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It’s “zine” fashion

Posted in Media, Digital, Nikki Preston, Latest reporters' blogs April 10th, 2007 by Nikki Preston

Whether you are a magazine, book or online publisher the latest trend in publishing seems to be to publish something that has a link with a magazine, whether it is technically one or not.

According to the Oxford Dictionary a magazine is a “periodical publication containing articles and illustrations”. This however indicates that online publications that are updated continuously, such as Idiomag’s online music aggregator, which was rolled out to UK consumers this week, updates user’s personal pages every three hours is simply an impersonator and as it is not “periodical” is more fitting as a news wire or blog site.

Even magazine publishers News Mags, Condé Nast and contract publisher John Brown have launched “bookazines” in the past few months, but apart from adapting the novel term it seems like just a cheapskate way of publishing a book - minus the costly printing expense.

Similarly online publishers, which are certainly proving a formidable rival to print magazine publishers, have combined the words “electronic” and “magazine” together to develop “e-zines” or “e-mags” such as digital lads mag Monkey or teenage girls magazine Jellyfish.

However, the term “zine” is being taken too far and are companies suddenly adopting the term just to get better coverage as they think that somehow “magazines” have more prestige than simply being labelled an “online website”.

Any company considering jumping on the “zine” bandwagon should be asking themselves why indeed they actually need to use the vocabulary of magazines to boast such new and innovative products that are being produced in this day and age, especially when traditional print magazines continue to face growing pressure from these newer and sassier rivals.