Editor and Publisher: Jon Wilson
Premiere issue: March/April 1996
Based in: Brooklin, Maine

Where to find it: some newsstands, bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, Web site at http://www.hopemag.com

Target audience: as Wilson puts it, "those of us who feel that we can't just sit by."

Cost: $4.95/issue, $24.95/one-year subscription

Circulation: 12,500

Mission: "To encourage understanding and a greater sense of possibilities; to help us glimpse the common bonds of our humanity without judgment, and to celebrate enduring human values, that they might find more currency in our culture."

Content: The September/October issue features a cover story called "Spinning Dreams," about a community mobilized to create a carousel for its children, and a package on "What's Wrong -- and Right -- with Our Schools" that looks at New York City's public school system as "a microcosm of what ails education."

 It's a painful, dirty, wonderful life . . . .

Hope's weighty mission statement is loaded with enough optimism to make any hardened pol or New York cynic head for the door. Assumptions of wide-eyed naivetŽ, however, are soon dashed; readers quickly discover that Hope is more about urban decay and children with disabilities than grinning lottery winners and perfect Waltonesque families.

 The magazine presents hope as something that arises when people react to life's painful punches with courage and humanity -- a twenty-six-year-old financial analyst who donated his annual salary of $53,874 to help children orphaned in the Oklahoma City bombing is one example. Another lies in Peter Davis's "journey to an American hell": he was mugged at gunpoint on a New York City sidewalk. The experience spurred him not to bitterness, but to write a book on poverty in America, called If You Came This Way. Hope published an excerpt, and it's pretty depressing, admits Kimberly Ridley, Hope's associate editor, but "what was hopeful was that Davis bothered to try to understand something about poverty and to get that dialogue going."

Editor Jon Wilson also wants to encourage that dialogue, as he did more than twenty years ago about a much more prosaic subject: wooden boats. In 1974 he was a college dropout with a passion for boatbuilding, who knew virtually nothing about publishing or journalism. Undaunted, Wilson launched a magazine, WoodenBoat, and soon discovered an untapped and enthusiastic market: ten years later the magazine was read by 100,000 boat lovers. Those profits are keeping Hope afloat.

 The writing is uneven at times, the concept a bit too broad, and some of the stories could use a good chopping. But feedback has been positive, and readers seem appropriately moved: "Tears came to my eyes again and again with each succeeding page-turn," wrote one reader in a letter to the editor, while a note from Cosmopolitan's Helen Gurley Brown gushed, "Hope is a miracle of an idea and execution. The stories are all so hype-less and interesting. . . ."

 Interest in the new magazine, along with ad sales, is increasing, albeit in "microscopic increments." "I might have been presumptuous in assuming that readers would share my idea of what constitutes hope," Wilson concedes.

 The magazine has another relatively hype-less, hopeful friend in New England: The American News Service in Brattleboro, Vermont, which provides media outlets with stories "covering America's search for solutions." It's serious, good-news journalism that's attracted subscribers like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

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