Z – Zines
04/30/2014 8 Comments
Rather than end the A to Z Challenge with a bang, I think I’m going to end it with a half-joke.
What the heck happened to Zines?
I mean, they seemed like a fad, I suppose, anyway, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised they’re gone. What were they, you ask? To merriam-webster.com!
Zine:
“a small magazine that is written by people who are not professional writers and that usually has stories about a particular subject”
e-Zine:
“an electronic magazine : a magazine that is on the Internet”
Oh… wait a minute… do they mean a blog?
Blog:
“a Web site on which someone writes about personal opinions, activities, and experiences”
So… kind of. Mostly. Maybe? There are probably a number of Blogs which might be more accurately Zines or e-Zines, maybe especially ones that have a specific subject, and which have multiple writers.
I didn’t end up going with my original plan for the letter M which was going to be Magazines… I felt like I was beating on them enough between Journalism and Newspapers. And because I knew eventually I would be writing about Zines… was it supposed to be the cool, hip, trendy, online word for a magazine? Was it supposed to catch on? Can you choose and control those sorts of things? Or do they just naturally happen – like the adoption of the word Blog instead.
I don’t know. But it seemed like a fun word to close out the A to Z Challenge with! Do you read any Zines? Or did you ever? Let me know in the comments below!
About CompGeeksDavid
DBCII 
Blogs killed zines. Plus, punk is dead. I actually wrote a few reviews for a local zine that had maybe two issues? Putting together a decent zine takes a lot of work, and even if you have a great product, most people don’t really care and there’s no ROI. You could spend hours and hours cutting up photos for collages and articles, take it down to kinkos and pay for lots of photocopies to staple together into booklets that end up in the trash 5 minutes after someone picks it up, or you could join wordpress. 😀
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That amount of work does sound like the sort I put into a really good blog post – ones where I use lots of visuals, or better ones where I make the visuals myself. Definitely nice to self-publish those, and have them live online for people to find! Yay WordPress!
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In high school I had a couple of articles published in Devo’Zine, a teen devotional magazine put out through “The Upper Room.” It was a great way for me to get excited about writing and seeing my name in print, but I don’t think they’re still around…
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I feel like the person who came up with the name of that Zine did not know how Zine was pronounced. If you pronounce “Zine” like “Djinn” you almost get Devotion out of it…
And yeah, getting people excited about writing and a byline, but that all happens online anymore, with blogs and social media, I guess.
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I never thought of blog as a type of zine!
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But it kind of is, right? Thanks for stopping by!
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I know I read some Zines, but I can’t remember their names. And aren’t there a few big websites that started out calling themselves ‘Zines?
I think blogs are partly responsible for their demise (and yes, there are a lot of similarities). I also think changes in the internet in general and the way social media has developed made them superfluous. Who needs someone else’s ‘Zine when you can build your own with a news aggregator?
And now we have things like Paper, which will automatically pull links from many sources, publish on a schedule, and even lay out the articles so they feel like a publication. ( http://paper.li/ )
Just thinking back on it now (and my memory is very fuzzy), ‘Zines seem like an attempt to bring the print media model online.
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Oh. And congrats on finishing the challenge! It almost got away from me at the end, so I wasn’t able to stop by as much as I wanted to. Just getting caught up with a lot of blogs I was following before the challenge now.
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