Printing the users' content

I just discovered what is arguably the world's first magazine whose content is 100% user-generated. It's called Notebook and is printed and distributed for free every month in Zurich and in a couple of other Swiss cities (total circulation of 30'000). It is made exclusively of pictures and short texts (max 750 characters) submitted by its readers through a rather simple website.

Now, this is counterintuitive. "User-generated" is a concept generally attached to online platforms such as blogs, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube etc, and refers to content produced by readers and users, as opposed to that created by media professionals. Applying this model to print is quite a novelty. Several newspapers and other publications have been experimenting with columns and other formats involving their readers, as I wrote in a previous post, but to my knowledge Notebook is the first that goes the whole way.

Notebook was launched 8 months ago by writer and publisher Rainer Kuhn (right in the picture) and designer Thomas von Ah. At the beginning they sparked the  mechanism "by asking some friends to submit their photos and stories". But they picked those friends carefully: "only a handful of them, people whom we knew could contribute texts and visuals in a new way and help give a certain tonality, humour, originality to the magazine", explains von Ah. Then, once the magazine started circulating, average readers started contributing, "playing off that formula". The most recent issue, whose cover is below, contains some 220 items, only about 30 of them coming from that core group of people, all the others the result of voluntary submissions.

The magazine lives of advertising, but a key tenet of the model is that nobody (except the two founders) gets paid to contribute. People send in texts and images. Kuhn selects them ("I leave out obviously abusive and obviously uninteresting stuff") but doesn't edit anything: "Headlines and texts appear in the magazine the way they're submitted by the readers". The items are organized by day, like in a monthlong diary. At the end of the month, von Ah takes what Kuhn has selected for publication, lays out the magazine, creates a list of all the contributors (every item carries their initials, and the index page their full names) and sends the whole to the printer. Around the 8 or 9 of every month (so the next is due soon) Notebook is distributed in restaurants and cafés, clubs, shops, sent per mail to subscribers, and made available in full in PDF on the site for downloading.

Reading through the issues, one immediately senses the discontinuity that comes with an open-source approach to creating a magazine, where pearls share the pages with snapshots of secondary interest, and hilarious bits are next to rather impervious ones. But as a whole the magazine is good entertainment, offering a polychromatic vision of the world, and that's how Kuhn intends it: "My job is to moderate normal people to entertain normal people", he says.

Notebook is a print product. They could have done this online, but they went to print because "it remains sexier", and "it is a sort of collector item: at the end of the year you have a collectively-created yearlong journal", but also because there are still bigger advertising budgets to be captured with a print product, at least for the time being. The idea came to Kuhn while he was vacationing in Asia to "do some diary of things that people are surrounded with, and which are not the topics of traditional media". When you read the newspapers, he says, "you realize that the stories they make big are socially important but not that big in people's lives", that other bits and jots matter, and that's what Notebook is about. Think of it as a collective scrapbook, a print lifecaching tool of sorts.

What's the target readership of such a publication? "People that have a 'bounce' lifestyle", answers Thomas von Ah: "they tend to take stuff in and bounce it out to others", a mobile crowd that goes through the world with open eyes, "acutely aware of small moments and geared to freeze them in a picture or a short sentence" and then "bounce" (share) them - in this case, on paper.

One of the things that surprised me reading Notebook is how big events such as, say, the Street Parade in Zurich or the football (soccer) World Cup don't take over entire issues. Nor is Kuhn "censoring" those pictures: people just don't send them in. "I think we have managed to root the magazine in everyday cool and interesting moments, by giving it that tonality from the beginning", he says.

I'm grateful to Thomas and Rainer for taking the time to talk about Notebook, because I've been toying with a similar idea myself for a while now - ever since writing a post earlier this year about a Dutch project - Startlog - to create a magazine with blog-generated content, and discussing that concept with a couple of publishers. I understand that Startlog is no longer: "during the process of creating the magazine we realized that all existing media are very eager to use blog/user-generated content", Jorrit Kreek, one of the founders, told me in an e-mail. So they're going to set up instead a sort of agency that will play intermediary between the bloggers and the potential buyers: both "old" (newspapers and magazines) and "new-ish" (websites).

It seems to me that user-generated content has some interesting potential in print. More on this in further posts, but any idea/suggestion/contrarian view is welcome.

UPDATE 20 Sept 06 - Web-to-print update

Comments

[Derek Powazek]

Note: We've been running a community-created magazine for two years, and just relaunched it with better tools. Check out JPG Magazine: http://jpgmag.com

[BG]

Thanks for the comment Derek: in fact, I blogged JPGmag in a further post:
http://giussani.typepad.com/loip/2006/09/webtoprint_upda.html