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News from the Magosphere 12th Feb ‘09

February 12, 2009 in News round-up | No comments

spektacle

Colophon is now Twittering!
Follow us all the way to Luxembourg – and then receive updates on talks and events during the festival. Also some early spreads from our forthcoming book are now viewable (click on the small images)

Docu recalls the love behind legendary New Orleans independent mag
I can’t imagine anything more opposite to The September Issue

Designer returns to his pet project: Diamante magazine
John describes it as “printed using letterpress, screen-print, lithography, die-cut, foil-block, a range of materials, inks and whatever I feel appropriate at the time.” He’s creating 6 issues a year, printing only 300 of each issue and selling them for (I think) £12 each. You can see some pics of the lovely-looking first edition here (PDF). A handful of subscriptions remain – email him for more information

Another online photography magazine launches
A great start, too. Following on from 1000 Words, and others, it seems that love of great photography is leading to some of the most interesting online magazines so far

Prada asks fashion editors to decorate their windows
Who’s doing product placement now?

Digimag Spektacle cryptically returns
It’s not a real suburban village, I promise. Somewhere I have their first edition from 2001, that came on a mini CD-Rom. They’re still experimenting with the strange combination of fashion and QR codes, now with iPhone reader. I can just never be bothered to take the picture and do the searching

Great magazine covers, daily
Not sure who we have to thank, but thanks (and thanks René for the heads-up)

Crisis roundup

Craft closes
Make survives. The spin-offs keep on spinning away

Guardian prints a publishers’ report card
I know things are bad, but there’s no need for those unfunny puns

What happened to JPG

January 14, 2009 in Trend, technology | No comments

A quick summary for those who haven’t been keeping up:

• JPG is/was a photography magazine created by 8020 Publishing, originally based around community submissions to their Flickr group.

• It was founded as a print-on-demand hobby magazine, and then turned professional in ways its husband-and-wife founders, Derek Powazek and Heather Champ didn’t like. The founders were given the boot; Powazek went on to help launch Magcloud and Fray.

• JPG’s sister magazine, a short-lived travel magazine also created from online submissions called Everywhere, was suspended in August 2008. (Disclosure: I wrote for it once, by invitation – which seemed somewhat to go against the whole ‘community created’ thing to me.)

• On 1st January this year, 8020 announced that JPG was closing. The Faith issue was the last one. No irony intended, I’m sure.

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Straining at the leash

August 19, 2008 in Clever ideas, Opinion, USA | No comments

Time Inc’s latest wheeze to revitalise the magazine industry launches in a few weeks. MagHound takes the NetFlix subscriber model (LoveFilm for you Britishers) and applies it to magazines: any titles you want for a fixed fee. It’s a bold idea, but there’s a few crucial details yet to be confirmed that will make the difference between it being the Messiah or just a very naughty boy.

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Keep it to yourself

July 31, 2008 in Clever ideas, Opinion, Trend, technology | 1 comment

A new magazine-based file-sharing website called Mygazines has just launched, flagrantly breaking publishers’ copyright from around the world. Is it a threat, an opportunity or both?

Let’s step back a moment. When Amazon released the Kindle, most people focused on the experience of using physical object, saying how they did or didn’t want to read a book on it, how it was or wasn’t the same as paper, and so on.

What most people overlooked, however, was that Amazon was testing something else at the same time, something probably even more important than being an early seller of commercial e-paper: they were testing a sales model for digital publishing.

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The seven types of User-Generated Content

May 13, 2008 in Buzzwords | 5 comments

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.
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