If I were to attach a keyword to the still newish year, it would be clarity. This magazine and the company that surrounds it evolved, both within and without, over the course of 2019. We have entered our new era, and this new year, with a greater sense of the why behind what we do. We’re here to share with you the stories of what makes Memphis its unmistakable self – to spark curiosity about and affection for the city that energizes us every day. And we aim to do that in a way that speaks to all of our readers, new and long-time alike.
In this month’s issue, you’ll find our 35th annual Readers Restaurant Poll results, including the year’s Top 10 New Restaurants, as voted by you. Want proof that your voices were heard? Because the new Tamboli’s Pasta and Pizza opened late in the year, past our cut-off date, it wasn’t on the official ballot for best new restaurant. So many of you wrote in Tamboli’s anyway that we decided to break our own rules, listen to y’all, and list it.
You’ll also find a portion of this magazine – pages 59 to 82 – dedicated to business content. Traditionally, Memphis has published primarily arts, culture, and lifestyle stories, with meaningful detours into heavier topics. We have left local business stories to our sister publication, Inside Memphis Business.
That’s changing in 2020 as Inside Memphis Business moves inside Memphis magazine. Rather than as a separate supplement, we will, going forward, publish IMB within the pages of Memphis magazine.
Contemporary Media, Inc., published the first issue of MBQ – Memphis Business Quarterly in September 2006. Several years later, we increased the frequency of MBQ from quarterly to bimonthly. Six times per year, this business publication – which, no longer a quarterly, was renamed Inside Memphis Business – arrived poly-wrapped with Memphis magazine to subscribers of Memphis. Piggybacking with Memphis has been, though not its only distribution mechanism, certainly its primary one. If you subscribe to the one, you receive the other, too – but if you buy Memphis on a newsstand, for instance, you likely have not read our business coverage.
And if the above paragraph left you a touch confused, I understand. When IMB was still called MBQ, people tended to mix it up with the Memphis Business Journal. Once we became IMB, well, plenty of people still called us MBQ – or invented new identities altogether, like “Inside Business Journal” or “Memphis Magazine Business” and on and on. I don’t blame them! The title changed mid-course, and the acronym echoes a few others around town. Not to mention that without stand-alone distribution, we had relatively infrequent opportunities to remind people, organically, who we were.
But here’s the thing: Jon W. Sparks and Samuel X. Cicci, Inside Memphis Business editor and associate editor, respectively, are responsible for producing some of the best local business content around. Their work is excellent, and we believe, both relevant and valuable to a broad sector of the community. We want to make sure that as many Memphians as might be interested in that content – and that’s a lot of you – have easy access to it. So we decided: Why fight a natural evolution? If Inside Memphis Business existed in many readers’ minds as a component piece of this magazine – Memphis – why force a distinction? Memphis, the magazine, can contain multitudes just like Memphis, the city, assuredly does.
Five times per year, then, you’ll find business sections within these pages. This month, read about IMB’s CEO of the Year Award winners. In April, we’ll present the annual Power Players listings. May will bring our meeting and special events guide. July, the annual Innovation Awards. November will bring the philanthropy issue, including the Giving Guide. We’ll also include business-related feature stories and columns in these sections and in other issues, too, as space permits.
I believe this evolution will make our business content more accessible and more dynamic, as we gain greater flexibility in when and how we can position these stories. I also believe the addition will add heft to Memphis magazine as we undertake to explore the whys behind the business and economic forces that drive our city.
Over the course of the year, we’ll no doubt uncover more possibilities, and probably a few obstacles too. (See above, re: clarity. This evolution makes sense, but growing pains do come with the territory.) I hope you’ll keep reading all of it, and that you’ll let us know what you think. You are why we keep making this magazine.
