An actual web magazine

[Brandon Seifert]

"A web magazine would, surely, give equal weight to the multimedia provisions of webspace — where, in any given week or issue, you’d find spoken-word, sound collage, music and video interpretation at least as often as you’d find artwork."

I write for an alt-weekly newspaper called Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and I've tried to do this in my articles for the website.

This week I had a short band profile in the print edition, with an expanded piece on our music-focused data shadow site LocalCut.com. The expanded piece featured the full interview I did with the artist (it'd ended up being a MySpace interview -- and yes, I am ashamed of myself), augmented with a video from her concert last night, a downloadable streaming mp3 of a song she mentions, and concert photos (which have not yet been added as I type this, unfortunately).

I always try to do this when I do a musician profile for the web, or a concert review of someone the readers are probably not familiar with: This concert review of a local band of "ninja rockstars" called Fist of Dishonor features concert photos and several videos, and was interlinked with the profile I soon did for them in the print issue.

LocalCut.com is kind of an interesting animal. It's the data shadow of our print edition's music section (our music section went strictly-local a couple years ago, one of the only papers in the country to do this), and in addition to all the content of the print edition (band profiles, show and album reviews, daily concert calendar), it has a daily news blog, short columns, a free local mp3 of the day, tour diaries by several dozen local bands, and a Flickr photostream of local concerts that most anyone can contribute to, if they know the trick. I'm really rather impressed by the site, and proud to be a part of it.

[Eric Rosenfield]

Of course, Warren was talking about fiction magazines before and so I wonder how the multimedia approach would relate to a fiction magazine (without it, say, becoming a short film magazine). Audio readings of the stories? Perhaps audio dramas of them? Video trailers? Spoken word over animation?

[Warren Ellis]

"Fiction" is the overarching definer -- a piece of video can do the same work as a flash fiction. Experimental video's been doing it for decades.

[Eric Rosenfield]

So the way to save prose fiction magazines is to make them movie anthologies? I don't want to make movies, I want to write stories, and if you're telling me the future of fiction is that it'll be watched and not read that seems self-defeating to me.

[Warren Ellis]

No, this is another tack entirely -- a tangent from the original discussion.

[Eric Rosenfield]

I'm almost certainly overreacting. I understand what you're saying--"a web magazine would have prose and art and photography and sound and vision." I guess I just feel like the video would overshadow prose to an unreasonable degree and the film-types trying to break into the industry with their shorts would fill up the ranks of any such magazine, and the prose would get ignored. But you seem to be indicating that the video would be something different than ordinary film shorts, and I guess I'm just not entirely clear on what that looks like. Maybe I haven't been watching the right experimental video.

You know, McSweeney's launched their multimedia magazine a while back and I couldn't understand why they were doing it. I even watched a few of the shorts they put up on their website, and they just seemed weird to me. The whole project didn't make sense. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.

At any rate, I'm sure once these notions become "fully baked" to you you'll lay them out in a more detailed and coherent way.

[Warren Ellis]

"I'm almost certainly overreacting."

To the point where I really have no idea what your problem is, yes.

[Warren Ellis]

Will check this at the weekend, thanks.

-- W