January Magazine has been publishing continuously since 1997. That’s a deliciously long time to have been doing anything. We have accomplished so much of what we set out to do in 1997. (1997!) In some ways, even more.
In many ways it feels as though we at January Magazine evolved the format that has become associated with blogging. A decade ago, when everyone else was still loading up Web sites with additions that offered a lot of sizzle but not much steak, we found ourselves almost entirely concerned with content: great writing, well edited; top art; super photos. At that time we envisioned a Web site about books and authors and reading that would grow more rich and intellectually valuable over time.
Another one of our early goals was a site that updated every day and a date at the top of the page that would give the reader a clear and honest indication that something new had been added on the date listed. Since those of us who hatched January mostly came from traditional print backgrounds, we knew that we wanted the material at the “top of the fold” to be the freshest we had on offer and that what came next — the newest stuff — should push the next newest lower on the page. Does that sound like a thought so simple it doesn’t require mentioning? And yet, when we began, these thoughts were so new, people laughed at us. Out loud.
What else? We talked a lot — a lot — about content. Again, steak before sizzle. And in an environment where newly minted “content creators” were writing in-depth stories in short, angry bytes, we were publishing 10,000 word interviews with people like Martin Amis and Margaret Atwood and 40,000 word features (I’m not making this up) on people like seminal crime fictionist Ross Macdonald.
We didn’t try to boil our reviews down to bite-sized bits so small that their meaning became lost. Instead of embracing the idea that, in the digital age, readers had suddenly developed the attention spans of underdeveloped hamsters, we went the other way. We understood — as we still understand — that our readers are intelligent people who care about books and the people who make them. In fact, we knew they were so intelligent that they were perfectly capable of making decisions about how much of anything we published they wanted to read. They didn’t need us to boil it all down to point form: they had the smarts to pull the points out themselves if desired. We felt our readers deserved everything: all of the information we had so that they could make the decisions on what they read by themselves. And since we didn’t have the restrictions of column inches or a finite number of pages, or the blood of a million trees on our hands, our writers could party with the material that moved their hearts. Then our readers could party with all of the information they were looking for. And everyone loves a party.
In 2006, we spun January Magazine’s crime fiction newsletter, The Rap Sheet, out onto its own in blog form under the care of J. Kingston Pierce, the editor who had conceived the concept of a crime fiction component for January in the first place. The Rap Sheet in blog form has been so successful, we were encouraged to try it with January, which we did also that year. And now, we’re making yet another change. Moving from the Blogger format that has been the home of January Magazine’s front end for nearly a decade, to a WordPress CMS that will hopefully be our final move — at least for the next decade — as it should be able to accommodate any future changes we might need to make.
This is a big change for us. I hope you’ll forgive any little bumps we might hit as we make the transition. Most of all, though, I hope you continue to enjoy the journey. I know I speak for everyone at January when I say that we certainly have. As always, thanks so much for joining us.
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