I’ll be there speaking about the magazines that have interested me lately, and I’ll be joined by Lucy and Tina from Lost in London, who’ll be giving a first-hand account of life at the sharp end of independent publishing, and organiser Alan Rutter of Clever Boxer.

The last I heard there were still a few tickets left, so get booking…

Would you like to work with the best independent magazines in the world? Then the Stack internship could be for you.

We’ve got loads of exciting things lined up for the coming months and we’re looking for a magazine lover who will help us turn the ideas into reality. More specifically, that means:

// Blogging (yes, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately)
// Organising events
// Managing subscriber lists
// Keeping up with the best in independent publishing

You’ll need to be a confident writer, well organised and passionate about independent magazines. The placement will be based at the Stack office in Shoreditch, it will run for three months and will pay £20 per day to cover travel and food expenses.

If you’d like to be considered, please email us with your CV and a brief paragraph on your favourite magazine. Tell us why you like it, what makes it special and why everyone should know about it. We’ll close for entries on Friday 03 February, and will contact successful candidates by email.

Good luck!

Thanks very much to everyone who came to Printout last night, and especially to Alex, Dan and Davey (pictured second left to right, being frowned at by me). It’s Nice That, Spiel and Boat are all very different magazines doing very different things, but I’d hoped that there would be some overlap in terms of the way they saw the year ahead.

And I wasn’t disappointed. All of them spoke really interestingly about an approach that embraces happy accidents rather than strict planning, preferring to make mistakes and learn from them rather than staying safe and making something more comfortable (and, perhaps, profitable).

Thanks also to Rob, aka Supermundane, who played a brilliant and progressively more barmy set afterwards. I couldn’t help feeling as I slipped off home at 10pm that his music was slightly wasted on an audience still feeling the effects of Christmas and New Year. We’ll definitely have to bring him back later in the year when everyone feels a bit more like staying out late.

Do you want to know what independent publishers are planning for 2012? Of course you do. On Thursday night we’ll be talking to three magazine editors to find out what they’re looking forward to in the year ahead.

There’s Alex Moshakis, editor of It’s Nice That, who will be filling us in on what the magazine / website / events organisers have got coming up next.

Davey Spens from Boat has promised to reveal all about where the next issue will be going and what they’ll be doing differently this year.

And Dan Byrne of Liverpool-based football magazine Spiel will be sharing the secrets of how they got big name advertisers from issue one, and how they’re planning to do even better before they reach their first birthday.

Oh, and Supermundane, the design hands behind Fire & Knives, Anorak and Cagoule, will be playing music. Come along, get inspired and make overly ambitious plans about what you’re going to do in the next 12 months. Tickets cost £5 and are available to buy now.

DoR is a magazine of Romanian nonfiction, written in English. But it’s also much more than that. Clever, sensitive, enlightening and funny, it’s a shining example of what magazines can be, and is driven by an editorial team that clearly believes in the power of independent publishing. Without going overboard, DoR is a real inspiration – everyone should see a copy.

www.decatorevista.ro

The Stack interview

Name
Cristian Lupșa

Job title

Editor

What is DoR?

DoR is the English language edition of Decât o Revistă, a Romanian magazine of groundbreaking nonfiction. Decât o Revistă (the title roughly translates as Just a Magazine) covers various aspects of modern Romanian life – social change, personal development, cultural trends, politics, and technology – assembling an eclectic and thought-provoking puzzle.

What makes it different to the rest? 

In Romania, DoR is the only magazine devoted to publishing and promoting long-form nonfiction storytelling, from narrative journalism to personal essays. We bring an Anglo-Saxon influenced view of what makes a story, and how it’s told, into a media culture that is largely superficial and reactive.

Who makes DoR? 

A bunch of writers, editors, photographers and visual artists that want to create an immersive story experience.

Who reads it? 

The Romanian edition is read by people in the creative industries, but also people involved in social innovation – be it entrepreneurship or NGO work. Locally, the English edition draws a lot of expats, many working in cultural or political diplomacy, but also people working in the corporate world.

Why do you work in magazines?
Because the purpose of a good magazine is to give you a snapshot of the world, show you what people are thinking, liking, dreaming, and buying. They can be windows into communities of thought and interest. The best ones are carefully put together by people who want to cultivate these communities, and give them the promise of a better life. That’s not a lie, and it’s not PR blah blah. We live to become better. Good magazines know that.

Aside from the print magazine, what else are you involved in?
I occasionally teach narrative journalism, and spread the gospel of good journalism at various conference and workshops.

What would you change about DoR if you could?
I’m never satisfied, so I always want to change things – wittier layout, deeper stories, a better grasp of the zeitgeist. I’d change the uncertainty of the economics, but that’s beyond my reach. I guess I’ll settle for improving the flow of the content and visuals.

Can you pick a favourite issue of DoR? 

Always the latest, as it makes me want to push everybody to do it even better next time.

Where do you see DoR in five years?
This is a tough one. I hope it’ll still be relevant, still leading the charge for good writing and good editorial design – offline and online. I hope it’ll be strong enough to be able to pay its contributors, most of whom will have hopefully matured into journalists whose work – be it words or images – can impact the life of their community, and make Romania into a better country.

My first thought was Holiday, Gerard Donovan’s incredibly tense short story in Zoetrope – I read that at the start of the year and it’s stayed with me ever since. At the other end of the year was the bizarre story on sinkholes that I read in the first issue of Matter – I only read it a couple of weeks ago but its lightness of touch mark it out as one of the best things I’ve seen all year. There were also stand-out stories in The Wire, Fire & Knives, Delayed Gratification and lots of the other Stack magazines, but none of the ones that came to mind put their content online so I can’t share them here.

Instead I’m plumping for a Fast Company article by Farhad Manjoo. Little White Lies editor Matt Bochenski first put me onto it, and it’s a fascinating overview of the tech war brewing in 2012. I’d been vaguely aware that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple were encroaching on each other’s territory, but Manjoo’s thorough, thoughtful assessment shows exactly where the battles will be fought and gives a sense of which of the giants are likely to triumph. Very exciting, and kind of alarming.

Read the article

“There has been a lot of discussion around criticism this year. Grafik dedicated 14 pages in issue G193 to graphic design criticim, whilst Design Observer has continued to publish interesting pieces about design criticism in general. As a journal for fashion writing and criticism, Address is of course interested in these discussions, but we were disappointed that in the field of fashion criticism the only real contribution this year came from none other than Lady Gaga. Her ‘Memorandum No3′ published in V magazine this autumn addressing what she calls ‘extreme critic fundamentalism’ is hence our favourite (as well as least favourite) article of the year.

Read the article

“My favourite online read this year has been the wonderful Spitalfields Life, which, even though it is online, is more like reading a book that magically updates itself every day. You really don’t have to live in the East End to enjoy this blog, although, yes, it does help. It tells the stories of the ordinary folk who live or have lived in the area with bags of respect and consideration, and gives them a voice that we would normally not hear. Amazingly it is updated every day and carries beautifully written portraits or interviews of local people, so that you discover who is behind the facades you walk by every day.

“Thanks to Spitalfields Life, I discovered a series of books called Ordinary Lives by Clive Murphy, which is based on a series of interviews he did with a few characters who lived in the area in the 1960s. The beauty of these memoirs is that they are recordings of interviews by the author – when reading them you really hear the protagonists’ voices and gain a great insight into their lives and personalities.”