 Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Hi, how are you? I'm Rob Wiener-Kent. I'm senior editor of the theater magazine. A couple weeks after that, that will change. But for now, I'm going to talk to our editor-in-chief, Jim O'Quinn, who was hired in 1982. Is that right? Yeah, in 1982. To edit a newslet. Is that there? Well, and to create the new... So they already had the idea to create the magazine. The idea was there. The idea for the magazine belonged to Peter Zeisler and the D'Zesh, the Z's, as they were lecturers. And we've got some Z's here with us today. And they needed a person who was conversant with the theater, but was also a journalist. In order to, you know, to spend a couple of years developing the magazine idea. Right. It was headed by Amala. Now, I remember somebody from your history who came to New York in the late 70s to study performance. Is that right? Have I had that right? That's right. Performance studies. We're going to talk about me. I think you should have introduced me and I should have come down with... Like Norma Desmond in that movie. But, no, I was... I started out as a... I have a degree in journalism in English. I started out as a city desk reporter on the Times-Pakay Union in New Orleans. Eventually ran a weekly newspaper in Southwest Louisiana that won... was sort of a nightmarish experience, but we won six Louisiana Press Association awards and sold the paper for a profit, thank you. And I also worked in the theater community in New Orleans, including being an apprentice actor in the professional repertoire theater in New Orleans. The worst actor ever made, but I did spend some time... I did my time as a professional actor. But anyway, theater in New Orleans sagged in the 70s. And toward the end of the 70s, my daughter was moving up East. I moved up East. I went to the performance studies department to sort of legitimize my interest in the theater. And TCG hired me out of... I spent three and a half years in performance studies. But they hired me out of that department to create American theater. Now, we've talked about... There was no sense of the demise of theater magazine. Which was in the 60s. Well, amazingly enough, for 20 years before American theater was established, before the first issue in April, 84, there was no national magazine about the theater of America. That had ended in 64 with the demise of the old theater arts. Theater arts, okay. Theater arts was around all the way from 1950, I believe, from the teens, right up through 64. But theater arts had always been a magazine about New York, really. In those last years, theater arts carried columns like labeled Hartford or labeled Phoenix. But they were many reports from... And basically the magazine was still New York. From the region. From the regions, that sort of thing. And it didn't really wash and the magazine pulled it. While there were magazines about opera and dance and other art symphony and other art forms in America, there was no theater magazine and Peter knew that that was not a good thing. And Peter and Lindy had in mind who better to sponsor a magazine about America's theater than the service organization for the new national theater that had come about in those years. Yeah, it was actually pretty much exactly from the death of theater arts in the mid-60s. That's right. When the resident theater movement boomed and by the time you came on board it was going full steam, right? Pretty much. Yeah, yeah. I mean there were still some companies that were formed in the 80s. But a lot of the ones that we talked about now, they got three. And so on, founded about 50 years ago. That's right. But there was no magazine nationally to cover them. What was the mandate they gave you and the rope they gave you to... Well, because our publisher is a service organization for the theater, it's a little journalistically iffy. Full-fledged, independent commentary was and is difficult. Yeah, yeah. Because we're in a certain way, since TCG is a membership organization, the theaters that we're covering pay our salaries to some degree. Right. It's challenging too. But Peter and Lindy were adamant about at least a reasonable measure of journalistic independence and a mandate to deal with the problems, difficulties, and challenges of the theater that existed. And, you know, you can go thumbs up or thumbs down on how well we've done that over the years, but God knows who tried. Yeah, yeah, certainly. So there really, there were no other national magazines, but even the state of publishing in general was more robust than it is now. Did you say our first journalism, Daily Papers? Well, around the country but not only in New York. Yeah, there were still arts reporters on Daily Papers everywhere and theater critics who actually got paid for writing regularly. Right. And that's just not the case anymore in any great number. Now, we published something online just today, which was a sort of your nutshell history of the regional theater, and it talked a lot about the movement that CISER and TCG and others led, not solely, but helped lead and to support, which made, I think in your phrase, the theater used to be centrifugal, all coming toward New York. Well, it used to spin it centrifugal and spun out of New York. There were road companies and Shakespeare tours, and big Broadway hits went on the road and so forth, but the truth is... Yeah, it used to come out from New York as well. And that dates all the way, all the way back to the beginning of the country, you know, Shakespeare on the road to frontier towns and so forth. But now it seriously has changed. As you see from just look down your New York Times listings, the most important works from on Broadway musical or plays have begun and originated elsewhere and come to New York. Yeah, a large percentage. So you picked up this movement midstream. I'm wondering what you feel like in the 80s, what the biggest changes you've seen in the resident theater movement in the three decades? I don't know. That's really hard to say. I'm very interested in international work, and I think during the late 80s and early 90s before sort of the xenophobia of the Bush era began, we had lots of exciting international influence. I'm proud of the way that the American theater introduced artists like Ari and Manish Keen from France and Tadashi Suzuki from Japan. Pina Bouch, right? Pina Bouch, Robert LaPage, all sorts of international artists, we wrote about before they had actually even performed in the United States. So we introduced those important world artists to America before audiences had a chance. One thing, American theater is often the first major or national publication to write about, not just international artists, but American artists as well. Yeah, it's true. In fact, that could well be seen as a fault of ours that we're always searching for the new, untried, tested, sort of hot new face as opposed to covering people who've had long, distinguished careers in the theater. We're trying to repair that balance a little bit from time to time. Really terrific Q&A with Rock Shulfer for his many years at the Goodman in this upcoming issue. Emily Mann will be on the cover, a wonderful piece by Alexis Green on the quiet radicalism of Emily Mann at the MacArthur and so forth. We need to strike a balance between new faces and credit for well-deserved accomplishments. I think it is easy to take for granted the institutions that we came up with, that were there and just always seemed to have been the big theater on the Hill. What was interesting about the Rock Shulfer is that the Goodman Theater was never a storefront theater, but it was on the ropes many times and the big success that we see in it now was hard fought and continues to be. We do try to... Those stories you forget and so it's really good to know. I think there's a possibility that maybe American theater and arts terms that was taken for granted. I wondered... We moved into the internet a lot more. We have, you know, completely... We're a daily now, not just on a daily basis. We're an hour lady. That's obviously not something that you have been a part of but spent sort of a long time coming, right? Well, it was an absolute necessity given the situation of journalism in America. I think I credit Teresa a lot. Teresa Irene, our director of TCG for understanding this and plowing ahead. We went online with virtually no additional budget, no additional staff. We just did it. We did it beautifully thanks in no small part to Suzy Evans and Deep Tran who are sitting right here with us. You know, just incredible skills and gifts that took us there. I couldn't be more delighted that I'm leaving the magazine in this double identity here with the online and the paper. Yeah, I did want to ask a... I'm going to turn over the questions in a second but if you could talk about maybe your proudest accomplishment in the time that you've been at the magazine. Well, you know, I'm a journalist and I'm proudest, I guess almost of us, individual stories that we've run. Some of them, you know, really unforgettable things that, you know, things I love that we've published. Our first big piece on Cornerstone here when Robert Koh wrote about that. We did the cover story of the Port Gibson, the interracial Romeo and Juliet. Remember that? Yeah. Just an incredible reportage and it led to years of coverage of Cornerstone, Bill Roush, that whole epic. I loved Don Shuey, the great Don Shuey, his piece, what's it called? The actor's object of desire, sort of the erotics of that day. A great piece, it's in this book. Yeah, I should mention we're going to be signing copies of this at the end of our time here. I loved the work Todd London and I did together. Todd did a whole series of pop culture, sort of pop culture responses to the theater that were great pieces. They're now published in one of his books of essays. So, you know, I think those are my proudest things. When we come up with, you know, something wonderful that really makes a difference. Well, Todd, essentially, Todd has covered, we're going to print the story in September. The last issue, you'll be... Yeah, that's a nice fortuitous happening. Twenty years ago, Todd wrote a piece about the 15 graduating seniors at the A.R.T. School of Acting in Brad Harbor and followed them for a year after their graduation about how it was to leave school and go out into the acting world. And it was a three-part series examining their lives and their studies. Now, twenty years later, he's going to follow up on these actors' lives. And that's going to be in the September issue of the magazine. We're going to get not just their venturing into the world, but the life they've lived in the twenty years. How many of them are still actors? How many of them are famous? How many of them are starving on, you know, on a doorstep somewhere? We'll see. But it's going to be a fascinating... It's there. There's one of my favorite writers, Roger Copeland. And I remember him from my recent check-up essay about check-up architecture, just his latest contribution to the magazine. There's another one. There's our great architectural writer who wrote about stages, the best stages in the world and the not-so-best ones. A rant against the black box was great. That was a great piece. So, you know... Joshua Dax, by the way. Joshua Dax, I'm sorry. So anyway, I love particular pieces the best. This is more like a piece of... We're just having editorial meeting here for you all. Advice. And we've talked about it before, and it's where we talk about it every day. We're a small office based in New York, about five years ago. Freelance is all over the place, but how have we managed to cover the national theme and not just the international scene as well from one desk in New York? Informance is the main thing. Well, TCG is an enormous hotbed of information, a clearinghouse of information. Everything that happens in the theater, the word passes through there, so we have a chance to watch for it and look for it. But we have a network of people that we talk to, critics, writers, academics, and theater people around the country that we try to stay in touch with. Sometimes we programmatically do that. We make lists of people that we want to call and talk to, and other times it's more laissez-faire. But that's really, really important is to hear what's happening to local people. Right. I wonder if I open the floor if anyone has any questions for Jim about the legacy... Or for Rob, who, as you know, will be assuming the editorship of the magazine this coming. You saw it first. But there'll be a transitional period, whether we two or three. We're going to work together, just as we have for the past six years. And I would have to say I could not be more pleased. I've never worked with a finer journalist than Rob, and it bows really well for the future of the magazine. Thank you, Jim. Yeah, thank you. With that, anyone have any questions about the legacy of the magazine? I've got more I can ask them, but if you all... Yes? I noticed that TCG has a program for kind of global cooperation in American theater artists and going on these projects. Do you write up afterwards in those projects? Well, once again, that's part of the touching area. How much of TCG's own programming are we going to write about in the magazine? We pretty studiously avoid doing some sort of big feature on what our own publisher... Our own publisher's initiatives in the theater. We sort of leave that to other folks. But we do have our page, one page of TCG news, and we cover those things in the context. Perhaps something comes of that that's a wonderful project. You see that is presented somewhere. We'll cover that as a production or something like that. We try to cleverly avoid broadcasting TCG's efforts as such. As such. I would just only add to that that I think there are cases where the folks that TCG is supporting and the projects they're supporting are good stories in themselves. What we're not going to write about is, isn't it great that TCG did this grant program? But we might, on a case-by-case basis, say that grantee, that's a story we want to hear more about their story, but we're just not going to highlight. We definitely do mention if they have a TCG AHA grant or one of those... But again, the perception, we want to go against the perception of the newsletter or House Morgan. Because we cover a lot of theaters that aren't members. We cover a lot of theater activity that's not... And we have... We're international in scope. The internationalism I was talking about before in the 80s and 90s was really simply due to the fact that these things were really happening and influencing the American theater. Today, the International Theater Institute in New York is centered in the TCG offices where William Capuchero is our head. And internationalism has become part of the magazine's mandate. And we have a global spotlight column every month. We have an international issue in May-June that focuses on some parts of the... different parts of the world. We publish the biggest compendium of international festival information that anybody does, I believe. So internationalism is a big part of our mandate. Yeah, what's interesting is we used to do sort of an obligatory section called Global Spotlight where we just would... We did a good job, but it was basically like each month we would talk about whatever festivals were happening. I never felt... I felt writing about a festival that's happening in Europe this month is not going to help anyone here plan to go there, right? They could find out about the work. So we decided to just do a column about anything happening globally, and we thought rather than making a slot for it and just plugging the story into it, and we were worried that there wouldn't be enough stories coming our way, the way that the stories come to us, we have an overflow of ideas of someone doing exchange, someone taking their play to Armenia. There's so much happening. Jerry, you had a question. I don't know if you can answer it. What is your frank appraisal for the future of the print magazine? You know, we've seen news week go away and the magazine industry is going, yet the print issue is sort of our record of what occurs, of what has occurred. Where do you see it going? I bet you can't answer. No, we can't. I'd love to hear your read on it, as best you can. Well, you know, it's just as up in the air for us as it is for New York Times or anybody else. One thing that we're, you know, we started, we went online last October. We've been online since then. At some point soon we're going to, we are my successors, going to sit down and evaluate exactly what the impact has been for say a year of online in tandem with the print issue. And decisions are going to be made. Will the magazine become, you know, bimonthly in print? Six times a year instead of ten? Will it, you know, will it simply shrink and more to lower expenses and so on? You know, we're a trade publication and as such our advertising has been more robust than you might imagine. It hasn't shrunk, you know, the theater training institutions and so forth, we're the only game in town and that advertising has, I'm not saying the totals haven't gone down like everybody else's have, but we're not severely damaged by this anti-print trend as some others have done. The magazine, amazingly enough, doesn't, we're subsidized by TCG but not by a hell of a lot. So it's really, we're really proud of that record and it still stands at the moment. But things, as you know, are changing rapidly and we just don't know what to look for. I would just say doing both of them, the web and print has made me think a lot about this, especially as we do this transition and I do feel like being on the web you sort of get into the wrappers of a river and you don't have a chance to step back and look at the big picture and I'm starting to think of the print issues while we still do them and I think for the foreseeable future we're going to do ten issues a year as ways to organize our thinking around topics and timely issues so that we can stop, step aside and say, here's going to be our issue on this making this like a tent of stories, this is where we're going to put these stories. Now some of them are actually only going online because we just have more ideas about this but that issue that comes out in September is going to be our marker and then also the print issue, the print edition will have a nice package of stories about that, whatever that is. So hopefully we'll also have time and information you want to get up. I don't want to become the magazine backed up, I mean people read the new records but it becomes a pile, I want to get to that one day we want to be the magazine that they really want to read and also we want to hear from people at this conference what you would like to see in the magazine what would you like to see in print and online and how do you get your information. So many people have met and said, do you have a website? They don't even know that we have a website so we need to let them know. Jenny? It's one of my favorite editions of the magazine. Have there been any conversations or responses to articles in the magazine that have surprised you? Surprises? You well. The biggest responses have come there are moments that you know of, the famous August Wilson ground stand speech which was delivered at the 96 TCG conference at Princeton and we printed it immediately and Mr. Brewstein did his rebuttals to it in the magazine and then those two important gentlemen ended up facing off at New York's Town Hall one Christmas arguing about it sponsored by American Theater. I mean that was quite the haul and that transcript has never been made available. Neither of the gentlemen wanted that transcript made available. But that became a national story. That's a national story. You know I just interrupted you say that the 20th anniversary of that speech is coming up and we're going to do something big about that because I think there's generations of people who don't even know what that August Wilson speech was about, what he was saying, what has happened to culture specific views since then. It's obviously issues that we're all talking about all the time but that speech was a marker that we wanted. You never know what, many times you don't know what it's going to get a enormous response. We ran a rather insipid story one time about the Spanish Golden Age, Lopida Vega and playwrights and like that and I got 20 letters and you know a huge response about why there's a secret Golden Age society out there but often you do not know what will and we publish things that we think are going to just infuriate people and silence. I have no idea. We just had a story about just the theater in Egypt that we published and I think someone must have assigned it to a class or something because there were a ton of online comments about it saying this is a great story and they almost had the same wording like this is a great story about Egyptian theater. You never know. Online comments have actually been more robust I'll just say than I would have thought. I didn't think people used online comment sections anymore but they really were on the top. Questions anybody's got? Yes. What's a favorable trend you've been watching in the theater movement over the last few years and would either of you like dream for me for a minute and not ask me to predict just to hope like a headline to a few years from now? I love the developments in chamber musicals. I think small chamber musicals really carrying the weight of the future of the musical rather than the big overblown I love the work of can you name Michael Solis? Well Michael John tends to do the big stuff but Dave Beloit Dave Beloit is that's not exactly a chamber musical I'm thinking of the February house at the public theater you know work like this yeah so that's that makes me happy because of Gabriel Coney people like that what do you think fun home is a chamber musical that's right yeah I was going to say something else musicals that's a big one of my topics I mean the thing we're watching is this discussion about diversity and inclusion and specifically gender parity is one that we've watched and I will say that I'm actually what I'm hopeful about is that we need to dig into the numbers the top ten list we do every year of one of the top ten plays obviously there's a very few female playwrights there but if you dig down below the numbers and you also look at generationally of who not just the living playwrights versus dead ones but old versus playwrights under 40, under 50 we don't have the numbers yet but I see a trend that is much I've had friends of mine say it looks like there's more women it's a long way in the other direction well I think that's actually a favorable trend we don't have those headlines yet but I think that the trend toward this coming season there's more theaters announcing all female or female dominated it's a redress that's overdue and I think it's a trend that's an ongoing coverage so maybe more than one headline on that one can you guys talk about the plague of putting good plays in the magazine and just sort of the history of that well we didn't at the very first but it was only Terry how long was it before we started putting plays in the magazine something like that execution of justice was the first play we by and by man was the first play we published so if that was in it took us four years we got a grant from do you remember we got a lovely grant from some two huh? thank you thank you dear Jenny was there too it was the Skirball Foundation that lasted maybe ten years and then we just kept putting the plays in for free we started with I think four or five but now we publish five a year that's five or six five five plays a year on our own dime you know that very well and our committee in-house committee reads these plays and selects them they're not submitted for potential publication we scout them out it's a balance as you know Terry in our publications program publishes a great many plays in single editions and multiple volumes and so there's always a tug of war about what might be right just for the magazine or for the magazine and in an anthology or et cetera et cetera so this is all part of the discussion yeah I will say also to answer your question Jerry a little bit is the one thing that's only in the magazine and for the foreseeable future will only be in print is the plays those are not online they won't be online anytime soon and so if you want to read the five plays we get a year it's only in print we do extensive interviews with the playwrights and that goes on yeah we didn't that's another interesting point we didn't do that for a while we just published the play and then I kept getting letters from this lady in pencil baby and she would say she must have written to me four times what was that playing I didn't understand a word out there could you explain this so we realized that we needed more than just a play text especially it was an adventurous or bewildering play and we began putting nice two page spread interviews with the playwright to help the lady in Pennsylvania what these plays were and that's been a wonderful addition to the magazine that our readers have helped us with yeah definitely anybody else have questions for Jim yes what advice would you give to aspiring journalists two different questions go into computers we have lots of aspiring journalists pass through our halls we have a busy and productive internship program it's a become an AT intern become a TCG intern as I said it's a clearing house of information you can learn an amazing amount and our internships well Suzy Evans the managing editor of the magazine was an intern who helped in her internship she helped develop this fat book here I don't know Stephanie Cohen were you ever an intern or were you just no you just were hired but the internships are very productive and interesting there and we incorporate our interns completely into the editorial process it's a tricky thing but the we're five people we don't provide lots of opportunities for real employment and it's just getting tougher and tougher out there you know I have an online presence write a blog do the things that the journalism teacher suggests yeah I would say I was editor of Backstage West until 2003 and moved to New York in 2005 it took me 10 years I got the job at TCG at American Theater in 2009 but these positions like gyms don't open up very often well I've been at it for 30 years yeah so just wait around until you're 67 yeah you've got a shot you know I will say anecdotally this is probably I used to when I was at Backstage West I would I felt guilty that I had a job with health insurance and that many of the people I was covering you know were struggling to make ends meet especially in that way you don't make any money doing theater I felt guilty about it and then I'm not saying the shoes under the foot I know there's huge compensation issues in the American Theater and huge equity issues and access but I gotta say I am less concerned about the future of the American Theater I feel like it's going to be fun it's going to consist I feel like when you say player versus journalist there's no huge commission for journalists there's no Edgerton Prize for journalists there's no it's a really tough field I'm really interested in we've had partnerships with the Jerome Foundation the Irvine Foundation the Hewlett Foundation to fund journalists in certain regions or in certain mandates and that's been a terrific program the Jerome Foundation funded us for 19 years we did almost 60 young journalists including such people as Jesse McKinley for the New York Times David Ng who's on the Los Angeles Times a lot of good people have been from that terrific that's a great program but that no longer exists I would like to, that's one of the things I want to do we want to do to help us develop new journalists of color because it's a really white field new journalists in other regions because it's a very New York analogy so I think we can play a role in helping the new generation because it's, I think it's theater can exist without journalism, right? it can, but I don't want to live in a world where we don't talk about it and we don't print, you know it's not marked, especially theater because it's something that's I'm fond of saying that theater is one of the few places that you can still bring people to church bring people together to experience something together and it's a dialogue of ideas and it's meant to promote discussion and thought that follows, it doesn't exist or if it's inferior or if it's weak then the theater is weakened the dialogue that follows the act of theater is an essential part of the theatrical act and that's what American theater is one of the things that American theater has devoted itself to is to being that providing a place for that dialogue to happen so that the theatrical act is completed and grounded and made fuller so we want there to be more more of us in you so we're going to work on that there there are folks here well yeah sort of a follow up to the how to get started question a minute ago does it still make sense for an aspiring writer to offer to do a piece on spec I don't know if that phrase even still exists I mean I remember 40 years ago I would write to editors I would say I've got this idea for a piece and they would sometimes say do it on spec getting on speculation we have no obligation to pay you or to publish it but we'll give it a quick and sympathetic reading when it comes in does that still happen? it happens it happens where it's very seldom that we accept things that just come come to us because we're busy you know planning an agenda but there are occasions like that there's got to be some middle ground between your formally commissioning a piece and signing a contract and all that and saying yeah that sounds like a great idea give it a try Roger what I would say is that in my experience on the other side pitching and freelancing and also being on both sides of it a lot in the conversations you have either conversations on the phone or in pitches if you're able to convey in that pitch what your take is and what an interesting thinker you are that's usually enough pitches can tell us a lot we also want to see great writing but we don't tend to unless someone is a fully formed writer and or someone we know like maybe a name person Tony Custer sent us something tomorrow we might just make a few changes and you know yeah so it's rare I would say it's no more rare Jim than just finding a good writer to write anything sometimes it's spec sometimes it's a pitch yeah I think a writer who is particularly focused on theater and theater arts if you don't pitch to America theater and dramatics and Yale theater and just a handful of places what do you do that's it Susie have you oh yeah Rob says really true someone emailed us and said they have a really interesting idea for a story that they're really interested we will assign a commission to write that we would never say go forth and write that maybe we'll pay you a favor we would commission them to write it and work with them on the piece if someone just sends us a piece and they haven't told us their writing that we're less likely to accept unless they're Tony Custer if someone just writes something because they were interested and went to some artistic director and was like I'm recording this for America theater but really to spec if you come to us with a good idea and a well written pitch that has an interesting idea of angle and you have a unique perspective on it then we will assign you to write that one more sort of contribution to that idea is that America theater is dedicated to carrying the voice of the artists not just the voice of the journalists so many times people who are known artists come to us and say I want to write about this tonight that's certainly true in the anthology majority of pieces in there or at least 50% of them are buying artists yeah we'll say also we don't take pieces on spec so much but people give speeches Richard Nelson that was a speech we seek out if someone's interesting we know about it's giving a speech somewhere we want to get a transcript of the speech and we'll just send us their speech and we'll say well let's talk about it and we'll write that so that's one source you know I'm Kirsten from America stage this was really interesting I have a question about since you are or since you have moved online and you have been covering more news content that's happening as you've heard getting it we saw this season announcement cover are you also considering just some news pieces are there new things of interest that you're looking to cover in that daily content that we should be thinking about as we move forward sharing what things might strike you beyond the season announcement the season announcement spills to me time and kind of core mission to me is when you're putting on your stage we're going to list that that seems key as are key hyrens hyrens entrances entrances and memorial those are things that we've always done in front of book news we haven't really done as much thinking I would admit we also have been trying to do we can't cover every new play festival but we've actually been trying to cover as many play festivals and newer festivals with some kind of coverage previews or have someone there for online that's something we've been doing we haven't given a lot of thought to other kinds of news so maybe we can collaborate on that we don't tend to do somebody got a giant brand to build a building we've been trying to figure out maybe someone else can help us with when do we report a new building what are the announcements they're going to do when they break ground when they say they're going to start a fundraising campaign when the place opens when they cut a ribbon we're not going to announce it every time we don't tend to do those kinds of things that get lots of local press we don't do anniversaries and such that's a good one all the time we don't do anniversaries as such like an anniversary is a time when there's just things and we'll say we're not going to cover it that is the 50th but let's talk about other things we get another angle or maybe it won't be right on time for your anniversaries so the Rock Shover thing came about because they were pitching them because they're 40th is 40th there we missed that by a couple of days March or 25th year at the McCarter but that's not what the story is so anyway that's just an example hope that helps we have a session tomorrow during lunch which is to take feedback on both coverage in the magazine and specifically on the website and more of what you want to see us cover I think another part of your question was are we doing more exclusive online only stories other than just the season announcements and we totally are we're doing a lot of that we're doing a lot of news we're doing a lot of just shows that we can't fit into the magazine our lead time for print is so long as you know if you've ever tried to get a story placed that we just have to miss a lot of stuff and so now online we said you know what we can do a story on that so it's completely different right so but also in terms of our theater right yeah no no we do less news than Playbill and Broadway.com or Broadway World whatever it is yeah so if you don't have any questions Jim is going to be signing this wonderful book 25 years ago this came out how many years ago Terry I don't know 6 years ago the 25th anniversary of the magazine 6 years ago we're now in our 31st year but this is a virtual you know history of the regional theater movement through the documents that were probably it's not just a history there's also amazing manifestos and screeds and rants it's great it's a terrific book so thanks very much