Social Ozine  

The power of social networks and PMWO  

It is appropriate on the imaginary island, Open Studios and Hospitality, to concentrate on the social networking value in the plan to start an online magazine for printmaking. After considering how games figure into the plan, social networking comes next. 

Ten points toward a crowd-sourced Online Zine  

An online Zine for printmaking might not follow traditional lines in the way online magazines are started in fields outside of printmaking—fields such as sports, news, entertainment and health for example. Those fields have a long tradition and hundreds of paper-based magazines as the ancestors of new, online magazine experiences.

What interests me about printmaking is in two parts: One, there is only one paper-based magazine in the English language, and one quarterly journal, in the entire world. The journal is published in the USA, where almost of million people have had some printmaking in their educational history and who probably maintain an interest in printmaking either as a maker or a collector.

Numerous businesses have grown up around the art and craft of printmaking. Printmaking is taught in colleges and universities and some schools. Printmaking presses are being manufactured and sold, costing a few hundred to over twenty-thousand dollars. So, there must be printmaking life there that should attract readers to a printmaking journal. My impression, however, is that the two publications are floundering.

It is my impression, also, that the publishers have no plan to go to an online version of their paper publication—building, as they say, on their legacy.

In an article published online (of course, or how else would I have found it?), Rachel Bartlett summarized ten point about starting or growing an online magazine using crowd-sourcing. The term crowd-sourcing interests me because I have a personal legacy of artworks and other tangibles of worth which I think might be part of the source for building my idea of a printmaking magazine online.

One by one, I am taking the points Bartlett listed and dwelling on them in these essays to glean what I might from the content and adapt it to the challenge that faces me. The fourth point she describes has to do with using social networks to get resources for an online magazine. She wrote:

Plug into the power of social networks

“Any crowd sourcing project will inevitably involve social media interaction, whether social networks are the setting for the crowd sourcing – perhaps gathering tweeted responses to a question – or to encourage social media communities to engage in crowd sourcing elsewhere.

“For Femina's Made By You issue, for example, a Facebook app was built which members of the social media network could use to send in their stories for consideration. It is also worth remembering [from an earlier part of Bartlett’s account] that Femina used social media in the first place to test the crowd sourcing waters before committing to producing an entire issue on this model.

“Meanwhile, Company uses a Facebook group of "die-hard Company fans" to gather feedback and ideas for editions of the magazine. The group is closed and so requires those who want to join to apply, "but we don't turn anyone away", White added.

“ ‘We constantly ask them what they want in the magazine,’ she said. An example included asking the group who they wanted the cover star to be, and were also given the opportunity to carry out the interview.

Printmaking Social Networks

There are social networks for printmaking: Print Universe, Inkteraction, Printerest, Baren.org, CraftandConcept and PrintPeople (I may not have these names down correctly). Also there are newsletters for printmaking clubs scattered around. Numerous bloggers are practicing printmakers and they produce news items and videos of note.