Stack magazines

Megawords, Meatpaper and fame

Andrew Losowsky — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:43:59 +0000

As we prepare to send out the goodies for Stack America’s second mailing, including a really lovely magazine (which I’d love to tell you about, but don’t want to spoil the surprise), bonus content and an exclusive print by mag guru Robert Newman, we should take a moment firstly to laud Megawords, one of the two magazines we launched with, who are currently featured in an exhibition at Printed Matter in New York, and secondly, Meatpaper, our other launch title, was described by Boing Boing guest editor Jimmy Guterman thusly: “I never wanted to read a magazine about meat, but my life is enriched because I did.”

Guterman, a Stack America subscriber, then went on to praise your humble independent magazine service, calling it “a superb curational service that selects independent magazines and sends ‘em out every other month.

“At a time when some aging mainstream print magazines are trying to convince readers that dead trees are still a commercial endeavor (wishful thinking), it’s reassuring to come across an outfit that realizes that print magazines aren’t just useful. They’re cool. They’re art. As noted on the Stack America blog, they’re “independent, creative media at its finest.”

Gorblessyou, sir.

M is for More Magazines

Stack editors — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:53:06 +0000

Andrew’s Designers Series got off to a flying start last month when he sent out Jeremy Leslie’s very fine magazine recommendations to all Stack America subscribers. It went out to the rest of Stack at the start of this month, and the next in the Designers Series will be coming out soon.

But we’re not done with the recommendations yet. One of the main reasons for starting Stack was to help people discover new independent magazines, so we’ve used Jeremy’s picks as a starting point to find even more. We’re asking people from all the titles he named to give us their own recommendations for magazines that everyone should read.

The first few are included below, so watch out for more in the coming weeks. And we want to hear your recommendations too – drop us a line in the comments box if you’ve got a magazine we should all know about.

Manzine

Kevin Braddock, editor
Magazine?
I always look for Smoke – A London Peculiar. Classic fanzine format (though with colour pages) and full of oblique essays, memoirs and narratives about London.
Why?
Matt and Jude have a long history in indie fanzine publishing and I love the way they turned London itself into a subject of fandom. Apart from that, it’s just very funny – their Urban Interventions series was laugh-out-loud. Apart from Viz and Private Eye, very few magazines make an active attempt to make their readers laugh. Magazines on the whole are far too serious and cool for my liking.

Publication

Nick Turpin, publisher
Magazine?
8 Magazine produced in London by Jon Levy
Why?
8 Magazine serves a whole community of people who value photojournalism and great story telling, in a time when the traditional magazine outlets for that work have vanished. Jon Levy’s passion for photojournalism has produced a contemporary Picture Post, which really has no rival. The magazine is produced by Foto8 in London who also use their ‘Host Gallery’ space to show photographic exhibitions, talks and discussions. Foto8 is also very active online and in using social media, especially Twitter, to keep the community aware of world events such as the struggle of the opposition movement in Iran and the issues around the photographic coverage of the recent earthquake in Haiti. 8 Magazine might be considered a model for the publishing industry in the way that it is self published, distributed online and through subscription and uses social media to build and maintain a like-minded community of readers. This way it has succeeded in championing photojournalism where the weekend supplements and traditional news magazines have increasingly failed.

Sang Bleu

Maxime Buechi, editor
Magazine?
More than one magazine, there seems to be a kind of new “movement” going on in the magazine world. It is not structured as a coherent flux but more like certain traits certain titles seem to have in common. This “movement” would include magazines like Some/Things, Lurve and Encens. And to a certain extent Acne Paper and Grey. You find it in many blogs too. They are a real step forward from the mainstream approach of Fashion and Arts you find in usual Magazines. I totally identify with that.
Why?
Because there seems to finally be something tangibly new happening in the art and fashion world. Young people don’t all relate to the glam and gloss, celebrity and money in these fields. They have become global and democratic whether you like it or not.

Yummy

Pascal Monfort, editor-in-chief
Magazine?
Pop from the UK. It’s not new but the new art director, my friend Michael, is doing the best job. And Kilimanjaro.
Why?
They’re my “inutiles”, so they are “necessaries”.

Calling all type nerds

Steve Watson — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:05:05 +0000

Lars Harmsen, editor of Slanted magazine, and Raban Ruddigkeit are once again inviting contributions to Typodarium, the calendar that provides a daily dose of typographic goodness.

They explain: “It’s a tear-off calendar like the one our grandmas used to hang in the kitchen. Each font will be prominently displayed on the front calender sheet. On the back there will be a detailed description of how the font originated, from whom and from what the inspiration came as well as where it can be obtained.

“You have the opportunity to book a maximum of seven favourite days in advance. The sooner you do so, the more choice you’ll have. Typodarium 2011 is distributed in design and museum shops and selected bookstores around the world.”

So there you go. Get your entry in by 1 April and join the date-based typographic geek out.

Kickstart a magazine

Steve Watson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:45:16 +0000

At the start of the month we wrote a post that ended by asking whether anyone out there had come up with a clever way of starting a new magazine. And the answer, all the way from Brooklyn, is yes.

Remedy Quarterly is a lovely food magazine – small format, perfect bound and mixing storytelling with recipe writing, it draws upon the personal recollections of food lovers to create a worthy addition to America’s current crop of independent food magazines.

But if Remedy is in good company thematically, it’s entirely unique when it comes to the way that it’s funded.

I spoke to Aaron Carambula, one of its editors and designers, and he explained how he and his co-editors had talked about starting their own food magazine and had always assumed they’d have to fund it themselves and try to recoup the cost later. But then they came across a new site called Kickstarter, and realised that they could use it to drum up support and get people to pay for copies before the magazine even existed.

Aaron explains: “I don’t know how many NPR pledge drives you’ve had to endure because you live in the UK, but Kickstarter works the same way. You say, ‘well, for this amount you get this, for a higher amount you get something else’. We set it up so that for $7, which is 50c off cover, people got an issue, and they got it before it was available anywhere else.

“But then we had to fill this space between the $7 single issue pledge and a $34 subscription, and we thought maybe people would like to give them away as a gift, so for $14 you get two copies, and a lot of people have opted for that. And we went from there. We designed a tote bag to give away, then we went up into the more generous sponsorship areas, where you get your name in the back of the book and you can be a bit more of an altruistic sponsor rather than just buying your copies, and we got a few of those.”

Just 15 days into the pledge drive Remedy was mentioned on US blog Design Sponge, and within 24 hours they had exceeded the amount they needed for start up, allowing them to amp up the paper and print quality and generally make Remedy even better than they’d hoped.

Now Remedy is out in shops and it’s being sold via the website, so it needs to find readers in the same way as any other magazine, but Kickstarter not only funded the set up and print of the first issue, it’s also provided a boost that gives it the sort of momentum a new magazine always needs.

Kickstarter is a relatively new idea but it’s growing fast and seems ideally suited for starting magazines. It has a whole section dedicated to journalism and a clear bias towards the independent, so if you’re reading this and thinking about creating your own independent title, get yourself over there and take a look. And let us know – we want to hear about all the new Kickstarter magazines as they happen.

Cook book

Steve Watson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:25:43 +0000

I first came across the brilliant new food magazine Fire & Knives through Jeremy’s post on magCulture. He seemed so excited by it I had to track down a copy for myself, and I wasn’t disappointed with what I found.

The USA has a particularly rich seam of independent food magazines. We’ve written here before about Diner Journal, The Art of Eating and Swallow, and we were proud to make Meatpaper the first delivery from Stack America this year. And then there’s Remedy (more to come on that one very soon).

So it’s about time that Britain got its own food magazine and F&K does us proud. In his first editor’s letter, Tim Hayward writes about the importance of approaching food as an amateur (‘one who loves’) rather than a connoisseur (‘one who knows’), a distinction that elegantly sums up the difference between F&K and what you might usually expect to find in a food magazine.

I don’t think I saw any recipes in it, and instead I enjoyed a shaggy dog (or scraggy bird?) story about a quail that takes over a man’s life, an account of horror actor Vincent Price’s little known foray into the realm of the TV chef, and the dining experiments that centred around Belsize Park’s Isokon Building in the 1930s.

Oh, and it’s all beautifully designed by the creative talent behind Anorak. Look out for it coming soon on Stack.

Fire & Knives

Steve Watson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:39:29 +0000

The place where serious food writing and beautiful graphic design meet, Fire & Knives is a new food magazine made by London-based writer and editor Tim Hayward. Big name contributors like Matthew Fort and Tom Parker Bowles will be familiar from the Sunday supplements, but in Fire & Knives they get to write about the aspects of food that fascinates them. Combining food with film, architecture, history, literature and much more, it’s an eclectic and impassioned exploration of British food culture.

www.fireandknives.com

The Stack interview

Name
Tim Hayward

Job title
Food writer and editor of Fire & Knives

What is Fire and Knives?
I could say that F&K was a brand because we have some ambitions for the name outside of the magazine world.
I could say that F&K naturally facilitates a coming together of foodwriters who can’t find a home for their best work with readers desperate for something stimulating.
I could say F&K is a desperate last bastion of quality food writing in an environment of ‘lifestyle’ pap.
Or I could stop being so pretentious and just say it’s a nice little magazine about food that looks lovely and doesn’t make any money

What makes it different to the rest?
The biggest difference is that it doesn’t get involved with advertisers, celebrity chefs or restaurant reviewing.

Who makes Fire and Knives?
Me, a couple of freelance subs and Present Joys, which is Cathy Olmedillas (Anorak and Sleaze Nation) and the utterly genius Rob Lowe.

Who reads it?
Literate food lovers

Why do you work in magazines?
Partly because I write and take pictures and I’m enough of an old Trot to want to annex the means of production. Partly because new technologies and ways of working are making it easier to get involved and the big boys seem not to ‘get it’ and are consequently bleeding out.

Aside from the print magazine, what else are you involved in?
I write for mainstream newspapers and food mags, do a bunch of online stuff and have recenty started doing TV and radio work.

What would you change about Fire and Knives if you could?
I’d pay the writers. Actually, not just that, I’d pay the writers eight times the going rate.

Can you pick a favourite issue of Fire and Knives?
The next one.

Where do you see Fire and Knives in five years?
Still very much in print though by that point I imagine that sorting out micropayment will mean we’re also available on your iPad or similar tech. F&K will also be working with its writers on projects in other media but the magazine will still be at the heart of it – a kind of nexus for quality food writing. Also, let’s face it, Rob’s logo is so damn good, I reckon it’ll be on everything.

‘SUPer star

Steve Watson — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:15:55 +0000

This month’s Stack delivery is ‘SUP, the inventive, ultra-cool trans-Atlantic music magazine. Started 12 years ago by editor Marisa Brickman and going stronger than ever, it’s full of clever design ideas and refreshingly unpretentious writing. Marisa landed in London yesterday after a two-week stint in New York, so we caught up with her fresh off the flight to hear how the magazine has grown from its humble beginnings, and how exactly you make a magazine based in two continents in your spare time.

You’re just back from New York – did you manage to do a bit of ‘SUP stuff while you were there?
Definitely. I usually plan a trip over for work and then once I know I’m going to be there for work I’ll tag stuff onto it. So we did the issue 21 release party at this place called SubMercer, a little bar under the Mercer Hotel. It’s one of those secret cavern type bars and it was really fun. The place holds 80 people and we actually had 750 RSVPs or something. I don’t know how it happened and how it got that crazy, but it was a good crowd – like a music-y, fashion, design crowd. We try to do either really down and dirty loft space grungey bands, or high end… we try to tick off both vibes and this was the more posh vibe.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about is that in the magazine you give completely equal weight and respect to some little band that’s just got a few songs on its Myspace page, and bands like Arctic Monkeys.
Yeah. To be honest the print issue ends up being very image driven, so we’ll kind of decide what are the bands we want to cover, how much copy we want to give to each feature, and then the actual amount of pages tends to end up being decided by how good the pictures are. And we’re getting to a point now where we’re working with photographers we want to be working with and kind of letting them do their thing and it’s becoming a lot more exciting design-wise because the amount of images we have that we can use is getting higher, so it’s getting harder to choose what we’re going to use whereas before it was just a case of picking out the ones that were good enough to be in there.

I think the design is really exciting. There’s so much stuff in the magazine that I haven’t seen done anywhere else, like you’ll use a series of very similar images one after the next or you’ll have two opening spreads for a story with headlines and everything.
The guys when they talk about it, they like it to feel like you have to read it from beginning to end, so its design is really storytelling rather than story by story if that makes sense. It’s important that it flows from one page to the next. The way we work is that I’m the editor and they’re the designers, so if I really hate something ultimately they’ll end up taking it out, but that’s where they’re creative and that’s where they do their thing. Initially I didn’t really get some of the things they were doing – it’s funny, a lot of the things they do, people think are mistakes. So on the website the way the logo’s cut off, everyone thinks it’s a mistake and I get so many messages from people going, ‘hey, your website’s fucked up!’ Or in the print issue, half the article will be cut off or a photo will kind of bleed onto another page, but it’s all intentional. Whether that’s the most user-friendly way to present information I’m not sure, but it certainly makes a statement.

It’s interesting that you talk about it as storytelling – I hadn’t thought about it in that way but that makes sense.
Well that’s the whole vibe of the magazine – we want to allow artists and photographers and writers to tell their story. It’s really all about the artist and portraying them in the way that they were in the interview, and that’s why the Q&A style works for us. A lot of music journalism in particular is really bad and a lot of music journalists will tend to talk about themselves more than they let the artist speak for themselves, so they’ll have a personal opinion or an agenda that they want to get across about the band and you end up feeling like you’re hearing more about the writer than you actually hear from the band. So we have a style guide for new writers about the way we like to do our interviews and reviews, and that all feeds into the relationship between the stories and the photos and everything else.

Every time Stack goes out now there’s a flurry of activity on Twitter with people tweeting about the magazines, and one of the things I saw written about ‘SUP is that one person got it and it took them 15 minutes before they realised it’s a music magazine, and they really liked that. Do you make a conscious effort to be unlike other music mags?
For sure. For me that’s a point of difference and it’s what makes us unique, but it also makes us very difficult to sell to people. The people that advertise in music magazines tend to be record labels, technology brands, etc, and none of those, apart from a few of the technology people, really have any money. We do have a lot of fashion brands in the magazine, and those are brands that are kind of inspired by music, but the bigger fashion brands won’t advertise unless you’re actually doing fashion editorial. So we definitely set out to make it like a journal – we want it to look more like an art journal than a fashion magazine or a music magazine, so I’d take that as a complement I guess.

I’m sure it was intended that way. You’ve spoken a lot about the designers you work with, but how does ‘SUP actually work? You’re in London and New York – how do you manage that?
Well there’s Brendan who runs a company called An Art Service in New York and he’s the creative director and he has a bunch of guys who work with him. Cameron’s the managing editor and he lives in New York and Abbey who’s the online editor, she lives in New York. And then over here there’s me and Josh, who’s the UK online editor and Laura who’s the assistant editor, and it’s really just a case of having a lot of conference calls and getting organised upfront so you can split up who does what. Usually the US guys will take care of the US stuff and the UK guys will take care of the more international features, and then the editing process is all done remotely amongst ourselves.

And how did it all start? When did you start ‘SUP?
I started in 1998. I was in college at UNC Chapel Hill and I always tell this story that I was working for the college newspaper in the entertainment section. At UNC they have a daily newspaper because the journalism school there is quite big, so I was like, “yeah, I’m working for the paper, awesome,” and I’d just got a job working for the college radio station and it had taken me a little while to get that job, so I was already a little apprehensive about whether they thought I was cool and credible.

I wrote this review of Faithless’s first record and I really didn’t like it. I didn’t slam it but I gave it a six or something, but it turned out that the editor at the time really liked the record so he inserted two paragraphs of the press release that came with the album into the beginning of my review, which totally changed the whole review. So I took a copy of the newspaper into this crowded newspaper office and I’d circled everything in red that I didn’t write and basically told them all to fuck off because I was starting my own music magazine and they just didn’t get it. They’d rather cover Alanis Morissette than Polvo, who lived in Chapel Hill, so I was like, “there’s this amazing music scene in Chapel Hill and all you guys want to do is cover Faithless!”

They just weren’t interested in the local scene at all, so for the first couple of issues ‘SUP was really just a totally local zine. It wasn’t even all music in the beginning – it was mainly music but then there was some weird art stuff too, like this girl who was in a band did these weird puppet shows so we wrote an article on her. That’s kind of how it started. I was an AV tech, so I used to go and set up projectors in classrooms and when I wasn’t wheeling around trolleys with projectors on I was sitting in my little office on Microsoft Word – I actually used to lay it out on Microsoft Word – and then I’d print it out and make the little book, then photocopy a load of them and staple the spine. I had a friend who was older – one of those rock dudes who ends up living in a college town forever – he was the manager of a copy store so I just used to go there late at night and make copies on his copy key.

But then at some point I was like, “okay, this is taking a really long time to staple all these pages together,” and I had piles of them all over my living room and I realised that I could print more if I did it in newsprint, so I started selling ads to local businesses and local record labels, and it kind of grew from there. Sub Pop was the first record label that bought an ad from us and the guy, Steve, who bought it actually just left Sub Pop a year ago, so it’s cool because a lot of the people I dealt with… like I was friends with the guys who started Pitchfork back in the day – they started after ‘SUP, so it was crazy to see the trajectory of what everyone else went on to do starting from these kind of fanzines, labours of love, and I just watched as the passed me by! But we’re still printing, so that’s something.

Well more than that, you’re selling copies now. Is that a big deal for you or just something you’ve been meaning to do for a long time?
Well the biggest goal is to make every one better than the last one, and just take baby steps towards that. Expanding to the UK gave us a new motivation and gave the magazine a new life, and it’s great to have a new fresh team of writers and photographers in the UK who don’t really know the magazine – I think that motivated everyone. And we’re starting to do side projects for brands, which is where the money is actually coming from to keep printing the magazine, so hopefully we can do more of that because selling ads is just a total schlub. You really need a dedicated ad sales person if you’re going to do that, and all the ads I sell now are totally through personal relationships and when you don’t have a production schedule that you religiously stick to and your distribution is kind of through boutiques and we don’t have all the hardcore data we’d need to have to sell to bigger companies, you can only get so far on personal favours.

So what sort of branding work have you been doing?
We started a magazine for Nike sportswear in the UK called 1948. They have a space on Bateman’s Row in Shoreditch which is under the arches and is kind of a concept store meets community space meets art gallery. We’ve done two magazines for them and we’re working on another one now, and it’s all about the characters of East London. It’s great – we’ve had some really good feedback on that.

In the US we did a big blog project for Fox Searchlight. It was for 500 Days of Summer and we called it 500 Days of ‘SUP – it’s still online at 500daysofsup.com. It launched about six months before the film came out and the goal for that was to generate buzz around the soundtrack and try to establish the film in the music world before it came out. We did a post every day, and it wasn’t really 500 days but it was pretty close, so it was music from the film or inspired by the film. That was cool so maybe we’ll get to do more stuff like that. Because it’s also a nice way for me to pay everyone that works on the magazine – everyone works for expenses and doesn’t get paid, so it’s really nice when we can work on corporate projects.

And do you see a day when that could pay you? Could it become your job one day?
I would love for it to. I’ve kind of been struggling with that for the past 10 years. I started out in music and then worked in PR and then went on to brand marketing, and I worked at The Fader in New York for a couple of years, and now I’m at Diageo in the FMCG brand world, so I feel like I’ve had a good path of learning about lots of different ways to do business. I haven’t pinpointed what the best business model would be for ‘SUP, but we’re trying to take on as many other things as we can to see what does work. Because I think we all know that print publishing isn’t really a viable way to make money! I think we could probably make money from the web, but rather than trying to focus on monetising that we’re really working to get the website into shape and get the writing better and be more active on Facebook and Twitter, and I think that once our hits are up to something we’re happy with we can start trying to sell advertising.