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.
