like a fire

OK, I confess that I don’t usually read youth ministry magazines. Lately, though, I have ordered subscriptions to two of the top ones. First there is the very academic sounding Journal of Student Ministries (recently Zondervan) and then there is the very publisher oriented sounding Leading Student Ministries (Lifeway). I received my first copy of each this week and had to do a mash-up.

What’s this about?
No matter what they have beyond this, content is what I need. Looking at the titles of articles, I usually decide if I want to read it or not. Article titles from JOSM, Understand that You Don’t, Counting on Them, When the Time Stops, and Now Remember How. From the LSM Essentials of Small Town Youth Ministry, No Longer Little Children, Using Recreation to Draw Students, True Love Waits in Africa and Homosexuality?. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what the first set of articles are about. I started reading the first part of each article and wasn’t helped much there (more later on that). LSM on the other hand gave me a very clear view of what the article is about. One point for LSM.

The Eyes Have It
I don’t care how good your content is, if you can’t read the article, then it doesn’t matter. This is where I am really scratching my head. I’m not an editor or publisher, but I know what looks good and what looks like what a pre-school class worked on for a crafts project. LSM looks very professional and is very readable. It has a consistent look and good typeface. Thumbs up. JOSM is just a disaster. It looks like they used 12pt font, as many fonts as they could find (one blurb for wanting user submitted articles uses at least 4 fonts in the same box) and pictures behind text that render a lot of text virtually unreadable. I emailed the team at JOSM and they assured me that they knew about it and were working on the problem. Still it just looks really bad and is just a mess for the eye to follow. Hint: Editors are supposed to look at the magazine BEFORE it goes to print.

So after this, can you guess which one I am reading right now? I have to admit I really thought the LSM from Lifeway was going to be an advertisement for their products and the JOSM was going to be more about actual ministry. So far I would pick LSM. It didn’t have a lot of ads about their products and actually gave me some things to think about. I have yet to actually read the JOSM and I probably won’t. I just can’t bring myself to read something that poorly executed (especially after a day with middle schoolers).

If you have never heard of LSM, give it a try. I think you will like it. If you subscribe to JOSM, maybe you might want to reconsider. I will give them another try, but if the look is consistent will drop my subscription.