Wiretap Magazine, my old employer,
Wiretap Magazine, my old employer, had a nice little piece on print zines, and where they might go in the age of message board communities, chat rooms, and weblogs. I became a zine reader when I moved to San Francisco, and have struggled valiantly to keep up with those that intrigued me. Yet while being a zinester has a low bar to entry (part of the appeal), being a loyal fan is a pain in the neck. Zines by nature are ephemeral, flames of creative energy, quickly extinguished. Zinesters bore easily and rarely print second runs of back issues (therefore if you pick up issue #9 and love it, issues #1-8 are probably already a memory) and distribution houses, usually the tireless work of one person, go out of business very quickly. Even the old big ass catalogs are mostly gone. Finally, without recommendations from other zine reading friends (of which I have exactly none), quality is a very slippery proposition.
Yet I push on. The giddyness and zeal of putting words on paper just because you have to no matter who listens, no matter how ghetto your Kinko’s copied pages are, is what independent media’s all about. And a big part of what I’m about too.
And just what the hell are zines?