The idea behind MEET came to me during the summer of 2007. My editor at The SF Bay Guardian, Marke Bieshke, had just offered me my first long-term writing gig as a blogger for SFBG’s now defunct “The Guardian’s San Francisco Blog” and I had to come up with some columns so I wouldn’t have to kill myself scratching up bullshit for five totally unrelated posts every week. I immediately thought of a profile/interview series for a couple reasons. First, I kinda sucked at interviews at that point and I knew I needed to get better if I wanted to keep writing. Second, I’m only good at talking to strangers if I actually have a reason to. I can bum a cigarette from someone or ask them what time it is, but I’ve always had trouble with casual chitchat. As a journalist, this was a problem. How was I gonna network? How was I gonna find out about new shit to cover? My SFBG column “Meet Your Neighbors” was the answer to both questions. It gave me a good reason to talk to strangers. And those strangers, because I had scouted them myself, always seemed to know about stuff I thought was cool.
Writing “Meet Your Neighbors” quickly became an obsession so you can imagine how bummed I was, two years later, when The Guardian stopped publishing their city life blog. Luckily, my mission was saved by their immediate launch of a sex blog called “SEX SF.” At first, the change was great; I was still interviewing awesome people. The only difference was that now they all had something to do with “The Sex Industry,” which never really gets boring because…well, because it’s sex I guess. Still, after a while, I realized something was missing. Sex is great, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff out there that’s cool too. That’s why I started MEET Magazine. It’s a way for me to continue my eternal search for unique personalities without any confines and without any outside influence. For the first few months I’ll be the main editor and contributor and I’ll be re-working and re-posting a lot of my old interviews as well as some new stuff. But, I’m hoping to get this site rounded out with some other voices as soon as possible. So…if you like doing interviews or writing profiles and you like what’s going on here or have any ideas for improvement, please shoot me an email.
Thanks for reading,
PS. If you’re wondering about the “SF Edition” tagline, it’s there because I hope to branch out to other cities at some point. Got any money?
