A Brit and a woman created and nurtured Newsweek. Now a British-born woman is moving it forward, pinning its hopes on a high-profile, print-digital merger. Can it survive – and is it any good?
I’m dividing this into two pieces, because I think that, in order to better judge and understand the magazine, it would be helpful first to understand something of the history and nature of American news weeklies, and their previous digital forays.
Two weekly American news-related magazines relaunched in two days. Very different stories, however – and very different results.
First up, The New York Times Magazine.
News magazines are the big news themselves today, with the new NYT magazine launching yesterday (I live tweeted my first impressions of each page on Sunday morning) and, entirely coincidentally I’m sure, the first issue of Tina Brown’s combined Newsweek/Daily Beast magazine appearing on newsstands today.
I’ll post more on both those two shortly, but first I’d like to highlight a really interesting-sounding creation by Chimurenga, which is a particularly creative pan-African magazine based in Cape Town that I’ve been a fan of since their excellent graphic novel issue.
The next Chimurenga project, working in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani?, is “a once-off, one-day-only edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present.”
The new creation promises to be “a multi-section broadsheet with news, long-form journalism, comics, sport, art etc. and 100-page books magazine to be released in September 2011, in numerous African cities. Back-dated to the week May 18-24 2008, it’s situated during the first week of the so-called xenophobic violence in South Africa, two years ago – but it focuses outward, covering the events, scenes and situations around the world during this period.”
And it’ll be distributed by newspaper sellers across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Southern Africa. You can read more about the concept on their hand-drawn dummy newspaper pages here.
Sounds fantastic – and they want your help. They want to turn the classifieds of their paper into a literary platform of its own. Learn how to participate here.
The medium of newsprint combined with deep thought and literary experimentation, with a more overtly political slant than the San Francisco Panorama, created and distributed in a region where newspapers remain the primary source of information? Can’t wait to see how this one turns out.
Here we go again.
Some news I’ve not seen reported anywhere in English: a Spanish website called Youkioske.com (“Probably the best website for reading online”) was ordered by a judge in Alicante last week to remove certain publications made by Hearst and Conde Nast from its site, and to remove the metatags “Cosmopolitan” and “Vogue” from their code.
Grafik (formerly Hot Graphics International, then Graphics International) has been a stalwart of the UK design scene since the 1980s. A more irreverent read than many other such magazines, it sadly closed last year… only to return this month with a brand new design, new structure and new business plan, as a bimonthly covering the global graphic design scene.
The Blogsplosion asked co-editor Angharad Lewis about what happened, what’s happening now, and what will happen next in the Grafik story.
If you happen to be in New England on Wednesday, you might want to come and see me speak on this subject. It’s going to be fun.
Info: Free entry, John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, starts at 6pm. Full details on the flyer (PDF; expertly designed by Benjamin Shaykin) I’m also maintaining a Facebook page on the subject for the library here. Come join the discussion.
If you can’t make it… things are in the pipeline to make some of my thoughts on this subject more widely available. More on that soon.
And while we’re on the topic, Jeremy has just posted some wise and not-unrelated opinions about iPads and magazines. Well worth a read.
Architecture has long been a popular subject of alternative magazines. Clip Stamp Fold covered the architecture zine culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and now Archi-zines is trying to do the same for the present day, curated by Elias Redstone.
It’s currently a small list, but growing quickly – sadly no RSS feed right now, but it’s well worth checking back regularly to follow this evergreen genre of alternative urban thought through magazines.
