Issuu.com

As the Fashion Director of NYU's fashion magazine, NYCHIC, and as a magazine journalism concentration in Gallatin, I am always interested in seeing where the world of magazines, in light of major sales decline, is adjusting to a new, web-obsessed/dependent culture.  

This semester, after having a lot of financial problems with our last issue, I hesitantly suggested to the editorial board of NYChic that we start doing a website instead of a tangible publication.  I say hesitantly because I personally love magazines -- holding them in my hand, being able to rip things out, etc.  For some reason, I have always looked at the "Webzine" as a destroyer of journalism as we know it.

What's so great about issuu.com is that the magazines on the site were created solely for the internet, and this is where my train of thought changed.  Prior to knowing about this site, I had thought of online magazines as the final stages of a publication's fall.  Elle Girl couldn't cut it on the newsstands so they became a website. Teen Magazine, YM, etc., all faced the same crisis.  It just seemed like a lesser version of something that was not bringing in enough revenue for survival.

Looking at the various online magazines on the site, however, proved to me that, if you go into creating an online magazine knowing that it is for a specific audience, in a specific space, you aren't "giving up," rather you are thinking about magazines and journalism in a different way.  In a way, it's kind of a rebirthing of the way we are thinking about writing/magazines/etc.