Inside the issue: what it takes to make a monthly magazine

A look behind the scenes at The Ballina Wave — and what the role of editor and managing editor actually involves, month after month.

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over the studio in the week before a magazine goes to print. Pages are locked, photographs chosen, words read and re-read until they sit right. Then the file goes off, and the next issue begins.

We've had the privilege of working as editor and managing editor of The Ballina Wave, the monthly community magazine published by Northern Rivers Media. Now in its fifty-fifth issue, the Wave has been a steady presence on the Far North Coast since November 2021 — a free, beautifully produced print magazine that lands in cafés, waiting rooms and letterboxes across Ballina and the surrounding region every month.

Below, a look at what it actually takes to put a magazine like that together — and what the editor's role looks like behind the cover.

Editing a monthly magazine is a planning job first

People often imagine magazine editing as a red pen and a strong opinion. There's some of that. But the bigger part of the job, especially as managing editor, is the planning.

Every issue has to be mapped before a single word is written. That means an editorial calendar that lines up with the season, the community calendar and what readers are actually thinking about in any given month. May is different to November. The school holidays change everything. A long weekend can swallow a deadline if you don't see it coming.

For The Ballina Wave, that planning involves balancing recurring sections that readers expect with feature stories that give each issue its own character. It also means coordinating with photographers, designers, contributors and advertisers — each of whom is working to their own timeline, and each of whom needs information at the right moment to do their best work.

A monthly cadence sounds gentle. In practice, you're always working on at least two issues at once: closing one, building the next, and quietly noting ideas for the one after that.

Structuring content so it actually gets read

Community magazines live or die on whether people pick them up and keep turning pages. That's a structural question as much as a writing one.

A good monthly magazine has rhythm. Long pieces need short ones around them. Heavy subjects need lighter neighbours. Photography needs breathing room. The opening pages have to do a particular kind of work, drawing readers in without giving the strongest material away too soon.

Part of the editor's role at The Ballina Wave is mapping that rhythm across every issue — deciding what runs where, how long each piece should be, which story deserves the cover and which photograph carries the spread. It's the difference between a magazine that feels considered and one that feels like a collection of articles bound together.

It's also where the editing and copywriting sides of the studio overlap. Knowing how words work on a page — how a headline lands, where a reader's eye goes, when a caption is doing more than the paragraph beside it — makes the structural decisions easier and the finished pages stronger.

Writing, editing, and the line between them

Editor is a title that covers a lot of ground. On any given issue, the role moves between writing original articles, commissioning pieces from contributors, structurally editing longer features, copyediting for clarity and proofreading the final pages before they go to print.

Writing your own articles for the magazine you're editing is a useful discipline. It keeps you honest about word counts, brief expectations and what's actually possible inside a tight deadline. It also means you're contributing to the voice of the publication, not just shaping other people's contributions to it.

Editing other writers is a different craft again. Good editing isn't about rewriting in your own voice — it's about helping each contributor sound more like themselves, with the structure tightened and the prose clearer. For The Ballina Wave, that's meant working with local contributors across business, community, lifestyle and travel writing, each bringing their own perspective on the region.

The trick, across both, is to keep the magazine's editorial voice consistent without flattening the individual voices inside it.

Collaboration is most of the job

The cover carries one or two names. The masthead carries a few more. But a magazine is the work of a much larger group — designers laying out pages, photographers shooting features, advertisers funding the whole operation, contributors filing copy, printers turning files into something you can hold.

A meaningful part of the editor and managing editor role is keeping all of those threads moving in the same direction. Briefing photographers so their work and the writing arrive in the same key. Working with designers so the page layout serves the story rather than fighting it. Talking with contributors early enough that their pieces have room to breathe before deadline. Being the steady point of contact when something inevitably shifts.

It's also where the broader experience of running a copywriting and editing studio in the Northern Rivers becomes useful. The same skills that go into a brand voice project or a website rewrite — listening carefully, asking the right questions, shaping messages for a specific audience — are the skills that hold a magazine together month after month.

Why local print still earns its place

There's no shortage of digital content competing for attention on the Far North Coast. What a printed community magazine offers is something different: a slower read, a curated selection, a sense that someone has thought carefully about what belongs in front of you this month.

Done well, a magazine like The Ballina Wave becomes part of how a community sees itself — a place where local businesses meet local readers, where regional stories are told properly, and where the photography and writing reflect the place they come from.

That's what makes it satisfying work. Every issue is a small, finite thing. It ships. People pick it up. And then you begin again.

Working with Wattle & Word

The Ballina Wave is one of several editorial and communications projects we work on alongside our copywriting and editing services for businesses across the Northern Rivers. If you're a publication looking for editorial support, or a business that wants its writing to read like it was made with the same care a good magazine is, get in touch. We'd love to hear what you're working on.

You can read the latest issue of The Ballina Wave here.