Save the date: Sunday, 3rd May 2009, The Rag Factory, London: “The London Zine Symposium is a annual event where people interested in zines, small-press, comics and / or radical culture can get together, buy or sell zines and share ideas with each other. The idea is to build a stronger DIY network and community by having people meet up, chat, maybe participate in a workshop or two but definitely have a good time.” Via
The winner of this year´s Gruner + Jahr creative award (Grüne Wiese) has been announced this week: The first place goes to “BEEF!” - a cooking/lifestyle magazine for men. Btw: The winner from the last competition is “Dogs” - a lifestyle magazine for doglovers. “BEEF!” is about food, kitchen, adventures, technique, gadgets - and a lot of meat. The second place goes to an online project (“My-next-challenge.de”), a personal Online-Coaching for Marathon/Triathlon. And the third place goes to “Businesspunk” - a business magazine concept for alpha animals; the claim was something like “work hard, party hard”, target group were young and trendy trainees, bankers and consultants, on the search for girls, money and coke. Ok, the concept was really ironic, but wasn`t this exactly the attitude of bankers that were responsable for the worldwide financial collaps?
Besides this big corporate award, there are some individuals working on some promising new concepts. For example: Raban Ruddigkeit und Jan Peter are working on a new magazine called “MGZN” - they want to collect the best textes from other magazines and newspapers - and create a “magazine of the magazines”. After 1000 orders they`ll start to produce Mgzn.
And Martin Schmitz Kuhl, Andrea Ruhland and Christian Sälzer are working on a new television and culture magazine: “PROGRAMM”. And yes, it´s true: Not everything on TV is shit - but all TV-magazines are looking like shit. The dummy is online and looks really great - now they are waiting to be discovered by a major publishing house.
Just published Just tattooed: Doing a magazine about tattoos is interesting, no doubt, but getting a magazine tattooed is fucking amazing! The swedish magazine Tare Lungt (means: “take it easy”) has published their third issue as a tattoo. Don’t believe it? Watch the Making-of-Video here. Via
“Tim Devin, a conceptual artist based in Boston is producing one of the most striking magazines in the world: you can’t buy it from a newsstand, nor from any bookshop, and you can’t even read it on the Internet. The encounter with “i left this here for you to read” (this is its name) can only happen by chance. About once a month, a new issue is printed of just fifty copies, and, thanks to a network of volunteers, is distributed in 25 cities across the USA and Canada. These copies are left in public spaces; you might find one on a park bench or on a bus seat.
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Mainstream print media is dying like flies: Yesterday Vanity Fair closed down their german edition. “Conde Nast, publishers of Vanity Fair, said it would stop producing the magazine (est. February 2007) in Germany due to the downturn in the global economy. Circulation has also fallen sharply, from about 500,000 an issue to 120,000 an issue, Deutsche Welle reported Wednesday. Conde Nast Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Newhouse said: “In a normal economic climate, we would have bravely carried on publishing Vanity Fair,” Newhouse said. “In today’s bleak economic climate, it is impossible. We did everything we could. We bought in talented people, invested in content and advertising and committed a significant amount of time, money and energy. But in the end we failed.” Glossy Lifestyle is over! Long live independent and real media!
Babylon Falling, a concept driven independent bookstore in San Francisco, with a focus on the spirit of Revolution, in association with It’s About Time are presenting an exhibition of radical underground newspapers from the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. The exhibit will be comprised of a variety of original copies of Berkeley Tribe, Berkeley Barb, The Realist, Chicago Seed, East Village Other, Catholic Worker, Civil Liberties, I Wor Kuen, American Report, SDS New Left Notes, and the Black Panther Party Newspaper. Billy X Jennings, who has graciously opened up his archive for Babylon Falling, will be leading a brief discussion on the history of the radical underground press in America. Exhibit runs through March 11th 2009. Via: Mail
