Zines Live (And A Misconception On Web Presentation)
Rita Flórez writes at GOOD Magazine about how zines continue to florish, even in the face of easier and cheaper means of reaching a wider audience with the Internet. One part stands out to me:
To Pagan Kennedy, creator of Pagan’s Head and author of ’Zine, blogs and sites like MySpace are just the natural extension of zine culture. “In many ways, the zine world is very much like the internet,” she says. “It’s just that zines happened through the mail, so it happened slowly. Even the conventions of the zine world—the personal zine, where you tell your life story—are very much like blogs and MySpace.”
Still, for avid zine readers like Rowe and Frederick, there’s a distinction between blogs and zines. “I don’t think MySpace has the zine spirit,” says Rowe. “The motivation behind a zine is [personal], but you don’t care about getting noticed. Print gives you many more options. If you publish it online, it’s limited by the coding.”
Emphasis mine.
Websites, zine or otherwise, are only limited by their coding in as much as their author’s knowledge of coding is limited. As someone who has written online in assorted forms for the last ten years, I can tell you that presentation is very important, not just in blogging but in presenting any content on any site, especially when trying to present something like fiction or a journal.
While the web presents the author with a wider audience, it also presents the audience with a wider pool of things to get their attention. The author’s job then becomes not only to provide solid content but to figure out a creative way to present that content and make it stand out. If you were aiming to publish a zine online, to stick to a blog format of just pictures and text is to set yourself up to be lost in the crowd. With so many tools available, as basic as Photoshop or an understanding of CSS and DHTML or as advanced as Flash and beyond, there are many ways to take text and make it so much more. It just takes time and commitment, just about as much as you’d have to put into making a solid print zine. But if you care about your material and getting it into other eyes, you should be willing to do that legwork.
(Via Kottke.)
