"You have to have a mission when you're publishing; otherwise you have nothing."

Jobs, jobs and more jobs?   What's a FOB editor do anyway? Class schedule for when you're not producing,,, Production schedule or from here to the end. . . Some random prototype ideas to get you thinking (somewhat) less randomly.

What is Advanced Magazine

Advanced Magazine is a production-oriented workshop in which students, working in small groups, develop and produce prototype magazines from concept to camera-ready. Each group comes up with an idea for a magazine[1] ; prepares a mission statement, bare-bones business plan and editorial calendar; creates design elements and a look for its publication; and then plans, writes, edits, illustrates, photographs, lays out and produces a prototype magazine... all within six weeks!

Pre-requisites

There are no official pre-requisites for Advanced Magazine, although Narrative, Online and Newspaper workshops all provide skills that should prove useful.

How it will work, Part I?

You have two choices.

1. You can get together with a group of your fellow students and decide in advance on a magazine project you collectively want to take on. I'll need to approve the project first.
2. Or you can leave it up to me to assign you to a group and then decide among yourselves on your project. I'll still need to OK it.

What's a group?

Essentially, you'll need five-six people for your group. Within the group, you'll have collective duties (basically, making sure the magazine is as good as it can be), individual jobs (Editor, Art Director, Photo Editor, Front/Back-of-the-Book Editor, Features Editor, Copyeditor/Fact-checking Coordinator... see job descriptions later) and the usual assortment of assigned writing, photography, editing and fact-checking assignments to keep you from getting bored...

What this means in terms of putting together a group is that you should look for people who not only share an interest in the magazine project you want to produce but who also bring complementary skills to the group.

You'll need someone in each group who's comfortable with Quark and Photoshop and who has an "eye" for good magazine design. You'll also want a leader-type, not to forget an anal-retentive nit-picky type!

How it will work, Part II:

As in other production workshops, there are scheduled class times and a production schedule . Don't plan on a lot of time off!

During the first three weeks, we'll be operating on at least two, more likely three parallel tracks.

As a class, we'll get together to talk about the magazine business and how it works and how you can apply that to your project planning.

There will also be a bunch of mini-workshops:

• For students who didn't get Quark or Photoshop training in one of their previous workshops, Blair Purdy will take the mystery out of it all.
• Michael Creagen will offer a couple of sessions on photography,  including at least one that will focus specifically on the creative side of magazine photography.
• Tim Currie will talk about almost everything you ever wanted to know about magazine design.
• Heather White, editor of Saltscapes Magazine, will offer a fact-checking and magazine editing seminar.

At the same time, you'll be organizing your own group meetings to fine-tune your individual magazine proposals and plan your prototype issues. Most of this work should be done in the first week.

Not to forget, writing, editing, taking photos...

During the last three weeks of the Workshop, there may be a number of special classes and/or workshops (time and place TBA) on issues related to magazine production -- and lots of time spent on actual production, of course -- but only one regularly scheduled class for everyone each week. We'll have an update meeting every Thursday at 1 p.m. so each group can report to the collective on its progress and/or problems and get advice, solace and renewal. During the other two listed class times, the individual groups can use the class space to schedule their own meetings to discuss what's been accomplished and figure out how to accomplish what's left to do.

Grading:

Producing a magazine is a collective exercise so you will be — mostly — judged on the quality of the magazine your group produces in the time available. That said, I reserve the right to use my power of marking to reward individual effort or punish slackers who don't pull their weight in their group.

[1] Previous groups have produced magazine prototypes on a variety of subjects for a variety of audiences: we've had city magazines, a magazine for and about Atlantic Canada's film industry, magazines aimed at twentysomething readers, a food-travel magazine about "the intersection of food and culture," a magazine aimed at junior high school students, etc.. There are a couple of examples of complete prototype magazines (in .pdf format) on the web site (http://journalism.ukings.ca/journalism_3776.html ), and some mounted magazine covers on the wall at the corner between Bruce Wark's office and Sue Newhook's. You can come up with your own idea, steal and modify an old one, or pick one from the suggestions at the end of this document.