Reinvigorating Regional Media

Liz Long has been harboring a secret since completing the University of Chicago’s Editing certificate program. She wants to bring the Oxford comma to The Roanoker magazine. Months spent immersed in The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) have equipped her to challenge AP style at Virginia’s oldest magazine.

“I really want to go to CMOS and use the Oxford comma,” she says, even as she laughingly acknowledges that her editor in chief might need some convincing.

These might seem like bold moves for someone who started as a receptionist at the magazine’s publishing company—LeisureMedia360—fifteen years ago, but they’re proof that Long’s strategy of relentless persistence has paid off. “I just sort of nagged my editor in chief until he let me start writing,” she says. That determination has since taken her to the magazine’s helm, where, in addition to overseeing the fifty-two-year-old Roanoker magazine, she has edited Blue Ridge Country, the official Virginia travel guide, and an assortment of other custom publications for regional tourism partners. She also produces and hosts From Print to Podcast, the magazine’s flagship podcast.

Despite all that, Long still wanted more. In recent years, alongside her day job, she established herself as a freelance fiction editor and has taken on more than a hundred projects across romance, young adult, sci-fi, and mystery genres.

Having the confidence to take on that sort of breadth, she says, is exactly where UChicago’s Editing certificate made all the difference. “The program helped me relearn the foundations and speak with authority,” she says. “I can confidently tell a client why they need a developmental edit instead of a proofread—and why a first draft isn’t ready for proofreading at all.”

The coursework’s value branched into other dimensions as well and gave her the confidence to change her pricing and project selection. “When you start freelancing, you feel you have to take every job,” she says. “Now I know my worth, and I know what the work costs, what I bring, and when to say no.”

Her big surprise was the Introduction to Acquisition Editing elective, which gave her the inside view on the whole book publishing process. “It wasn’t just, ‘What does an acquisitions editor do?’” she says. “It was how the whole team moves together—from query to publication and production management—and, from the author’s side, how to build a proposal that actually gets read.”

Between deep dives into the hidden secrets of Word and instructor time after class that helped her take class concepts and apply them to her business, the certificate was just what Long needed to bring it all together. As it happens, she also has the perspective of a USA Today bestselling author of young adult and romance fiction. “That means I know what it feels like on both sides of the red pen,” she says. “I can talk authors off ledges.”

But the masterstroke came when Long channeled her new knowledge into a seventy-page business proposal envisioning an expansion of LeisureMedia360 into book publishing. As conceived by Long, Leisure Reads would be a publishing imprint that would initially focus on regional nonfiction—Appalachian culture, local sports, cookbooks from the magazine’s recipe columnist—with the potential to expand into fiction. The proposal was so comprehensive that it stunned her team into silence when she first presented it to them.

“We’re looking at not just growing vertically but also horizontally into interesting and wonderful new opportunities,” Long explains. The plan’s still in its early stages, but just the go-ahead to explore it was a milestone.

In a sense, Long’s grand vision has brought her full circle. What began as a way to deepen her technical skills has now pushed her into uncharted territory. “My goal wasn’t to add a line to my resume,” she says. “It was to grow, to keep evolving. This program gave me the confidence to shape the next chapter, and maybe even the next imprint.”