the agenda: change the name of the meeting. To Sy readers were not a demographic to sell to advertisers; they were flesh-and-blood allies in the improbable enterprise of publishing an independent, ad-free magazine. He spoke of them with warmth, as if they were friends. There are certain things one never does to friends: mislead them with half-truths, try to impress them with overblown language, insult them with glib generalizations. Working for Sy would be a different kind of education for me.
