Extra Credit

On Monday I attended the Magazine Clubs presentation on the San Francisco publishing company McSweeny's one time Newspaper project Panorama. The three editor's behind the project: Chris, Jesse and Brian decided they wanted to produce a Newspaper that was 350 pages long and deluxe as possible. They decided to do this project with no newspaper experience, which was not easy. They took inspiration from The Sunday Morning Post, Zaman and Excelsior. As Chris said, " We wanted to make a newspaper worth buying." They decided to do something very different. As Jesse said, " [We] let writers as much as they need to. Every article has it own page." With all their dense material they still managed to sell almost all 40,000 copies of the magazine. Since they are not newspaper writers I asked them what they saw as the future of newspapers and if they thought they were dying. Chris said, "Print is always dying. The Bar needs to be higher. It's and exciting moment. It's a vibrant and alive. That hasn't really changed." After seeing their presentation I thought it was really cool and successful. I think that they proved that the newspaper, especially an elaborate one, is still in style and still important. I think it proved that people are still interested in in depth and well rounded information they can hold on to. When asked if they'd do it again, Brian said, while slightly laughing, "We're not going to do it again."