Recent Stories with tag magazine

Duty Calls, courtesy of XKCD.

Oh, noes! Someone was wrong on the internet! In a flash of uncommonly brilliant fail, the editor of Cooks Source [sic] magazine, a New England regional floppy made up primarily of ads, pissed off the entire internet by declaring that everything on it is "public domain."

It took only hours for what should have been a wee, tiny, plagiarism molehill to explode off of Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal, and hit the mainstream press--including, but not limited to, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the L.A. Times--due almost entirely to the editor's poor manners.

Judith Griggs, the editor in question, has since been Google-bombed by the website Smart Bitches Read Trashy Books, and exposed as a multiple plagiarist who has also ripped off copy from Martha Stuart Living, The Food Network, and Disney, among many, many others. She even has a shiny, new wikipedia entry! There is little doubt that Ms. Griggs will have to change her name in order to ever hold another job in the publishing industry, at the very least. So that's a lesson for all: Be nice. Also, the internet is not a copyright-free zone.

Also drenched in the sauce made of fail last week was liberal media bastion NPR. The network's retrospective This is NPR: The First Forty Years leaves out most major contributors of color, including All Things Considered host Michele Norris and the African American Public Radio Consortium. Racialicious pointed out that the book illustrates an essay by Michel Martin with a photo of Audie Cornish. This falls under the category of a they-all-look-alike fail.

Yale University Press has bumped their street cred with the release of The Anthology of Rap, which aims to become “an essential contribution to our living literary tradition." I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's past time that rap and hip-hop were included in academic studies of comparative history and literature, and The Anthology of Rap could fulfill some of that function, which is no doubt why Yale published the tome.

Matt Labash, over at the Wall Street Journal, gave a The Anthology of Rap a (mostly) good review, but his piece is primarily of interest for the great books on music that he references and recommends. Fans of music, as well as books, will enjoy his selections, from the classic images in Back in the Days by Jamel Shabazz, to Jeff Chang's hip-hop history, Can't Stop, Won't Stop.... (more)

The Rainier Valley Post alerted me to the existence of another Seattle online magazine, and it feels less lonely out here already.

Southend Seattle magazine has 15 contributors listed and translates into 23 languages (that sounds excessive, but as the site points out, "over 60 languages are spoken within the 98118 digits that are the cradle of the Southend."

What we are doing here is looking to ourselves. The contributors to this grassroots movement have come together to build bridges within the community by sharing the valuable resources of their experiences, knowledge and passions.

One story is about family dining options in the Southend, another is about growing roses. Sounds very bucolic down there. ("On the average, we're as safe as people living in Ballard.") The new Rainier Beach Community Center gets some attention, too.

Great design, beautiful photography, the only quibble I have is with their disregard for the Oxford comma. Hey, no one's perfect.

Since we started The SunBreak in September of '09 over 54,000 unique visitors have come to the site. Last month, we served up over 35,000 page views to over 15,000 readers. People just like you! People who like a little news, some sports, a lot of arts and culture, a bit of food and drink. And occasionally deranged hordes from Harvard.

Readership, and repeat readership, is really the best reward we get for the work we do, which is otherwise unprofitable at this point. You'd think, an online magazine, why that's a license to print money! (It turns out that's just an expression, or so the Treasury tells me.)

How you read is up to you: Our stories can appear in your news stream if you fan us on Facebook. You can get them tweeted to you. (Thanks to everyone who's put us on a Twitter list, you're loved.) Our stories can all show up in your RSS reader--subscribe now. We're also trying out a daily email summary, sent out after 5 p.m. Or, you're old school, we respect that, just bookmark or "favorite" The SunBreak. Stay tuned for mobile platform news; the boys at Instivate have a fleet of elves on it.

You can also participate--write your own post. That could be Front Page material you're sitting on. Or drop your best shots into our SunBreak Flickr pool. Every weekday we choose a pool photo for our Glimpses post.

For those of you with goods to sell, we have advertising you can afford, largely because it's self-serve. Upload some art, choose a daily or global rate, and publish. It's as little as $2.50 a day. Who's reading, you ask? 60 percent of our readers make more than $60,000 per year. 30 percent earn over $100,000. (That's why that top banner is $30 CPM; we're worth it.) You can also sponsor a whole category.

Okay, the short version is, Thanks for reading. Come back soon!