Ok, he isn't George Barna, but at least he's ours.
     And he arrived just in time.
     You may have noticed that The Door, despite its scintillating prose, drop-dead humor, slick color and eye-catching covers, has been entertaining a shrinking number of subscribers lately. We have about the same number of readers, because as subscribers dropped, newsstand readers have picked up the slack. But because of the economics of magazine distribution, newsstand sales generate less income. That means our writers and editors are down to just one bowl of gruel a day.
     It's all part of the business of magazine publishing, something we acknowledge we know a lot less about than we thought (see Issue #157).
     Then, at The Door's moment of greatest need, like Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker, Ken George arrived.
     Ken is all uptown. He has contributed to the direct marketing efforts of such companies as AT& T, City Bank, Business Week and Reader's Digest and is now based in Hilton head, S.C. He promised to make it rain for us. In fact, if Ken is right, it's about to El Nino all over the parched little corner of the publishing world. Wahoo!
     But Ken isn't doing this for free. He's no chump. He's charging us his normal fee, which is always $1 more than the salary of the chief executive of the firm that hires him. He calculated using my salary and found he would be getting $11 a day.
     He said he'd do it anyway. That's when we started calling him "King" George and questioning his sanity.
     Does he like The Door?
     Not particularly, he said.
     Then why focus all his big-city smarts on our tiny mag?
     Can't really explain it, he said.
     Whew! Boy, for a minute there, Ken, we thought you were nuts.
     Once we heard his plan, we knew Ken was probably an angel in disguise, and crazy like a fox. The trick, he said, is to co-opt the tactic of the televangelists – direct mail marketing – and harness it for The Door. Actually, it's what every successful magazine does, although maybe not as well as Ken was going to do it.
     First, Ken analyzed our subscriber base, comparing home addresses to the latest census data using a sophisticated computer program. The results were surprising. We had assumed the bulk of our subscribers were struggling seminary students who pooled their meager resources to purchase a subscription. But no.
     Ken found 75.6 percent make more than $20,000 per year (The 24.4 percent who make less are comprised mostly of Door writers and editors); 33.7 percent make more than $50,000 a year; and 15.2 percent make more than $75,000 annually.
     So much for the "poor seminary student" theory.
     Our next false assumption was that our subscribers are mostly young smart-alecks and troublemakers. But much to our surprise, Door subscribers mirror almost exactly the U.S., Population age groups. Smart alecks of all ages read The Door. The only other products consumed that broadly are air and water, which led us to wonder if The Door was as necessary to human life as food, shelter, and other necessities.
     The last great surprise was that the state with the highest per capita Door readership is Oregon, followed by Colorado, Minnesota, Washington, and North Dakota. What does it all mean? We don't know. What does this say about Oregon? We shudder to think.
     Ken's next step was to send an elaborate questionnaire to a select group of Door readers, media observers and Door writers and editors past and present, asking where they felt the magazine was and where it should be going.
     Ken stirred the results into a vat containing the eye of Newt Gingrich, the sweat of the editorial board and the carefully preserved toenail of our publisher emeritus Mike Yaconelli, and presented it to the editorial board at a three-day meeting in mid-April.
     Some examples of the replies:

On the purpose of The Door:
—	"To carve up sacred cows and serve them up on a well garnished platter with plenty of spice, cooked over the refiner's fire."
—	"To humble the haughty by using humor and satire to hold a mirror up before the religious world, especially those who are trying to "use" God for their benefit."
—	"To humanize an area which tends to produce an abundance of self-indulgence disguised as spirituality."
—	"To maintain a passion and zeal to connect with those who are, for whatever reason, falling through the cracks of the church and our culture."
—	"All this, of course, in a context of entertainment. Without that, it doesn't work."
—	"To point out the places in the religious world where the emperor has no clothes."
—	"To let our readers know it is ok to be different."
Should anything serious appear in The Door?
—	"Sure, but the concept has to be meaningful, brief, and compelling. Steer away from diatribes about social/political issue – that's for Sojourners and The Other Side."
—	"Yes, The Door has always had some piece of sanity in it. We don't want to be pointless. Some kind of a voice of reason has to be present in the magazine to point to the cross."
What's The Door's place in tomorrow?
—	"The Door will become a touchstone of sanity by exposing mountains of B.S. with humor."
—	"The church needs The Door. Do whatever it takes…it's too important to let die."

* * *

     We certainly plan to stay alive. And if Ken George's marketing mojo works, we'll know there was method in his madness after all.