Paper and ink? In this economy?
Please. There’s no need to call us corporate geniuses and business visionaries. We know.
It’s 2024. Zuck decides elections, your boss (or dad) is likely trying to work out how to replace you with AI, and Google probably owns your genome. Bow before your Big Tech masters, and tremble. Now is the age of Digital Everything. Naturally, we decided to start a print magazine.
But then, we also picked ‘Christian, sweary, boozy and Socialist’ as our podcast niche$. We go where the money isn’t, so that you don’t have to not. That’s our slogan. #grindset.
With distribution channels shrinking, the odds of getting an indie religious mag on the shelves of your local newsagent are about as favourable as that newsagent’s long-term chances of survival. The whole business of setting up a magazine is wildly expensive and every year someone else proclaims the death of print.
Why the hell would we start a physical magazine?
The answer is that we are idiots, obviously. But, also: we believe in magazines. We love them. And not just because there is something very satisfying about holding a physical artefact in your hands, excited because you’re about to embark on a journey of delight and discovery, through content and images created and curated by experts and artists*. It’s also because magazines are better than the internet.
They aren’t as cheap, of course. And they can’t anticipate your desires or tailor content to your specific set of market-segmented taste clusters like a good algorithm can. And magazines don’t deliver dopamine in titillatingly titrated doses like ADHD medication. But, at their best, they offer more than all the convenience, speed and targeted gratification of even TikTok. Because they don’t give us what we want.
More accurately: they don’t just give us what we know we want. And that’s a beautiful thing.
The web is brilliant at answering our questions, but not at answering questions we didn’t know we had. Algorithms are getting great at giving us ever more segmented and rarefied content that suits our tastes and mirrors our prejudices. And digital can be a wonderful platform for discovery, if what we want is more of the same.
But an entire print publication can do something else. Something we think is better. A newspaper might draw you in with a headline or the promise of a loved cartoon or columnist. A magazine might catch your eye with its cover, or offer interviews with people you would put on your fantasy dinner guest team. All of which you can find online. But as you turn physical pages to get to things you know you want, you’ll pass by things you didn’t know you did. Articles you’d never search for. Issues not of obvious interest to who the algorithm thinks you are. Opinions you do not hold.
Hyperlinks bypass accidental knowledge and synchronicitous discovery. Search engines take us to exactly the information we want (or at least they used to), and automated ‘recommended for you’ sections (now included at the bottom of literally everything) suggest products based mostly on a machine’s idea of what people ‘just like us’ should like. All carefully sifted through the mesh of ad-spend and the interests of capital.
A magazine, if you’ve chosen wisely, will give you what you want, what you expect, and a bunch more besides. Articles you would not have thought to search for. Interviews with people you’ve never heard of, and invitations to information you never knew you needed.
It’s also, if you’re chronically online as we† are, a nice respite from the angst-inducing speed and connectedness to everyone and everything all at once that digital provides.
That’s not to say the print is always great – the multinational capital machine, that owns much of the media, curates opinions and frames news in collaboration with the wishes of empire, and that, frankly, can suck. Deeply. It can also occasionally be pretty good, if we’re honest, because great journalists and editors also gotta eat. But, importantly, it’s not happening here. We have no billionaire backers making us fat off the commodification of revolution or religion∆. We are, for our sins or by the grace of God, an indie mag.
Independent magazines are not automatically good for the world, but we are hoping this one will be. At least as a space where people of good intention do not feel so alone and out of step with a world gone mad on war and greed. And as an alternative to religious spaces cluttered with purity tests, narrow obsessions and ever-shrinking tables.
What we’re hoping to do here is offer some breathing room, to stop and think, to explore frontiers you’ve rarely seen mapped, and to feel accompanied on the journey we ourselves are making. One page at a time.
Or two, if you’re looking at the spreads. That’s how you’re meant to look at them. That’s fine.
We’ve no idea if this publication will ‘work’ (in the sense of making enough money to sustain itself for long or, fingers crossed, pay a few people’s salaries), but we’re hopeful. There are more people occupying this space than we’ve all been led to believe. That’s part of the problem we’re trying to address.
Right now, though, we’re more concerned with trying to provide a kind of antidote to (or maybe just dilution of) the media that seems only to paint the parameters of faith as narrow, fearful and angry at all the wrong things.
Because we don’t think that’s how it has to be.
And we don’t think you have to be a visionary or a genius to see that.
So here we are. A magazine. We hope you read it, and we hope you subscribe and tell your friends about it. More than that, we hope you enjoy it. We’re proud of this little library of art and ideas. We hope you’ll join us for more.
♡
– Jonts, Malks, Lau and the team.
This article appears in Issue 1 of S(h)ibboleth magazine. You should check out the rest of it. Order now.
$Beer Christianity is a podcast listened to by literally dozens of people worldwide.
*This is quite a high bar, please moderate your expectations when approaching this publication’s specific wonders.
† See credits for culprits.
∆ Don’t threaten us with a good time.