Bill Manning has been named Editorial Director of Fire Apparatus & Emergency Equipment magazine. For 15 years he served as editor-in-chief of Penn-Well’s Fire Engineering magazine, and earned recognition as the leading journalist in the fire service trade press. He has 25 years of experience in publishing and conferences.
We look forward to a lot of positive changes at Fire Apparatus & Emergency Equipment as we implement a sharpening of editorial focus worked out by Bill and Ed Ballam, our managing editor, as well as myself.
Bill Manning’s first column will appear next month on the page facing the inside back cover. He will alternate this space monthly with a new column by Alan Saulsbury, founder of Saulsbury Fire Apparatus-now owned by E-ONE-who is widely recognized as a consultant in the fire industry.
Ed Ballam starts a new product profile feature in this issue with a story about the E-ONE mid-mount platform featuring the very stable low slung outrigger jacks. More similar features along with field experience stories will supplement shorter, tighter company profile stories such as Ed has been doing over the last 10 years.
Bill Manning is an award-winning editor, writer, speaker, and has long been a voice speaking out in promotion of firefighter safety and advancements in personal protection. He has been consulting with Fire Apparatus since February about ways to strengthen the magazine’s editorial content formula and consistency of focus.
We’re the only magazine to cover the fire apparatus and equipment industry with an emphasis on product features and how they help the firefighter better perform. Under Bill Manning’s direction our stable of contributing writers will be expanded and our coverage will intensify.
Fire Apparatus magazine will extend its editorial coverage to include several new columns. One will give regular tips on writing specifications for apparatus and equipment purchases, another will focus on apparatus maintenance and a third will be a regular monthly piece on protecting the firefighter, which will cover everything from turnout gear to emergency escape ropes.
Two other columns will alternate monthly, rescue tools and firefighting tools, both by new writers.
We’ve already begun organizing our new Editorial Calendar for 2007 and are planning coverage far in advance.
Bob Barraclough’s popular Apparatus Ideas will continue to lead off the columns with an expanded position at the front of the magazine. The new columns will really broaden our apparatus and tools focus and complement our present writing staff of Robert Tutterow, Alan Baldwin and Will Chapleau.
We have always been impressed with Bill Manning’s ability as an editor and the respected position he held for many years as the voice of a nation of firefighters. He was never shy about speaking out on behalf of the average firefighter and fire departments large and small.
He brought fire service influence on national politics to an unprecedented level. In that regard, his role in advocating the creation and congressional passage of the FIRE Act legislation was a particularly important achievement.
The FIRE Act of 2000 has been the basis on which hundreds of millions in federal aid has been distributed to local fire departments since 9-11-2001 through grants from Homeland Security.
Most firefighters aren’t aware that the first ever federal assistance to local fire departments had been approved by Congress a year before the terrorist attacks and was already funded at the $300 million level for the year 2001.
It was due to people like Bill Manning at Fire Engineering and lobbying by the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) that the mechanism to get federal money to local departments based on need was already in place when the 2001 attacks occurred.
Upon PennWell’s acquisition of the Fire Department Instructors Conference (FDIC) in 1996, Bill assumed the role of conference director and was the driving force in building that training program and trade show into the world’s largest event of its type.
Bill Manning is a principal and vice president for business development for Anderson Manning Media Group. In conjunction with that company he will continue to provide media consulting and conference organization and direction activities.
In addition to his work as Fire Engineering’s editor in chief, he has scripted and produced numerous training videos, launched two startup publications and numerous ancillary publications, and has been the creative force behind a score of large, live media events. Recently he assisted in creating a firefighter safety video series for the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
While it may be of less interest to the majority of our readers, advertisers and people who work in the fire service industry might like to know about another expansion at the magazine. We’ve added former Fire Engineering publisher Henry Dinneen to the staff as Western Region Sales Manager.
This fall Fire Apparatus magazine celebrates its 10th anniversary and by any measure we’ve come a long way as the only independently owned magazine for firefighters and the fire industry. We’re pleased so many highly experienced people have chosen to join our staff.
We speak out on issues affecting firefighters everywhere, whether it be apparatus recalls, misguided and unnecessarily expensive SCBA proposals, warnings about the shaky financial status of certain manufacturers or inability to fill orders on schedule. Nobody else will dare say anything remotely negative about a present or potential advertiser, so we’re just going to continue telling it like it is.
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