Electronic Magazines

▪ 1998

      With the increasing popularity of computers and the Internet, more and more magazines put versions of their material on-line. According to the Net.Journal Directory, by 1997 at least 10,000 magazines and journals, out of an estimated 100,000 American and Canadian publications, were available on-line. Some respected magazines—e.g., Time, Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic— had on-line publications, which often differed from their print siblings. Because the publishers were not constrained by space and printing costs, new topics could be introduced and material that appeared in print could be expanded. Other magazines appeared only on-line—e.g., Microsoft Corp.'s Slate. These could focus on one topic or emulate general-interest print magazines.

      The most extreme form of electronic magazines, called e-zines or zines, were publications available only electronically—for example, on the Internet. Often of casual design and respect for facts and produced by at most a few people, these magazines tended to be highly personal, irreverent, and/or bizarre. They were usually directed to a small-but-devoted audience and did not take advertisements or seek to make a profit. .

      Electronic magazines could trace their deepest roots to 1926, when a writer and small-time publisher, Hugo Gernsback, began a science-fiction magazine called Amazing Stories. One section provided readers space for letters, discussing the different stories. Gernsback included addresses of the letter writers so they could contact each other directly. This led to the development of associations and discussion groups where people could write their views on what was being published. Soon other science-fiction magazines were using this approach. In 1930 Comet (later renamed Cosmology), the first magazine devoted principally to this format of exchanging opinions, was published. Since these magazines were at first put out by the fans themselves, these publications were called fanzines.

      The first fanzines were crudely and laboriously produced along a similar pattern: a person would write a personal article on whatever he or she liked, find artwork that would enhance it—either self-drawn or photos found somewhere (the more offbeat, the better), paste it all together, make copies of the work by machine, fold and staple them, and then trade with other fanzine publishers.

      With advances in xerography and desktop publishing, the fanzines became slicker and more visually appealing. The next giant step was the move to the Internet and the World Wide Web, which provided fanzine publishers a chance to reach a much larger audience with high-tech zines produced on electronic media. As more user-friendly technology and software appeared, even nontechies could create elaborate, interactive e-zines with frames, sophisticated graphics, animation, and hypertext links.

STEVEN MONTI

* * *