Today saw the delivery of the last issue of Planning News for which I was co-editor, and my last post to the magazine’s facebook page. So I guess we really are done. I hope you can excuse a few self-indulgent thoughts.
It has been a privilege to work on the magazine. No other Australian state has a monthly planning magazine; Victoria is very lucky to have one, particularly since it also sustains the three-times a year VPELA newsletter as well. It is a tribute to the establishing editors of the magazine that they had not only the vision to see how important monthly publication was, but also the persistence to ensure that it happened. All the subsequent editors owe them a lot, as they proved the monthly turnaround could be done and established Planning News as the key channel for debate in the Victorian planning industry.
When we took over we were very conscious of the heritage of the magazine and its importance; we tried to live up to that. Of the issues we did, I’m particularly proud of the issue we did after the release of Melbourne @5 Million and the Victorian Transport Plan. Those documents marked a really decisive moment in the government’s approach to planning, and in response we were able to get contributions by Mike Scott, Robin Goodman, Max Lay, Ray Brindle, Knowles Tivendale, Paul Mees and Daniel Bowen (plus my favourite of all the covers we ran). There is a run-down of some of the higher profile issues we did here. Most of my own writing for the magazine is archived on this site and can be found using the planning news tag on the right of most pages.
The guilty pleasures were the goofy things we slipped in, usually in the Clause 101 column. On that front, a particular moment of pride was the portrait of Mole Emperor Zandar the Merciless. That was a level of weirdness that I don’t think the magazine had descended to before.
We couldn’t have done it without our loyal regular contributors and the array of others who contributed more irregularly. Our full thank-yous are in this month’s magazine but Greg Loveder, from Troedel’s printers, also should be singled out for consistently going above and beyond the call of duty in his work on the layout.
We worked hard to try to make the magazine more eye-catching, so to wrap up this moment of self indulgence, here are what I felt were our five most effective covers. Image credits for all these are available by clicking the image. You can see all the covers for our issues here.
