It's been one year now since I began talking earnestly with Sean Reily about selling the Metropolitan to me. He wasn’t sure how serious I was. I suspect he wasn’t sure how serious he was about letting go of the magazine he'd founded and nurtured for the last 11 years.

    "Whatever else it is, a magazine is an intensely personal product of the publisher," advises La Jollan Walter Browder, who's edited more magazines in his career than I’ve read in my lifetime.

    He's not entirely right, of course, not in an age when so many magazines and newspapers are owned by large corporations employing publishers who are middle-level cogs better connected to their overhead bureaucracies than to their own desires, let alone the desires of their readers.

    In the case of this magazine and this newborn publisher, Browder is a little closer to the mark. This is my magazine now, and I’ll be beholden to no one - other than my family, my employees, and the hundreds of advertisers and 90,000-or-so readers who support or abandon the entire operation by choosing whether or not to spend their money and time with the publication. In other words, I do bow to many masters, and I’m just a phone call away from being influenced.

    I like that. I’ve got a good ear and I’m a sympathetic soul. I want to be influenced. I need everyone else's ideas, if only to save humanity from my own.

    But I don’t want to be pressured, least of all by some hotshot advertiser seeking to buy the cover story or some favorable press with a full-page ad. Let's see, a full page amounts to, oh, less than 0.25 percent of our annual revenue. (I guess we can survive without this particular ad. I certainly can do without the arm-twisting.)

    If it’s newsworthy or interesting, we’ll write about it. We’ll write nice things about advertisers and non advertisers who do good things. We’ll write fairly about advertisers and non-advertisers who don’t do good.

    So I’ve bought myself a measure of independence built upon a broad base of dependence. I’ll take it, and I’ll take it very personally as Walter Browder suggests. I hereby pledge to create a valuable San Diego magazine that attracts, informs and entertains its work-oriented readers, a magazine of such high standards that each of our 45,000 monthly copies is indeed passed along to several different intelligent people, a magazine that serves its advertisers so economically that they cannot resist this medium to reach their customers and clients.

    Advertisers, go ahead and compare. You can buy a half-page ad in the Metropolitan for as little as $750 and have 45,000 copies distributed door-to-door to executives and workers in 93 percent of all the office suites in Downtown, Mission Valley, Kearny Mesa and the Golden Triangle, including UTC, Sorrento Valley, Sorrento Mesa and Torrey Pines; and from racks in 300 high-traffic restaurants, shops and office lobbies. With all due respect to San Diego Magazine, the San Diego Business Journal, San Diego Daily Transcript and San Diego Union-Tribune, not one of them penetrates San Diego’s most productive business markets more thoroughly than the San Diego Metropolitan Magazine.

    Thirty-nine percent of our readers are professionals, 29 percent are managers or business owners, 18 percent are secretarial or support and 13 percent are employed in sales. Average household income per reader is $68,500and 33 percent of our reader/households earn $100,000 or more per year. Those are good demographics - see why I bought the magazine? - and they can only improve as the changes we’ve made take hold.

    Readers, go ahead and compare. With the possible exception of the U-T by virtue of its sheer army of writers, I dare say none of our esteemed competitors maintains a stable of business, professional and civic affairs writers more experienced and more appreciated by San Diegans than ours, including:

    Editor Tim McClain, the personable newsman who helped run a fine business monthly, the San Diego Executive, which shut down shortly after I wooed him back to become my managing editor at the Daily Transcript;

    Contributing Editor Janet Lowe, who spent a decade as business editor of the San Diego Tribune and has written more about Warren Buffett than any earthling;

    Managing Editor Danielle Laney, who's been charming Metropolitan readers for two years already;

    Herbert W. Lockwood, the 79-year-old dean of San Diego journalists, historian extraordinaire and namesake of the San Diego Press Club's perpetual

    "Woody Award" for humor writing;

    Brage Golding, former president of SDSU and father of the San Diego mayor;

    Neil Murray, career services director of UCSD;

    Judith Witty, ma'am about town and nationally published travel writer;

    Lynne Carrier, Pulitzer Prize nominee and expert on San Diego government;

    Gerald Trimble, the man who redeveloped Downtown San Diego;

    Patrick Osio, who understands better than most why Tijuana and San Diego are one great mixed-up metropolis;

    Austin Lynus, the aerospace engineer with a passion for automobiles;

    John Willett, cited last year as the finest music critic in the state by the California Newspaper Publisher Association;

    Sean Patrick Reily, who had the foresight to establish a modest monthly magazine in the heart of Downtown San Diego nearly 11 years ago, expanding the publication to Golden Triangle and Mission Valley workplaces, and also had the foresight to pass it on to a team of San Diego writers who aspire to greatness;

    There are a few others.

    And then there's little old me.

    I sort of splashed upon the San Diego scene in 1973, when the legendary Harold Keen dubbed me one of "Keen's People" on Channel 8. He'd read a piece in the El Cajon Daily Californian about what happened to me while covering a drug bust in Ocean Beach. I was a long-haired reporter writing on a pad, which didn’t set well with the federal DEA agent who confiscated my notes. This first Amendment oversight had people rather irritated, from Mayor Wilson's office to Washington, D.C., and the Tribune's frank Stone wrote a dandy editorial about it. A few days later, a DEA agent appeared at my door with my notes and a letter of apology. My stoned roommate was very angry and suggested I move.

    Bored with the pace of SDSU, I quit just a semester short of a bachelor's degree to join the Chula Vista Star-News, a white-collar bootcamp if there ever was one. I spent 2-1/2 years there - a lifer by Star-News standards - and even ghostwrote Mayor Frank Scott's most brilliant State of the City Address before landing at the Daily Transcript in '77.

    I spent 17 of the next 18 years there - I'd left for one year mid-way to work at the Tribune. At the Transcript I did a lot of growing up, making my name first as an eager city politics reporter with lots of scoops on Downtown redevelopment at a time when most journalists (and most San Diegans) had forgotten there was a Downtown.

    We learned and wrote much about San Diego’s economic development, business and banking, including the greatest S&L catastrophes in American history, implosions that still hobble San Diego today. Bob Witty, Otto Bos and Keith Lister were among my mentors, often willingly. I became city editor, then managing editor and finally editor and vice president. Before I left, the Transcript introduced its product on the World Wide Web, and I’m delighted that it’s become San Diego’s deepest Internet database of public interest, though I’m disappointed the paper lost its old-fashion passion to the digital age.

    I earned plenty awards and made lots of friends. I also wrote too many obituaries about too many great people. I’m most proud that from the mid-1970s to early 1990s, we proved that a small business daily also could be an influential player in a big city's business and civic affairs. The San Diego Daily Transcript really was an anomaly in American journalism for many years, and it’s too bad only 11,000-or-so San Diegans knew about it.

    I’m married now to a strong woman who can put up with me, usually, and we have two daughters, a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old. My father held Katherine only once. He died a month later. I’m very sad he couldn’t see his grandchildren grow up. I’m sad he couldn’t see this first edition of his middle son's magazine.

    He'd give me a lot of advice, unsolicited, and some of it would be good.

    So, yes, a magazine can be an intensely personal product of the publisher. But this magazine will be a shared affair. I expect all of our reporters to be dispassionate most of the time, but expect our best writers to be passionate some of the time. Readers and advertisers, please write and call and tell us what we should be doing to make this magazine your magazine.

    Maybe we’ll run it up to twice a month.