Finally, I’m launching a magazine
After years of talking about it, I’m launching a magazine.
I’ve wanted to publish my own magazine for a very long time. The closest I got was The Magazine Diaries, the namesake of this newsletter. I hoped, back in 2014, that this lovely little A5 compilation would be the start of something bigger.
As it happened, life got in the way, but I’ve never really stopped thinking about it.
Last summer, Joanna (my partner in life as well as publishing) had the joy of editing Word On The Street. Her enthusiasm for the magazine-in-a-day published from the Magazine Street conference and her delight at the finished product lit a fire under our publishing aspirations.
We’re now deep in the planning stages for The Grub Street Journal, a quarterly magazine for people who make magazines.
Why a magazine for people who make magazines?
Well, they say you should make the magazine you want to read, and in the Venn diagram of our interests, between making things with wool and listening to blokey guitar bullshit, magazines are smack bang in the middle for me and Joanna.
And, we think magazine people will be all over it.
Of course there are already great magazines, newsletters and podcasts about magazine publishing out there. But they tend to have a focus on the business side and while we care deeply how magazine people make a living, we want to find out more about them.
Our first cover story asks, What kind of idiots still make magazines? We’ll be talking to activists, entrepreneurs, community organisers and industry veterans about why they do what they do. What do they love about making magazines? What do they hate? What have they learned and what would they rather forget?
Every issue we’ll bring our journalistic grit and a wry editorial eye to the biggest questions in magazine publishing, challenging the industry to change - always brutally honest but relentlessly optimistic. And we’ll have some fun too.
With Grub we want to make something beautiful and lasting: A carefully crafted quarterly with page design that excites without making your eyes bleed and with well-written original stories that you want to read. All on really nice paper…. you know the indie magazine drill.
While The Grub Street Journal is absolutely a passion project, we also see it as a research project. We want test out the things that we think will make print magazines sustainable into the future.
And that’s where the Magazine Diaries newsletter comes in. Rather than three ideas worth stealing every week, I’m planning to document our magazine making journey.
I’m unlikely to send the newsletter every week. I have a magazine to launch and I want to keep things interesting. Cards on the table, I’ll be send the newsletter when I have something to share.
If that’s not for you, I get it. Thanks for being here, may the road rise with you.
If it is for you, AMAZING. Welcome to the party!
Peter
