Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25125
letter When we started blue, part of the point was to create a maga- zine where the focus was the reader him or herself, as opposed to supermodels, rock stars, Hollywood actors, major league ath- letes or rich guys in suits. In other words, by de-emphasizing superficial popular celebrities, blue could be about someone much more important: THE READER. It would be, we envi- sioned, a mirror reflection of their world of possibility. The READER would be able to look in and see all the places THEY could go, and amazing things THEY could do. We resented the far more common magazines that tell us what we should think about instead: "How to lose IO pounds?" (Oh, I didn't realize I was so fat.0; "How to become a millionaire!" (Aren't most millionaires the unhappy and scrupleless ones we read about in the papas?) We hated magazines that showed us a high-priced uncomfortable clothes that we "NEED" (This reminds again that we need more money than we have, not to mention the whole fat thing.) And, to top it all off, the nerve of them: "How to get a date/get a boyfriend/have the best sex!" (Ok. This is the final straw. Do I really need a mbicle-desk magazine editors help on that one.?) As you can see, pure brainwash. A cult couldn't have done it bet- ter: Preach about a better path, sneakily insult you all the way, and then boom, crush your sense of sexual identity/confidence. To build you back up again: Can we just have $12 so you can get this for the rest of your life? You're addicted. Anyway, you get the point. At blue we saw that a great magazine would be more about working with the readers. Not against them. So, to enlist our philosophy, we proclaimed: No celebri- ties! No personality-driven stories! No huge photos of people! And, most of all, no people cover shots. But to succeed you've got to be flexible, you've got to lis- ten to the marketplace. The feedback we got, in response to our idealistic philosophy and abstract covers, was our readers asking: Where are the people? Who are the heroes behind the Adventure Lifestyle? We want to get to know them? Please introduce us! This is, we recognized, a pure human need: that for role models. The challenge is picking the right ones. And finding them outside of the proverbial magazine "box." So, I had been thinkin<> about this for awhile, when I first heard about Julia Butterfly Hill (see Speaking for the Trees, page 54), the courageous woman who lived in an ISO-foot tree house in northern California for two years and eight days, in protest of the desecration of the planet. Here was someone who sacrificed her time, and potentially her life, for the planet's health ... something so selfless and which we all should think a lot more about. If there was anyone deserving the cover shot of blue, this was it. She is my hero. AMY SCHRIER FOUNDER