Co-create Ozine  

Building a printmaking magazine online cooperatively  

Item number two in a list of ten suggestions posted by a British publishing industry online magazine about starting online magazines is studied in this essay by one who would start an online magazine—he calls an Ozine—in the field of fine art printmaking.

Co-created online magazines

In her article, Rachel Bartlett lists ten things to consider if you want to start an online magazine (I like to use the word Ozine because, in the past, electronic mail evolved to email, and magazine evolved to Zine), and the second in this list of ten struck a chord with me. She wrote:

2. Consider building a 'co-creation platform'

While publishers running these crowd sourced magazine projects often make use of social media platforms to invite submissions, Finland's Olivia magazine, which is published by Bonnier Publications, built its own "co-creation platform", Oma Olivia (Open Olivia), where readers could help make decisions about the content and design of a crowd sourced edition.

"Everything was done in the editorial group," chief executive of Bonnier Publications, Marjaana Toiminen, told Journalism.co.uk, with the overall project run by the author of a crowd sourcing thesis at Stanford University.

"[The thesis author] knew what else was going on in the world so she could integrate her knowledge into the concept," Toiminen explained.

"The online platform which was built for the special issue - which is published once a year - delivers each decision as a challenge, such as the photos to use from a shoot, or the text to put on the front page. Toiminen prefers to describe the project as "co-creation" instead of crowd sourcing.

"It's something deeper, and more open," she explained. "You involve the audience in every phase of making the magazine, starting from ideas but going deeper into getting angles and finding questions to ask and then deciding on the blurbs and photos and everything. So it's like an ongoing process throughout the magazine."

"The platform offers a number of different decision-making mechanisms. These range from a vote to "open discussion", Toiminen said. "Every process or every challenge has different types of involvement models."

Press story

There is a similarity between the way that the Mini Halfwood Press evolved and the idea behind co-creation. It was Tom Kughler and I at the start. I went to him to create the first halfwood press, then—when I remarked I wished I had a model of it—he created the first mini halfwood press.

You might say the first person who asked about buying one like it was a co-creator, too. The possibility of making mini presses to offer the printmaking world occurred to me at that point, and six months after Tom brought the first mini halfwood press to my studio for testing, I had sold half a dozen of them.

Tom carried on with making slightly bigger presses; the people interested in the presses asked for cheaper models and we provided them. Therefore, among the group—me, Tom, and several hundred people who wrote to me via email—we co-created the alternative to the typical etching presses of the past two generations.

Co-create PrintmakingWorld Ozine?

The evolution of the Halfwood Press line will be different than making a magazine—whether paper-based or digital and online. How can you compare the two? Only in one way: it proved to be the basis of expanding the printmaking experience to reach more people. The making of a small, beautiful, portable press is comparable to bringing skiing, for example, to more people who are interested in skiing without bringing the snowy mountainside to the readers. On the bus I see someone using their mobile to read a skiing magazine as they ride, headed for work and not to the slopes.

He or she might just as well be reading a printmaking ozine as a skiing magazine on the mobile or on a tablet. The question remains, for me, how do you build it? Co-creation, said Bartlett in the second on the list she collected from publishers who tried and succeeded, is a possibility.

Co-creation is a strong possibility because printmaking itself is often a co-creative art, a social art that many times involves communities of practice and people with mixed expertise. In the same way that Tom Kughler and I “co-created” the halfwood press line, and then hundreds of people got onboard by purchasing them, a printmaking ozine might be co-created.

Who will be the “Tom”?

From reading the second point, above, it appears I need (1) someone like me with the idea to create an online printmaking magazine, (2) an editorial group similar to what traditional magazines have—a group of people who buy in, ideologically, to my vision of a blender magazine rooted in the true history of printmaking as a time-based art; (3) someone who is working on a thesis at a major research university to see how crowd sourcing will play in the development of the business of this ozine.

Is there, nearby, a university that is fostering the study of the kind that the student at Stanford was inspired to undertake? Or a university where there is a faculty member who would make the suggestion of this subject to a student doing advanced work?

It bears thought.