The Editor-in-Chief Industrial Complex
Written by Kat Boskovic
When I became Editor-in-Chief of Your Magazine that fateful day of January 2025, I was under the impression that I had reached the top of the editorial food chain. As most regrettable long-term relationships do, this one began with a crush. After encountering the magazine at my freshman year Org Fair, I developed what can only be described as an unhealthy attraction to a student publication (a story for another day). What followed was a whirlwind romance from staff writer to Style Editor to Editor-in-Chief, complete with increasingly serious commitments and a gradual surrender of my personal autonomy, as most relationships often culminate. Not that I can claim to have been an unwilling participant; as early as 2024, I was stalking former EICs on LinkedIn and had even constructed a fictitious resume charting my eventual rise to power. In retrospect, the warning signs were there—unfortunately, they were put there by my own hands.
After several semesters of climbing the ranks, I had finally secured a position from which I could oversee the magazine’s operations, delegate responsibilities, and send emails beginning with the phrase “Just circling back.” I had people for things. Those people had people for things. It was a beautiful system, and for a brief moment, I believed in the separation of powers.
But to my future dismay, the separation of powers requires there to be people to separate them among. I regret to inform the Emerson College population that, following a recent vacancy in our Arts & Entertainment department—despite the former editor’s generous offer to simply “give the position to someone else,” as though editorial appointments were theirs to bequeath in a last will and testament—I am now the interim Arts & Entertainment Editor. I would like to thank the selection committee for their confidence in my leadership during this transitional period.
For those keeping track at home, I am now responsible for overseeing the editorial operations of Your Magazine, editing the A&E section, and training its assistant editor. In other words, I have successfully consolidated executive and departmental authority under a single administration. The transfer of power was swift, largely uncontested, and conducted without consulting the electorate. Political scientists generally have a word for this sort of arrangement that begins with the letter D and ends in –ship, but I have decided to call it efficiency (as most self-appointed historical sovereign leaders have).
This, of course, is nothing new. Last semester, I found myself begrudgingly proofreading articles without the PB-308 Copyediting supposed pre-requisite, an undertaking that taught me two things: first, that the English language contains an astonishing number of opportunities for human error, and second, that I apparently possess the face which suggests I would be willing to correct all of them. Then came the summer, which longtime readers of this blog (yes, both of you) may recall from my previous dispatch, when I became responsible for generation issue themes with only a Pinterest account and a dream. That vacancy has since been filled, but just as I was beginning to believe the division of labor had been restored, I was hurtled down to my roots of section editing.
At this point, I have begun to suspect that the organizational chart is less a description of our editorial structure than a list of positions I may eventually be required to occupy. I am not so much climbing the corporate ladder as collecting its missing rungs.
The irony is that I still write articles for the magazine, entirely of my own free will. This is perhaps the most damning evidence against my credibility as a victim of editorial overextension. Nobody is threatening medieval torture to coerce me into pitching stories, conducting research, and agonizing over the precise arrangement of words in a sentence. I do those things because I actually enjoy writing, an unfortunate personal weakness that has repeatedly interfered with my ability to complain convincingly about my workload.
Writing, however, is one thing; if anything, it’s an opportunity to have content to blast to my whopping twenty-five Substack subscribers (shameless plug here). But I have somehow achieved the rare distinction of being both the person producing content and the person responsible for ensuring that people producing content are producing content correctly, which brings us to the central contradiction of the Editor-in-Chief industrial complex.
The more efficiently I perform my duties, the more duties I become qualified to absorb. I have become both the employer demanding increased productivity and the employee wondering whether she is entitled to a lunch break. Naturally, I have considered unionizing. Unfortunately, collective bargaining becomes rather difficult when management and labor share the same Google account.
My latest appointment has also introduced me to the wonderful world of succession planning, a world I was mercifully spared of as Style Editor when the previous editor returned from a hiatus in Los Angeles. As interim A&E Editor, I am responsible not only for editing the section’s articles but for also training our assistant editor, which means I must teach someone else how to do the job I am currently only doing because there is nobody else to do it. This is, admittedly, a compelling argument for the importance of education. Every successful institution should be able to reproduce its own workforce, preferably before that workforce begins writing increasingly deranged blog posts about its working conditions.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that Your Magazine is currently operating under martial law. Our editors are talented, our writers are producing genuinely interesting work, and our assistant editors are learning the peculiar art of telling someone that their article needs substantial revisions without making them reconsider their entire academic career. And despite my complaints, I care an embarrassing amount about the whole enterprise. I care whether an article has a compelling argument, whether a writer feels proud of their work, whether an issue comes together the way we imagined it would. I care enough to spend an unreasonable amount of time rearranging sentences written by people who are presumably out enjoying their college experience. Somewhere along the way, I became the kind of person who voluntarily assumes additional unpaid responsibilities for an extracurricular publication and then writes 1,000 words complaining about having additional unpaid responsibilities. I recognize that this is not an especially sympathetic position.
Still, I maintain that there is something profoundly ridiculous about being twenty years old and experiencing what can only be described as a corporate restructuring. I entered college intending to write things; I did not anticipate becoming the subject of a case study in administrative overextension, much less presiding over the gradual centralization of Emerson’s only monthly lifestyle publication.
For now, my administration remains committed to a peaceful transfer of power. I am training the next generation of editorial leadership, maintaining departmental stability (at the expense of my own, pending a new Abilify booster prescription), and doing everything in my power to ensure that the A&E section survives my temporary occupation. Whether I will eventually relinquish control or simply discover another vacant position to inherit remains to be seen. At the time of publication, I remain Editor-in-Chief and interim A&E Editor of Your Magazine. I cannot guarantee that this list will remain exhaustive. The Editor-in-Chief industrial complex continues its expansion, and its sole employee has filed a formal complaint (via blog post).