In Praise of Stack Magazines.
March 15, 2010 1 Comment
Last week during my business of magazine class, we discussed as a group what magazines will be like in the future. The discussions ranged from looking at the effect the iPad will have the experience of reading magazines as a whole, uses of augmented reality or whether magazines will continue to exist in print form at all.
A majority of the class remained hopeful that the magazines will still continue to exist in print form for the next ten years with the ‘learn back’ experience crucial to magazines popularity while at the same time being aware of the various ways in which magazines are evolving through the use of technology.
After the lesson I went home, caught a train and made sure I took a magazine with me for the journey. I decided on the free music publication ‘Sup Magazine which was sent to me by the subscription service Stack Magazines.
Stack Magazines is a subscription service that collects the best independent magazines from around the world and delivers them to your door. I found it interesting that on a day I was thinking about the future of the magazine industry, here I was not only enjoying a magazine in its most basic form, but doing it because of a service that sorely seeks to promote the passion and talent that is required to publish quality independent magazines.
While the idea of what type of journalist I may one day become has changed over the past few years, I am pleased that something like Stack still exists to remind me why I wanted to be one in the first place.
Without it I don’t think I would have discovered magazines such as music magazines Shook and the sadly now disbanded Plan B (which you can now download as PDF files) the wonderful children’s magazine Anorak or the slightly disturbing and melancholy Finnish magazine Kasino A4.
While some magazines are more enjoyable to read than others, as it happens ‘Sup Magazine is one of my least favourite and I found it hard to get excited over anything in Ride Journal, the fact that there are still people who are willing to publish magazines independently for nothing more than the passion of doing it is something that should respected.
So while magazines are worried about what their magazine will look like as an iPhone app or thinking whether people pay attention to advertisements in digital magazines or not, it is pleasing to know that people out there are still people out there with the ambition and drive to create something independently. I for one hope this is not something that will slowly start to die out in the future.
I have to say I agree with you on Stack. For too long now magazines have been at the mercy of the companies who advertise within them. Journalists and designers need to come together more often to create content for themselves and for the audience that is not marred by sales targets and accountants. As the internet continues to expand, the printed word may become a niche object and the large publishing companies and national newspapers will suffer but the little guys who understand and respect their audience will continue flourish.