Behold On The Danforth Magazine! Just launched yesterday!
The magazine above was created by my (recently graduated) students as the final project for my Magazine 2.0 course, which is the web component of the post-graduate Book and Magazine Publishing program at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications.
While I cannot take credit for their hard work and inspirations, this magazine is everything I had envisioned when I developed this course (and advocated for the use of Wordpress as a CMS).
All of the content on the site was the product of their other courses in the Magazine and Publishing program. My course was simply a means of showcasing what they had learned via the creation of a dynamic web2.0 magazine website. I can only take credit for the provision of tools, philosophies and examples. The rest was up to them.
Here’s how we did it … Continue reading ‘Teaching web2.0: Creating an online magazine’
I got my first twitter notification last spring. I thought: “great, another chat app. So what?”
I didn’t really have time to play with it so I did the laggard thing and let others show me why it mattered. Many months later, I have some reasons to engage it. I’ll be writing a post about this in the next couple of days.
In the meantime, you’ll find me at twitter.com/melmcbride
I love magazines. I take them with me wherever I go. In fact, I love my magazines so much I hauled my entire collections of New Yorkers and Harper’s along with me when I moved across the country as a student. The thought of throwing them away was simply too much to bear. Sadly, I eventually had to part with my treasured collections for the simple matter of space.
I guess old habits die hard because I am now currently collecting Runner’s World, a magazine I’ve been reading since 2004. In fact, it was a single issue of Runner’s World that got me started running. A subscription kept me going strong.
One of the things I love about the magazine is the range of content - from newbie to ultramarathoner. I’ll read stuff that doesn’t apply to me at all simply because it’s well written (good editorial choices). I’ll stay up into the wee hours when my subscription arrives. I take it with me wherever I go. For example, as much as I love the online version, I can’t take the computer into the tub for my post run ice bath. And that magazine is only way I can get through an ice bath.
Continue reading ‘Web2.0 magazines: Runner’s World’
“I don’t know how to run a newspaper.
I just try everything I can think of.”
- Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane
I recently had an interesting conversation with a journalist friend about the question of blogging and accountability. Like many of his colleagues, my friend believes in the role of gatekeepers from an ethical standpoint of public good - facts versus hearsay and that sort of thing. I agreed.
As I write this, I meditate on the fact that I do not have the luxury of a personal editor to go over this post - a post that might also benefit from a professional turnaround time (time to edit, refine and further research). At best, I can afford an hour or two for this non-paying work - and it is work.
That said, I welcome a set of basic standards appropriate to the realities of this particular writing context.Thing is, who gets to define them? And can we really apply the standards of an old paradigm to a very new (and different) one?
UPDATED: Jan. 10/2008
(Draft) Bloggers Code of Conduct from Tim O’Reilly. There are a bunch of other similar docs out there (that I might have referenced) but this is one of newest. Visit individual media sites for their own policies - CBC and BBC, in particular, are at the forefront.
Continue reading ‘Citizen Kane v. citizen editor’
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