The making of a magazine

Inside a small, blue and white century home at the crest of a steep hill in Tyne Valley, P.E.I., a lone secretary waits for one of her employers, Karla Kordyban, to show up to discuss the day’s business.
The dark-haired woman, Kelly Murphy, doesn’t waste her time while she waits. There is always something to keep her hands busy.
Murphy first met Kordyban in an employment interview that was supposed to take place in Island Living magazine headquarters in Tyne Valley. She showed up, but nobody was there. She had to go to O’Leary.
“I was out of work and looking for work.”
So she consulted with Jodie Gavin of the O’Leary office of the provincial Employment Development Agency (EDA), who told her Kordyban was looking for an office administrator.
Murphy was struck with Kordyban’s elocution and obvious education. Kordyban apologized, with a smile, for the mix up over the location for the interview.
“And this is why I need someone like you,” Kordyban, a former theatre arts and creative writing professor, told Murphy in a stage whisper.
Murphy started on June 2, 2008. She works 32 hours a week and has Fridays off.
“I always have a long weekend, which I always enjoy.”
Her duties include reception, subscriptions and invoicing. Her daily routine is predictable. She arrives at 8:30, listens to phone messages and checks emails, addressing anything urgent immediately. Often that routine gets interrupted, she said.
“I do some trouble shooting.”
For example, Transmedia, the printing company Island Living uses, once sent an email saying there was something wrong with a CD they got from the magazine. Murphy had to call Patty Hardy, one of the co-publishers and the magazine’s layout artist and photo editor, who sent another CD to the printing immediately.
Murphy’s duties often take on a creative bent, she added.
“I really like to do research.”
Often the publishers have asked her to find people to interview and she has happily complied.
“I’ve been a resident of western P.E.I. all my life.”
Kordyban and Hardy, the co-publishers, are from Kentville, Nova Scotia and London, Ontario, respectively, so Murphy’s knowledge of P.E.I. community personalities comes in handy.
Hardy asked her to find a candle maker and she was able to find one right away, she said.
“I am way underpaid,” she said, laughing.
And often it has been incredibly humorous to work for the two women.
Murphy recalled a phone call from a potential subscriber in which a toilet flushed suddenly in the background. It’s experiences like that which make the day go by quickly, she said.
It’s almost 11 a.m.
Kordyban bursts through the front door, hustling quickly into the small, inner office. She doesn’t bother to remove her outer jacket or place her belongings at her desk, just behind her secretary’s.
With bright yellow briefcase in hand, Kordyban hovers over Murphy’s desk, speaking crisply and getting right to the point, discussing email communications and other magazine distribution details with the younger woman. She has a big smile on her face.
Kordyban stands about 5’3”, has short, light brown hair and wears a gold-brown leather jacket and green and gold, flowing skirt. On her feet are brown leather high-heeled boots. She wears no jewelry except a wedding and engagement ring. And there is no sign of makeup.
Within a minute or so, she moves to her desk and shuffles and rearranges the desk’s surface to her liking, putting away books, moving aside other items. The smile has disappeared. She plunks down on her chair and begins to write cheques. Within 15 minutes of her arrival, two servicemen from the phone company show up. It is time for them to add two phone lines to the office space upstairs. One of the men ask her about the service they already have.
“I think we have the computers on all the time,” Kordyban says.
She leads them upstairs to the second level of the little house, which has the two other offices, one for co-publisher/photo editor/layout artist Patty Hardy and the other for advertising manager Jeff Ellsworth, who came on staff on Dec. 1, 2008. Ellsworth studied recreation management at Holland College from 1995 to 1997 in Summerside. Born and raised in St. Lawrence, in western P.E.I., Ellsworth found employment upon graduation as the recreation director in Alberton. He had no real conflicts for the 12 years he was with the town and his strength was organization, he said.
“Festivals came easy to me.”
Ellsworth is also known in P.E.I. for his softball talent and in September, 2008, Island Living did a story about him. Shortly after, Kordyban pitched him the idea of becoming the publication’s advertising manager. He made the decision to do it on Oct. 1, he said.
“My initial job was to be the marketing/advertising manager for the magazine.”
Ellsworth is medium height with dark hair and eyes.
“Then I got there and started taking on several other things,” he said. He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
Ellsworth day timer maps out meetings, events and business mixers. A business mixer is a formally organized event which CEOs and business owners attend. He rarely passes up an opportunity to promote the magazine to potential advertisers or sellers. He’s even been known to give away stacks of old issues for free just to get the word out.
“I’ve been making a lot of positive connections across the Island.”
The magazine has produced quarterly issues since 2007 and up until now it has used one phone line to get the job done. Some of the original employees have never worked in the office. One is Cathy Sprague of Stratford, P.E.I., who met Kordyban at a meet-the-artist weekend at Best of P.E.I. in Charlottetown. Sprague, a retired home economics teacher, was showcasing her photography. Kordyban was impressed with her work and asked her to use some of it in Island Living. Sprague agreed.
Soon she was selling ads.
“I was blown away by the magazine. I thought it was absolutely beautiful.”
She had no advertising sales experience and learned as she went along. She plunged in with nothing more than a copy of the magazine and a persistent smile.
“I don’t know how I got the ads at all.”
Most business people she contacted asked her for numbers, which she did not have.
“I’d be sitting there with a blank look on my face.”
Finally a media kit was put together by the publishers and Sprague used that, as well as the Internet to make a case for the lifestyles magazine.
Sprague used contacts she has established over the years, she said. Often, a potential advertiser would mention she had taught them in school.
“I had a good rapport with them.”
With a planned expansion to bi-monthly editions, effective January, 2009, Kordyban and Hardy decided it was time to bring in new staff. Hence, the decision to hire Ellsworth so Sprague wouldn’t have to work alone. With the addition of staff has come the need for more technology.
One of the servicemen wants to know about some of the hardware they have. Kordyban asks Murphy where the hardware manual is. Murphy goes to a storage box and pulls out a large paper book. She grins widely.
“That’s why we pay her the big bucks,” says Kordyban.
Everyone chuckles.
One of the servicemen is leaning on a door frame, scratching his head. He tells Kordyban his mother was interviewed for a heritage article. He wonders if it is Island Living.
Kordyban says no, it wasn’t.
“Ours is contemporary so we don’t step on each other’s toes.”
The men leave.
Kordyban bends over Murphy’s desk again. She’s reading emails. Something she sees makes her face light up.
“Hallelujah! That’s great!”
Ralph Kordyban shows up. He is Kordyban’s husband and submits photography occasionally. He also assists with distribution. He stands about 5’11”, has a full head of grey hair and wears a neatly trimmed, grey beard. His voice is soft and he doesn’t say much. In stark contrast, nothing his wife does is executed without tremendous energy and speed, so in similar style, she goes to her car. Ralph Kordyban follows.
They get in and she drives. The first stop is the Evangeline Credit Union in Tyne Valley, where she makes a deposit, taking only minutes.
When she returns to the car she explains even though she did not arrive at the office until 10:45 a.m. she was working at home since 8:30 a.m.
“My day started real early and it happens all the time.”
She’s not complaining.
After getting back on the road, Kordyban’s purse rings. It’s her cell phone. She hands the purse to her husband, who is sitting quietly in the back seat. He finds the phone and answers it.
It’s Kelly from the office.
He hands it back to Kordyban.
“Hey!...OK...Yeah...”
She hangs up.
“Before we had Kelly I had to do everything,” she pauses and nods her head.
“It was bad.”
In the summer she prefers to walk to do her business banking but it isn’t always possible in Tyne Valley during the cold season, she said.
She punctuates her words with hand gestures, crisp elocution and resonant volume.
Kordyban retired from her teaching position in western Canada and she and her husband first moved to P.E.I. just before the magazine was begun in 2007. She kept hearing of artisans, Island-wide, who nobody really knew anything about, she said.
“I kept meeting all these people with all this talent but they weren’t making a living at it. That was the purpose of the magazine.”
To showcase the talent and unify Island culture.
“Local people don’t do the Island.”
Kordyban hopes to change that with her photograph-strong, feature article magazine.
As the cars near Summerside, her phone rings again. She looks at the call display.
“Patty,” she says, flipping it open.
She listens.
“I’m near Slemon Park.”
She pauses.
“How much of it...? Do you remember?”
Another pause.
“I’m picking it up.”
Patty Hardy , who was made Kordyban’s full business partner in the autumn of 2008, embarked on her photographic career purely as a by product of another hobby. Coaching baseball, she said. She began to take pictures of the children while they were playing and giving copies to the parents. She started out with a little Kodak digital.
“I loved the action.”
After a couple of years, she got a better camera and one of the players’ mothers, Anne Phillips, began encouraging her to go somewhere with her talent.
“She created the monster in me to get out there.”
During that same period she was helping a writer, June Ellis, with some layout work. Ellis knew Kordyban was starting up Island Living magazine and kept pressuring Hardy to submit her work. The two were introduced and Hardy finally ended up going on a photo shoot with Kordyban. The photographer has been with Island Living since its first issue, Hardy said.
“I’m not educated. It was an opportunity a lot of people wouldn’t give to me.”
Indeed, Hardy is completely self taught.
And promotion within the ranks came quickly as Kordyban realized the gem she had in Hardy. Soon after starting work with the magazine, Hardy was hospitalized with pneumonia and when she got out she found out she had been named photo-editor. That meant she got to veto all the art work and do the layout. She picked up on the technology immediately and became proficient with it.
“I understand the calibration process.”
Calibration is what photo editors do, with the help of a piece of software, to ensure the colours they choose stay true during printing. The potential for change is quite dramatic, she said. It can make or break your photos. And Hardy is a perfectionist, taking factors like lighting and surrounding reflective colours into consideration.
“I even wear grey sometimes when I do skin tones.” If she wears bright or dark colours, it might reflect back on the screen and distort her perception, thereby affecting the calibration process and the final colours printed.
The two co-publishers make an odd couple, as Hardy stands about 5’6”, taller with her trademark, spike heeled boots. When they show up to do a combination photo shoot and interview , sometimes eyebrows are raised, Hardy said.
Once, the duo covered the Irish Moss Festival and Hardy didn’t know the horses were not restrained, she said, laughing. She was following them along and almost got trampled.
“I just assumed they’d stop the beasts, but they didn’t.”
Hardy has learned to work under stress and how to be ready at a moment’s notice.
“I’ve met a lot of people and I’ve learned what not to do.”
And communication is a big part of the magazine’s success – which means frequent cellphone use.
Kordyban hands up again and asks her husband when he has to be back home.
“Why can’t I just drop you off at Frank’s?”
He tells her she can’t do that. They agree he will drop a camera off to a freelance photographer the magazine uses while she runs other errands.
Since things got started, freelancers have provided Island Living with articles and photographs. June Ellis has been writing for the publication for about two years.
Ellis works full-time as an administrator at Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley. She met Kordyban at a P.E.I. Business Women’s Association lunch and learn at the Loyalist Hotel in Summerside, she said.
She took a writing course through correspondence about four years ago and wrote an article on abuse for a women’s issues newsletter shortly after. She had one article published in Island Living about a foster mother due to receive an honourary doctorate in UPEI’s spring convocation exercises, she said.
“She says it was because of my article.”
Ellis loves how Hardy always chooses photos which flow well with her work. Most of all, she enjoys the interviewing process and never uses digital recorders.
“I just take notes. Sometimes people aren’t comfortable with a digital recorder.”
Technology and publishing work hand in hand, though.
Kordyban reads a gauge in front of her.
“I have 10 kilometres of gas left.”
The car pulls in to the Loyalist Inn parking lot in Summerside.
“It’s 11:29 and I said 11:30. Perfect.”
Ralph Kordyban is dropped off and his wife continues on to Office Depot, where she purchases accounting software.
It’s 12 p.m.
“We budget our time. It’s what we do,” she says.
She drives to a computer business in a strip mall in downtown Summerside and picks up a laptop computer the magazine had ordered.
The clerk sees her entering and smiles widely.
“I got ‘er done for you,” he says and brings the flat box containing the computer for her to examine.
She asks about another computer Hardy had looked at.
“We’re just waiting for the drives to come in. Corel is installed,” he tells her.
“OK,” Kordyban says.
She looks at the computer, puts it back in the box and pays for it.
“I can now take my work home.”
It’s 12:15 p.m.
She drives back to the hotel to pick up her husband and takes him to their ocean-view home nestled between the old and new Roman Catholic churches just past Abram Village.
After dropping him off, she drives back to the Tyne Valley office, shuffles some more paperwork, speaks briefly with Kelly and leaves to go to Hardy’s home. There, she will look at and make decisions about photographs for the rest of her very long day.
And it’s only 3:25 p.m.