Why isn’t everyone doing it?

Why isn’t everyone doing this, I asked myself the other day.

Well, of course there’s a reason – it’s kind of insane. One person can’t really go up against the huge media conglomerates. To publish a magazine – even online – takes money and time and people skills and other things most working journalists and freelance writers don’t have much of, as I know from experience.

Yet I’m still a little surprised to look around me and not see the Internet landscape littered with other on-line magazines published by my contemporaries and former workmates. (Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.) When I started this blog, which I then spun off into an online magazine, it seemed like a bit of a no-brainer; then again, if someone had told me what a money and time drain it would be, and the chances of success (nil to none), I probably wouldn’t have taken it on.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post – that I’m taking the blog in a different direction.

Up until now it’s been a showcase for odds ‘n’ ends that I didn’t think were right for the site proper (that is, The Snipe). In fact the site developed out of the blog (The Snipe was originally known as Guttersnipe as well) and I originally wanted to keep it going as an adjunct to the main site. But since it’s become harder and harder to find time to update it and anyway, except for the odd Shoe Star profile, there’s not much I think belongs on the blog instead of the site, well, I haven’t been feeling very inspired.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I now want to use the blog for what a blog is meant to be – something far more personal than regular journalistic enterprises. Usually on The Snipe we like to keep at least some journalistic standards, but on Guttersnipe I’ll be throwing all that out the window.

So what can you expect, for those of you still with me? I think one of the topics I want to discuss is editing and publishing a website. I’ve learned a lot in the two-and-a-half-years I’ve been running this thing, and I’m going to share as much of it as I can remember with you, the reader.

Which brings me back to, Why aren’t more working journalists and freelance writers online publishing their own magazine? The answer of course is, because most of them are too busy, or aren’t ego’d out enough to think they can make it work. They don’t have anything to prove, they don’t have a grudge against former employers (and employers to dense to hire them, haha) to inspire them.

I admit to all of these unseemly human motivations. However, I also remember fantasizing about having my own magazine (Vibe I think the teenaged me wanted to call it. Seriously). This memory is something that’s really only occurred to me in recent days, and though I don’t put too much stock in it – I also had daydreams about marrying Pat Benatar and being the last man on Earth, fighting hordes of vampire-zombies – it reassures me to know that at least part of my motivation originates at a time before all the other creaky motivations of adulthood crept in.