A friend shared this ridiculously cool e-zine today and I HAD to return the favour to you. I suggest you spread the word, too. The calibre of intelligent, thought-provoking content is right-up-there, and dammit, makes me wish I had me an i-Pad so I could loll around in bed and read this at leisure. It's that good. That's irrelevant though; you'll want to read the stories any way you can.
See the entire magazine right here:
http://wordymofo.realviewdigital.com/
Here's what editor Michael Adams had to say:
"WordyMofo really springs from a love of writing about what you're interested in. Getting to do that in magazines isn't always easy because most have a very defined idea of what their readers and advertisers want. And while the internet is obviously freer, the layout of most sites and all their bells and whistles and pop ups make them less conducive to longer reads. So, this an attempt to do both - the classic style of a mag with the global instant reach of the net. Most digital mags - whether web-based on iPad apps - are at the moment simply slightly retooled versions of what's in newsagents. WordyMofo, on the other hand, has been designed expressly for e-readers and desktop screens, so you don't have to zoom to be able to see the text and photos. It really does look best on an iPad but we felt making it only as an app was a bit exclusive, expensive and weighted to a user-pays experience.
"Our approach to stories is also different: whereas a lot of publications and sites feel they "have" to cover something because their competitors are, we're aiming to write about the things and stuff, people and arts that don't get saturation coverage. Hence in our first issue, we're talking to Weatherbill, a YouTube prophet who predicts calamity in just two days (run to them thar hills), and the women behind the burgeoning sub-culture of E-rotic literature. We make one of our writers subject himself to 24 hour marathon of bad TV and delve deep into why The Killer Inside Me misses the mark as a Jim Thompson adaptation. On the occasions when we will go down the celebrity route, we'll ask different question (indie It Girl Greta Gerwig tells us what's in her Too Hard Basket), or we'll shine the light on the people we consider celebs (the man who made Titanic II surely merits such status!) Then there's the sillier stuff, like our ideas to improve Talk Like A Pirate Day and Banned Books Week.
"So, the upshot is if you can read it elsewhere, you probably won't read in WordyMofo - and vice versa.
"As for how it's gonna work? Well, it's free and we created it with a small and passionate bunch of peeps for next to nothing. As for a business plan, a payment model, all that kinda stuff, well, we haven't a clue. Ideally a lot of people will read it and businesses who serve the world via the net will want to advertise and that'll help. But even if they don't and they don't I'd say we'll keep going because, well, it's fun."
So there you have it, folks. I am all for supporting innovative trail-blazers in publishing - and I think you should too. Share.
