iT's….. the story of how a newsletter became a magazine

Robert Campbell, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

There's a series on British television called Dragons' Den in which would-be entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of business experts (the "dragons") in order to secure investment finance. Most of the ideas are rejected by the dragons who take great enjoyment in crushing the business dreams of the innocent entrepreneurs who had been so sure that their idea would be the one to make them rich.

I have often watched the programme and imagined myself standing in front of the five dragons, nervously pitching my business proposal. "It's a magazine for teachers of English... um... er... with articles, interviews and teaching activities... lots of classroom activities based on what's happening in the world today."
I can hear the dragons laughing as they dismiss the idea. "Don't give up the day job," they say.

I'm not sure if I ever imagined that starting a magazine for teachers would make me rich but it has been my day job for the past 15 years. And, over the years, it's become more than a magazine. There are the activity books we publish. There are the Internet sites we design and run. There are the audio recordings we produce for publishers. There are the book design and layout services we provide. Not forgetting the student magazine we publish for British Council students worldwide. But it all started with a magazine for teachers: iT's for Teachers.

So why start a magazine for teachers? Like many people, I started teaching when I moved to Spain in the 1980s. At that time International House Barcelona published a newsletter called The Calendar and I combined my teaching work with editing the newsletter.

I had very little experience with putting together a newsletter. At school I had edited a magazine that, due to lack of funds and my powers of persuasion, consisted almost entirely of contributions written by myself, credited to an assortment of bizarre names. The same was true for those first issues of The Calendar.

Apart from including articles and information for teachers, I wanted The Calendar to provide teachers with activities that were up-to-date, motivating, and that didn't shy away from difficult topics. This was back in the days when there was no Internet or satellite television, video was a novelty and British newspapers usually arrived at least several days after their publication date. So topical activities were in demand.

Over the five years that I edited The Calendar, the newsletter grew up into a magazine. It widened its territory from Catalonia to what we labelled as Eastern Spain. Believing the magazine should continue to grow and reach the whole of Spain (and maybe even the world!), I set up a new magazine independently that incorporated The Calendar.

So why iT's? What is the significance of the title and that capital "T"? Many people think the title comes from the opening sequence of the comedy TV series Monty Python's Flying Circus in which a caveman runs towards the camera to say, "It's….." before being crushed by the opening credits.

The title in fact comes from a newspaper advertisement I saw that read, "It's Time!" It grabbed my attention because I was feeling that the time had come to do something new. Time had already been used as a magazine title, but It's seemed a good alternative. The word it's also seemed a good choice because it could be used in so many different ways.

As part of my pitch to the Dragons, I would point to this as a sign of my confidence in the business. After iT's for Teachers there would be the record label (iT's Music) and then the airline (iT's Air)! Anyone who has started a business knows how easy it is to believe that a small business will grow into an empire.

As far as I can remember, it was our original designer who had the idea of the small i followed by the capital T. The cover photo of the first issue came from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. On the cover it read simply, "It's here!" The cover of one of our recent anniversary issues used an image from the same movie. The text was changed to "It's still here!"

So what has changed after 15 years? One thing that has changed drastically is the mechanics of how a magazine is made. It's a business in which so many jobs have disappeared to be replaced by new technology. Back in the old days hard copies of all the pages went to the printers with the designer's instructions written on them so that the printer could go through the laborious craft of turning ideas and notes on paper into a printed magazine.

It's sad to see how much of the craft has been lost from the world of printing but the doors that have opened as a result have made the task of creating a magazine so much easier. Today's magazine can be created on a single computer. The Internet has also made access to information, images, collaborators and readers so much easier. However, with all these advances, it still always seems to be a mad rush to meet each deadline.

Our mission back in 1990 was to create a magazine that was different from the other magazines for teachers. For example, there was the left-handed issue (No. 44), which had to be read from back to front. Then there was the banned issue (No. 56), which had a feature on censorship; we designed the magazine so it looked as if pages had been removed from it, cutting the censorship feature in half. It was a play on the censorship theme, but several readers called in to say that their magazines had pages missing.

The "white" issue was our first magazine of the new millennium. White was said to be the colour of the millennium, and our white cover included a message written in Braille which read "love is blind" to coincide with our classroom activities on Braille and St. Valentine's Day.

The life of a magazine is limited, and it was always sad to see good teaching material left in an old issue to eventually be forgotten. So we started rescuing and reformatting the best activities from back issues to create packs of material that teachers could photocopy. The resulting theme packs and project packs were extremely popular with teachers and developed into the series of Activity Books that exist today.

In the autumn of 2000 we took a big step and started printing the magazine in full colour. Two years later, in spring 2002, we launched American editions of our student magazines, bits and iT's Magazine. It wasn't the best time to launch new educational magazines in the United States, but we certainly learnt a lot from the experience.

Soon after the first issue was sent out we received a message from a high school in Texas that read: "I received your magazine today.... I was appalled and shocked at one statement on page 15 - 'Now look, we're going to go to the kitchen first and we're going to get some champagne out of the fridge.' My students are 14 to 18 years old. What are you trying to teach junior high students and high school students - that drinking is OK? Why not get a soft drink, or a glass of milk? In a day when teenage drinking is rampant, why encourage or condone drinking? It is the little foxes that 'spoil the vine!'"

A list of guidelines soon arrived from our American distributor detailing what was and was not acceptable to include in U.S. educational material. The guidelines included the following: "Baseball caps should be worn facing forward. There should be no contact between wild animals and children. Animals in zoos should not be seen behind bars in cages. Settings should not include any religious buildings, symbols or individuals (rabbis, priests, etc.). Story lines should avoid religious overtones or holidays. There should be no references to the occult, magic, ghosts, witches, etc. Do not depict or include in story lines card playing, dice, drinking alcohol, smoking or weapons."

iT's has always tried to provide teachers with topical activities and to tackle issues that course books often avoid. Suddenly faced with the task of censoring the content was difficult and often frustrating. I'm happy to say that we have now returned to our roots and re-launched iT's for Teachers in a new format. It has a new size, a new look, and new regular sections that we created after conducting a survey to find out what teachers really want from a magazine. It also has the classroom activities that are so much fun to create (and hopefully to use).

If you don't know the magazine then you can find out more about it at our Website at www.its-teachers.com.

Robert Campbell
January 2006

Note: Some sections of this article first appeared in iT's for Teachers.