Exploration

E-zines: Creating Communities

Many people are picking up their papers—not off their front porch, but by clicking a bookmark in Netscape or by looking in their Hotmail inbox.

Of course, some still favor their printed paper. For many, it's the romance of crisp paper rustling over a cup of coffee. Ah! The evocative smells! These can never be rivaled by e-zines—unless someone invents the scratch-n-sniff URL. Personally, I still like the idea of reading an old-fashioned paper, if for no other reason than to avoid another occasion for carpal tunnel.

Since the dawn of the Internet, when someone decided that content was king, e-zines have proliferated. The word itself has been in use for some years now, and though some other names (e-serial, e-journal) have been tossed around, "e-zine" and the abbreviation "zine" seem to be the lasting favorites. Formed from the combination of "electronic" and "magazine," "e-zine" is almost a misnomer. It might be more proper (if less catchy) to call these publications Web periodicals, because they mimic on the Web the full spectrum of print periodicals.

E-zines come in all the same formats (and then some) as their print counterparts, covering material found in newspapers and magazines, professional newsletters and literary journals, entertainment newsweeklies—and any hobby or interest you can think of. Some of these zines spring from existing print publications, while some were begun solely on the Web—and still others, like
Me Head, were begun jointly as Web and print projects.

The Web sites of print-based periodicals, like The Economist and The Stranger, use article style and graphic design similar to the original printed page. Even ad and subscription practices remain similar: The Economist requires you to subscribe in order to access most of their Web site, while The Stranger, distributed freely in its hometown of Seattle, is available free to anyone who types in www.thestranger.com. Some zines, like Millennium, are print publications that were scanned and made into PDF files that live on the Web for you to download.

Other zines, like Salon and Synesthesia, were created specifically for the Internet. Most of these depart from print style. Salon, follows print-like standards for article style, but has a penchant for quirky social commentaries that would be less usual in a print periodical. Synesthesia, on the other hand, could not exist in print: It's a collection-in-process of Flash poetry, which of course never existed before the Web, and combines visual motion—which of course is unprintable—with the more traditional print concept of a poetry journal.

Because of the Internet's technology, the reach for audience is shortened amazingly, like beaming the paper down to the planet's surface, a la Star Trek. All you need are coordinates. And since an e-zine is constantly being beamed "out" to everyone, the reader can connect with this constant feed through these coordinates—the URL. So absolutely anyone with a computer can potentially receive any publication.

Of course, luring Internet users to these coordinates in the first place is a challenge—links from other Web sites and search engine positioning take the place of phone calls and door-to-door soliciting. Hits to a Web site and the list of user names—if the zine requires them—are a new way of gauging readership. One way of retaining readers once the e-zine has attracted them is to mail a copy of the zine, or blurbs, or a certain article, directly to their e-mail address periodically.

Furthermore, the Web is a cheap method of mass production. This means that more and more people are able to muster the capital to fund a Web site, and whatever publication has been lurking around in the back of their mind (which you thought was best left there) might suddenly see production. Scary, huh?

Interactivity. The reader's ability to respond directly to and to expect relatively immediate response from an e-zine is what truly separates e-zines from print periodicals. E-zines are a dialogue where print is a monologue.

Print periodicals exist to inform or entertain a selected audience. A certain authority is expected from the writers. As a reader, letters to the editor (which may or may not get printed) and classified ads are pretty much the only bit of information you contribute to the paper. On the other hand, the reader can generally expect quality, reliable information from reputable print publications. The smaller number of periodicals per topic or per town weeds out the uninformed, the untrustworthy, or the undependable written product. At least one hopes.

Web periodicals are not governed by these traditional writer/reader roles. Because the very nature of the Web is to be interactive, utilizing these capabilities is almost inescapable. It's like Pandora's box: Once you've experienced dialogue-driven zines, could you pack them back into a box and never use them again? Who will accept a monologue when there can be a dialogue? And who can resist putting their two cents into the discussion?

The ways in which zines can be interactive are numerous. CNN.com includes an immediate-response poll, called "Quick Vote," where a surfer can answer the question and then see to-the-minute results of all the readers' responses. Cosmopolitan Magazine's online version includes the traditional Cosmo Quiz—but now it tallies the results for you.

MSNBC, invites the reader to "Enter your ZIP code to get local news, sports, and weather." At this and many other sites each reader receives a tailor-made version rather than a generic one-size-fits-all package—the most extreme form of this being portal sites, like MyYahoo or MSN, which allow you to include news, weather, daily comics or horoscopes, and much more, according to your choice (from a their list, not from the whole Web). Then, you can use them as your personalized home page/morning paper.

On some sites the Web's potential for interactivity goes beyond an increased participation of the audience with the writer. On these sites the readers and the writers are one and the same. Donuty's discussion board is an integral part of the zine. It invites the readers to "Send us a story or anecdote about an experience in a donut shop. We'll post it here. Or go straight to the story submission section and post a story right now." Thus, the readers of the zine become participating writers.

These writers are what you might call "drop-in" writers: They wouldn't have decided to write for the site except that it was there, interesting, and easily accessible. The other kinds of zine writers are hobbyists who write for zines for fun, in their spare time, and career staff and freelance writers, for whom "Web content creation" is a paying job.

This Web-wide opportunity for interactivity raises the question: Why does the staff writer for The New York Times know any more than I do? However, another question is raised as well: With all these various zines springing up, whose writing do you trust? All writing must rely upon its own merit, not just the author's reputation, and readers must do their own fact checking and evaluations. As the folks at Absolute Authority on E-zines say, "here, the Absolute Authority is YOU!"

One site, spark-online, says it leans heavily towards editorial-style submissions because they are more suited to the Web than "rational, argumentative-style" stories. An editorial format eases the reader's tension as to whose facts to trust; instead, they decide which opinions they agree with.

Articles on the Web are informal compared to their print counterparts. The possibilities of interactivity make reading online more like chatting with a friend over coffee than attending a lecture or sitting in a business presentation. And since no one person is in charge, it becomes rather rude to take a formal tone. Even the legal disclaimer at Urban Downpour, a Seattle nightlife zine, becomes fun and chatty: "Anyone can submit a story, regardless of age, race, gender, educational affiliation, favorite TV show, etc."

The dialogue of e-zines affects not only writing style: It also affects structure of the zine. While a print periodical selects and caters to a community, the e-zine in and of itself can create and sustain a live, involved community. For example: Paul and Jen both read the print magazine, Hot Rod, but they've never met. Then Paul and Jen discover American Racing 'Zine, which includes a bulletin board called ShopTalk. Through ShopTalk, they discover their common interest and become friends—and become part of a larger community made up of American Racing 'Zine readers.

Gumball Poetry includes an online poetry workshop which anyone can participate in; Pif Magazine includes a "Writers Only" section—a posting board where writers can find each other. And some zines help to sustain a community. Professional e-mail lists, like the Seattle Writergrrls, for instance, have spawned zines as a way to showcase their work and share their experiences.

Plastic is an example of interactive zine activity taken to the extreme. Participants sign up, suggest existing news stories (gleaned from other online publications), and then join in reviewing and chatting about these stories. Each person's commentary is rated by other readers, and commentary that is consistently insightful or funny or interesting enough, gets pushed up to the top of the response string, and the writer win points. Enough points, and you get to be one of Plastic's editors—who are able to accept and reject story suggestions, and to assign or take away more than one point for each posting.

Is Plastic a zine? Well, maybe not quite, if a zine is defined by the same criteria as its print counterparts. Web periodicals have a new criteria, and Plastic exploits the interactive qualities of the Web as medium.

Another effective exploiter of the Web as medium is Blogger, a collection of diaries that are interlinked with one another. But Blogger stretches the definition of a Web periodical. Should we consider online diaries to be zines, in that they are periodically updated, published works? Or does the subject matter of a zine have to be more public, and less personal?

Does there have to be a winner and loser?

It looks like we'll have both print and Web periodicals for a long time to come. And though more and more people may be getting online for published news and entertainment, I know there are some things I still want newspapers for. There is something comforting about the act of spreading out the paper, of folding it up—a more personal interaction: As with books, I love to feel the paper in my hand. And can you imagine Sundays without dividing up the sections of the paper with family members, fighting your brothers for the funnies?

Then again, e-zines can be quite appealing, too. For one thing, I can make one of my own—and provided I know a cool Web designer, it might look good, too.

One thing they have in common, though. Papers and e-zines come in different packages, smell different and look different, but your cat will always try to sit in front of you while you're reading.

• The Absolute Authority on E-zines (click on Directories in the navigation bar to the left)
• eZINE Search: World's Ultimate e-Magazine Database
• The Etext Archives

For more discussion of the printed word's transition to the Web, see Steve Outing's Stop the Presses column in Editor & Publisher Online.

Top ten differences between e-zines and newspapers by Melanie Scott and Stephanie A. Shenk

10. E-zines never smell like wet dogs
9. You can't make a boat or a hat out of an e-zine
8. You can't e-mail a link to a newspaper
7. E-zines don't dissolve in water
6. E-zines don't cost more on Sundays
5. E-zines don't kill trees
4. You don't have to tip the e-zine delivery boy
3. You can't line your birdcage with an e-zine
2. E-zines don't get ink on your fingers

and the number one difference between e-zines and newspapers. . .

1. Silly putty doesn't work on computer screens

Stephanie Shenk has been working as an editor and writer in Seattle for the past two years. After a romp through England (bartending), Louisiana (reporting), and San Francisco (surviving), she’s settling down, slaking her thirst for adventure by working as a contractor.