Portal or Community - or Both?

Planning PrintmakingWorld Online and Ten Channels

Mequoda advises

A consulting group I follow is Mequoda. They provide mountains of free information gleaned from their work with online publishing enterprises. They list nine business models. In a free 129-page book, they elaborate on these models, always referring to the nine. Sometimes they advise going through stages, but always they warn the reader to keep their goal in mind and learn from other examples. As I read through the pages, two possibilities stand out: the portal model and the community model. I warm to these because the portal model reflects my game, Emeralda; the community model looks attractive because it is the printmaking community where I belong and where I have the most credibility.

Content

One goal is to put all my essays online—thousands of them; and with our daughter Nellie’s help we are well on the way to having my essays in a form suitable for online delivery. Content is much-ballyhooed in the Mequoda publications. With the rise of the blog, it seems like everyone is suddenly a content provider and subject matter expert.

Yet, there is no single online magazine for printmaking; you would think, with all the printmakers who have blogs for their musings and pictures, that there would be one. Is it possible that no one has anything of depth to offer? Depth is what I like—not just technical things or stories about the luxuries of printmaking for a few at the top of the economic scale—but depth to be able to extend printmaking from its ties with painting and other fine arts to the needs of education and economic development.

My early career was devoted to bringing depth and breadth to the printmaking division at the University of Washington School Of Art. This was not appreciated by the faculty, a staid group of well-heeled, conservative painters. For a few years I succeeded in proving that by connecting printing to electronic media by using the historic and social aspects of the printmaking the students could do better than was possible on the old atelier model.

By the time I left college, I saw there were ten kinds of skills and practices in place in those students’ demonstrations—from navigating new technologies to public speaking. This gave to me the architecture of something I was not sure of, and I called it an asset management and legacy transfer method under the name Emeralda, and subtitled, Games for the gifts of life.

These ten channels—as Mequoda’s authors call them—constitute the domain of the kind of printmaking I like and to which I am devoted. Emeralda becomes, then, an imaginary world where printmaking is the dominant art, craft and design work practiced in this community. PrintmakingWorld online then becomes the parent company for ten online magazines, each one being a variation on the ten themes I used to define the pathways to success that some of my former students traveled.

Reference: See page 67 of the Mequoda book for suggested organic marketing that fits my investment, i.e., the occasional newsletter.