So, doing the magazine primarily by myself is proving to be unscalable, and since I do like to sleep (occasionally ;)), I’m trying to get more people on board. Here are the different things I need help with in putting the magazine together — if something appeals to you and you feel you have enough time to volunteer for it, send me a Facebook message or an email (editor at mormonartist dot net). It would also help if you let me know about how much time you think you can commit. For the illustrators, photographers, designers, writers, editors, and interviewers, please send a few samples of your work as well (to the email address).

Also, if you know of anyone who’d be interested, please let them know.

1. Transcriptionistas. Since we try to quote our interviewees as accurately as possible, we record interviews (whether they’re in real life or on the phone), and that means we need people to listen to the MP3s and type up the interviews. The work is fairly tedious and not exactly glamorous or exciting, but it needs to be done. This is the biggest bottleneck for us right now. The time commitment varies on how fast you transcribe; interviews are generally about an hour long, so transcribing one interview would probably take from two to five hours.

2. Proofreaders. We’re not big fans of typos or other errors, so we need people to comb through the magazine in a nitpicky fashion looking for things gone awry. (Or anything that ought to be clarified.) The time commitment on this depends on how fast you can proof, but it’s less work than transcribing.

3. Scouts. We want to know what’s going on in the world of Mormon arts, but we (meaning me) only have so much we can do by ourselves. We need people to scour the web looking for people we can interview, feature article ideas, and existing content we might want to reprint (photographs, essays, whatever).

4. Illustrators/photographers/designers. We’d like to have illustrators and photographers we can call upon to supplement the magazine where necessary. I’m not sure yet exactly how much we’ll need — it’s in flux — but it’d be great if we at least knew that we could get illustrations and photographs if we needed them (for the design, I’m thinking). You would of course retain the copyright to your work and be able to use it elsewhere; all we want is the right to put it in the magazine.

5. Interviewers. Interviews will only be done on assignment for now (i.e., we won’t accept unsolicited interviews), but we’d like to expand our base of interviewers (which currently consists of me, myself, and I :)) so there will be more variety and different perspectives. (We’ll have some rules and guidelines for conducting interviews — for example, non-email interviews (real-life/phone) must be recorded. And interviews need to touch on the intersection of faith and art in some way, since that’s what this magazine is all about.) It would be best if interviewers can transcribe their own pieces, since they’re going to be the ones most able to capture the gist of what was actually said. Location is really only a factor for in-person interviews; you can do phone interviews over Skype (you do have to buy Skype credit, though), and email is of course free. (We generally have the interviewee choose which is most convenient for them.)

6. Writers. As we start expanding our content base beyond interviews, we’d like to have staff on hand who can write up events or do other feature articles. (Granted, we *will* be accepting external submissions as well, but we want to be able to assign things as well.)

7. Editors. This could technically be part of transcribing, but I’m going to try splitting it out and we’ll see what happens. Basically, once the transcriptionistas transcribe a raw interview, the editor needs to go in and turn the spoken English into written English. You need to be a good writer for this. And as we expand beyond just interviews, the editors will also review submissions and their submitters to edit them into shape for publication.

8. Section editors. This is the biggest commitment. As you may have noticed, the magazine is now split into sections:

• Literature & Words (writing, storytelling)
• Visual & Applied Arts (painting, photography, sculpture, book arts, glass-blowing, etc.)
• Music & Dance
• Film & Theatre (including animation)

The names of the sections may change but that’s the basic idea. Section editors will be responsible for the content in their area. They’ll choose people to interview, get them interviewed (whether themselves or by interviewers), make sure the interviews get transcribed and edited, gather artwork/photographs to accompany the interviews, review submissions, find other types of content and get it ready for publication, and so on. Because this is such an important and responsible position, I’m going to have to be very selective. I need people who are extremely reliable and committed, who can follow up with other people to make things happen, who are passionate about the arts in general and their specific area in particular. If you’re interested in becoming a section editor, write me a short (one page or so) letter to convince me why I should pick you. (I should also say that if there are enough people who want to help out, I may assign assistants to the section editors to help lighten the load.)

This is getting long. :) Anyway, I’d love to have as many people help out as possible, while still maintaining (and hopefully exceeding :)) the level of quality we’re at. I realize that not everyone has oodles of time to volunteer for something like this, but with the various positions (and there may be more types in the future), I’m hoping there’s something for everyone, even those who only have an hour or two a month. And location really doesn’t matter, thanks to the Internet. (You do need an Internet connection, but if you didn’t have one, you probably wouldn’t be reading this. :))

Finally, expect some growing pains as part of this staff expansion. With luck it’ll be a relatively smooth transition, but hang in there through the ditches and speed bumps, because we’ll make it. :)