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Celebrating Ita

I love magazines. Always have. I’m a sucker for the first issue of any new mag – ever since Dolly was launched full of promise at the very beginning of my teens.

It’s not just reading them, though, that brings pleasure. I’m fascinated by the way magazines are put together. Who choses what stories to run when. How you balance advertising and editorial (I have been known to count advertising pages, sad, isn’t it?).

So I can’t wait for Sunday afternoon when the Friends of the National Library will celebrate one of our great magazine editors, Ita Buttrose. It promises to be a feisty and fascinating afternoon, with Ita in conversation with writer and columnist Ruth Ostrow and The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Deborah Thomas giving the keynote address.

Ita has already declared her hand in an interview in last weekend’s Canberra Times. “We must take off the rose coloured spectacles and say it – this is crap! How can you produce this week after week?”, she said in an interview with Sally Pryor.

They are fighting words and I look forward to hearing more.

Hope you can join us at 2pm on Sunday - for the price of a couple of issues of your favourite glossy.