News from the magosphere 15/05/08


Weekly magazines don’t appear often enough
Shortlist’s Mike Soutar backs almost-daily mags. If Rubbish can do it…

Painting by numbers is nothing new
New Republic cover echoes Time cover echoes Esquire

Graydon Carter, Kurt Anderson and others talk about Spy magazine
PDF transcript of a discussion from 2006, now available from the NYPL via iTunes

Magazine includes credits for the model’s plastic surgeon
Nice counterpoint to the New Yorker piece that’s getting people in a tizzy

Ling magazine wins SPD gold
Bit of trumpet blowing for us. Not bad for a Spanish inflight mag


The seven types of User-Generated Content


Photo by Telstar Logistics. Available through a by-nc Creative Commons licence

Since they told us the web had been upgraded to 2.0, the media buzzphrase has been “User-Generated Content”.

It is, apparently, both the saviour and the death of mainstream media. Actually, it’s a meaningless phrase, a catch-all applied to very different and often contradictory ideas – most of them not new at all.

Here’s a breakdown of what people actually mean by UGC in magazines.
continue reading…


Milanese whirl


If you happen to be passing through Milan at the end of this month, I’m giving a talk entitled ‘The Ingredients of the Revolution’ at SignJam Live on 25th May, and also curating the exhibition Objects as Magazines in the gallery/shop Artbook throughout the weekend.

Themes in the former will include new ideas concerning creation, distribution and money making in the magazine world. The latter will be a varied selection of objects from my personal collection, including the occasional Visionnaire and even an Is/Not, if we can find a wall big enough. Stop on by, do.


News from the magosphere 07/05/08


Mad magazine’s office is filled with old merchandising junk
What a depressing place to work

Fantastic VF spread scores double by echoing classic illustration
Via Mark Porter

New York Look’s summer cover is lovely, recalls Brodovitch etc
First cover ever with red eye?

V magazine goes digital…
Via Boico

…and so does Monkey Magazine
Digital magazine creates its own even more pointless web spinoff. They’ll be in print, next

Iran bans celebrity, film magazines
I’m a little bit late on this one


News from the magosphere 05/05/08


newyorkshoes

Time 100 cover gallery
Commissioned but not used – Time Top 100 cover stylings from Brody, Kidd, Euro RSCG

Stunning foot/shoe images for New York magazine
First three pages of the online story; the stiletto is remarkable

Vogue Italy creates all-black models edition
Keep an eye out for it in July

Vogue Japan creates Hello Kitty fashion shoot
OK, they win. Hello Kitty wears 55 looks from the latest Dior collection, including limited-edition figurines available at Colette soon. Reminds me a bit of Wallpaper*’s ceramic fashion shoot last year


Amsterdam block party


It’s a magazine’s worst nightmare: the backers suddenly pull out, leaving you with big overheads, no cash and imminent disappearance. Couple that with being a weekly publication, and the vultures aren’t so much circling as asking for the wine list.

This is what happened about a month ago to Amsterdam Weekly, a decent, free English-language magazine printed on newsprint, and distributed in cafés and bars around the city. What they did about it, however, was rather fantastic.

Rather than put the whole thing on hold (and lose momentum, readership, advertisers, staff), or go for a paid distribution (huge risk, new problems) they decided to ask for help from their readers in a rather novel fashion.

Inspired, I suppose, by the million dollar homepage filled with pixels, every page of the magazine except the ads was divided into 204 blocks, and then for two issues only, sold online for €5 each. If you picked up the magazine for the club listings, you’d have to pay to reveal them. If you were featured in an article, you’d have to put the money in the slot so everyone could see you. If you took the front page photo… you get the idea. People were offered special gifts if they bought a certain amount, from free entry to a “thank you” party, to books and tshirts, and the whole thing was powered by a natty web system that made it pretty easy to take part.

Announced on 27th March with the front-page headline “Unf*ck us!”, it was a brave solution. Did it work? Kind of. There were lots and lots and lots of holes in the magazine (PDF download of the second issue, 10th April) – but that also reminded its readers how much trouble the mag was in (and they could download the unholed version online, if they wanted). It could have been implemented a little better - it wasn’t very clear on the website which features would be revealed in the following issue, for example.

Overall, however, the idea was rather clever indeed. Its readers certainly won’t forget it in a hurry. Did AW make enough money to survive? Right now, they’re still going. And long may they continue to stay unf*cked.


News from the magosphere 30/04/08


momus's reading list

Momus’s life through magazines
“There are hardly any pictures of the outsides of British newsagents in the 1970s”

Interview with the editor of 1970s mag Contemporary Photographer
Part of Foto8’s series of looks at classic photo magazines. Looking forward to when they get to Reportage.

SI Wiki Vault
Brave move, letting their archive loose inside a sports-focussed wiki. Seems to be working quite nicely.

Novel made from 40,000 snippets of 1960s women’s magazines
I missed this when it first came out. Have now ordered it - sounds great.