Thanks to Gawker, I found The New York Times' second article about zines. For the second time in a month, the paper of record is looking at those hand-crafted, independant publications produced by generations of starving writers.
Turns out the producers of the new magazine Lemon grab the street cred of zines while pumping $35,000 of advertising into this "labor of love." Are people really going to buy a pseudo-zine that steals the homemade aesthetic from poor kids and tries to sell it back to the same poor kids for eight bucks a pop?
More importantly, I wonder what would our friend Jenna Freedman would say about all these new bling-filled zines?
Check it out...
"Lemon No. 1, which appeared on store shelves in February and promises "pop culture with a twist," has an unusual square shape, a thick textured cover and glossy full-color pages containing paens to Bill Murray, gothic horror novels and Polish movie posters. And it smells like, well, lemon."
"With the $7.95 cover price and $35,000 worth of ads from corporate sponsors Puma, Paul Frank, Adobe and Canada Goose, Mr. Grady and his partners will probably break even on the first issue's 8,000 copies, which cost about $45,000 to produce. But, Mr. Grady said, "I don't know if we'll ever pay for our time."
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Jenna Freedman weighs in via email. I thought the note sounded good enough to include whole in the comments...
Freedman says:
"Ew, no! I'm not sure Lemon meets any of my criteria for what defines a zine.
1. Self-published and the publisher doesn’t answer to anyone
If you've got $35K in ads, pleasing your CORPORATE advertisers would have
to influence your content.
2. Small, self-distributed print run
8,000 isn't a huge print run for a magazine, but it is about 80x what a
likely average for zines might be.
3. Motivated by desire to express oneself rather than to make money
The creators may not be expecting to make money, but this does seem to be
an ego driven experiment in a way that zines are not.
4. Outside the mainstream
They would probably argue for this, but I would counter that this magazine
as art object (an idea that isn't new, by the new) targets a group that
while not exactly mainstream, is of a privileged class, and therefore has
other forms of communication. Zines may be primarily the work of white
kids of middle class origins, but the zinesters themselves rarely have
control over an significant amount of money, nor do members of their
readership.
5. Low budget
The creators might call their product low budget, but according to my math
they cost $5.625 each magazine to make. That sounds pretty inaccessible to
me. The only thing that DOES sound zinelike is the likelihood that they'll
lose money on the proposition.
Lemon may be a wonderful publication; I have no idea. But it's certainly
not a zine.
Jenna"
Posted by: Jason Boog | May 9, 2006 9:49 AM | Permalink to Comment