Pacific Standard

Not to be confused with Reese Witherspoon's film production company, Pacific Standard.

Pacific Standard, formerly Miller-McCune, is an American magazine.

Background

Miller-McCune magazine was launched in 2008 by Sara Miller McCune, the founder and head of Sage Publications. It was named one of the year's "hottest launches" by MIN magazine^[2] and the following year received the same honor from Library Journal. It also received the 2008-2009 Society of Environmental Journalists Award for Outstanding Explanatory Journalism and the Utne Reader Independent Press Award 2009 for science/technology coverage. In 2010, Miller McCune was named by Folio magazine to the FOLIO: 40 list of publishing innovators: "At a time when print is becoming a secondary product for many publishers (in mindset if not revenue), Miller-McCune is succeeding with long-form journalism."^[3]

In 2010 the magazine launched Miller-McCune LIVE, a special events program to bring articles to life through comprehensive debate featuring industry leaders. The first debate, on lobbying, took place in September in Washington, D.C. The second debate was held in New York City in November with panelists Sree Sreenivasan and Rachel Sklar, who dug into the effects of social media on "real life" and ways to humanize the Internet.

On February 17, 2012, Miller-McCune announced that the magazine's name would be changed to Pacific Standard as of the May-June 2012 edition.^[4] That April, editor John Mecklin announced his resignation, citing "creative differences" among other reasons.^[5] On May 17, the organization announced that Maria Streshinsky, former managing editor of The Atlantic magazine, would be the editor-in-chief of Pacific Standard.^[6] In a May 2012 interview, Streshinksy said that the publication's new name reflected its taking a "western" perspective: "We want to tell the nationally important stories that are coming out of this side of the country, and from the edges of the Pacific.... So many of the nation's biggest shifts have come from the West, and we want to showcase that."^[7] As of January 2014 the magazine enjoyed its largest website traffic month ever; it continues to get most of its funding from Sage Publications, with much smaller amounts from subscription, newsstand, and website revenue.^[8]

Readership and topics covered

The magazine was created for opinion leaders, policymakers, and concerned citizens who are interested in developing solutions to some of the world’s toughest social and environmental problems. Drawing from the latest scientific research and evidence, Pacific Standard is published bimonthly in print and continuously online by the nonprofit Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.

In-depth pieces include stories such as "Native Environmentalism and the Alberta Oil Boom", "Global Warming: the Archaeological Frontier", "When Facebook Is Your Medical Record", as well as "Art and Alzheimer’s: Another Way of Remembering", the story of Hilda Goldblatt Gorenstein (Hilgos) and the documentary "I Remember Better When I Paint".^[9] For the "dream article" of Pacific Standard, editor-in-chief Maria Streshinsky has said:

"What I’d love to do is find research that sheds different light on conventional wisdom. History has shown that over the years we get an idea in our mind, or we look at some data, and we push forward with good intentions. Take the DARE program to keep and get people off drugs. It started in the early ’80s in Southern California but the numbers seem to show it doesn’t work. All those years, and all that funding, and maybe it helped people, but as an overall program, it’s been a failure. If you have numbers that can show that program didn’t work, the questions becomes, 'Why?' 'What made us think it would?' And then, 'With that knowledge, what are people doing out there that can really affect change?'"^[7]

References

External links

• Official website
• Miller-McCune LIVE