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Editorial challenges in the digital era:

a proposal for building an online magazine

Francisco Gil, Universidade do Algarve, Portugal (fgil@ualg.pt)

Abstract: A magazine is a means of communication that acts as a platform for different

social discourses, included or excluded from the hegemonic media circle. Traditionally,
a generalist magazine or a magazine includes different contents of different topics and
authors, using paper as a physical support. Since the end of the 20th century, with the
increasing massification of electronic devices connected to data networks for Internet
access, the paradigm has changed, causing new ways of producing and transmitting
information to readers. This work aims to show the development of an editorial project
that, with the objective of giving voice to different points of view on transversal topics
to society, proposes to adopt the new editorial paradigm and adapt to the new reality in
accessing content for dialogue, and sharing ideas. The study methodology is based on
the analysis of reading patterns and access to content through electronic devices, which
allows the adoption of a responsive design for the publication of chronicles,
photographic images, comics and comic strips in a fully electronic, online and open
access format.

Keywords: responsive design; digital media; online magazine.

Introduction
The project to build an online e-journal emerged before the pandemic period. It was in
the first months of 2019 when we raised some problematic issues in the general context,
we were in. There were no confinements, no curfew in a Europe characterized by
widespread peace and well-being (although there were still localized outbreaks of
poverty). But there was a strong desire to intervene and share views.
From a motivational perspective, we understand that the restlessness and the
questions/problems we then raised are indicators of a certain level of personal needs
such as the need for self-actualization. Silva et al. (2006) describe the need for self-
actualization, according to Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, as the needs for
growth, potential achievement, i.e., pleasure in work, and achievement of goals and
personal development.
These were the very concrete questions we raised: we have an opinion, we want to share
our work, our ideas, and concerns about the world we live in. How to do it
independently? What form should it take? How to reach our peers?
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In developing the project, we believe that the appropriate format would be an online
electronic publication. The question of independence has also been approached in a very
coherent way. As an author's edition, we decided to assume all expenses and develop a
publication to share with our friends, acquaintances, and other interested parties. It is
not our goal to make a profit, nor to rely on advertising. Costs should be contained to
the size of a small bag.
We contacted some opinionated friends who like to write and others who like to draw
and, in a few days, all were challenged to collaborate in the project, sending their
monthly contributions on a voluntary and pro bono basis. Texts, comic strips,
photographs. You name it. We want a publication for dialogue and exchange of ideas.
In any field of knowledge and, above all, in the communication of science and the
problems facing the world.
Today, we are all much closer through communication resources and technologies. So,
the exchange of views, social intervention has every reason to occur, with the
availability of content, text and images on a website, blog, or webzine.

Means of dissemination
The massification of the Internet, a global network of interconnected computers, and the
World Wide Web, a system of existing documents on the Internet that allow access to
information in hypertext format, occurred in the 1990s (Monteiro, 2001) allowing
access to a large number of users to the most differentiated online content. Business
companies began to adapt to the new platforms, expanding their areas of operation. In
the media field, newspapers and magazines have adapted their editions to the new
devices and, in some cases, new titles created specifically for the Internet are also
emerging. New communication platforms and technologies are differentiated and
accessible to many readers, thus increasing the dissemination of content. Devices such
as desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. are now probably the
privileged platforms for access to information by the younger generations.
The emergence of new devices is not necessarily the reason for the disappearance of
traditional formats, despite the difficulties for traditional titles to survive. Traditional
editions, books, newspapers, magazines, discs, despite technological pressure and
production costs, continue to occupy a prominent place in the universe of many readers.
Take the case of vinyl records, with the renaissance of new commercial editions. Long
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Play vinyl records, which many thoughts would disappear completely with the
appearance of CD-Audio compact discs and the growing diffusion of streaming music
in MP3 or AAC format.
Paper publications, aimed at the public, emerged in the 19th century with the social
changes and the decline of the old aristocratic regimes. The liberal revolutions that
occurred somewhat throughout the Western world have provided an increasing decrease
of illiteracy and the progressive strengthening of a consumerist middle class that, in a
market context, increased the demand and supply of production in the most varied
publishing areas. This period of post-industrial revolution, as referred to by Aquino &
Martins (2007), creates a new social time, which we can call free time, which refers to
human actions performed without external need, where subjects make use of this time
with total freedom and creativity, depending on their awareness of the value of their
time. This new social time, opens space to a series of social activities, which allow the
growth of the so-called cultural and artistic productions, where music, theater, literature,
comics, cinema, etc., begin to proliferate, as professional activities of great economic
and social impact begin to proliferate.
It is in a context of economic, social and technological development, that cyclically,
with its ups and downs, artistic and cultural manifestations have emerged in the last 200
years that today, with great commitment, have tried to adapt to new platforms,
technological devices, as a response to new ways of life in society and, of course, also
to the almost compulsory seclusion in times of pandemic. As Mcluhan (1964) points
out, electronic devices today function as extensions of the human body and are already
physically part of many citizens of the consumer society of the so-called Western world.
It is through these extensions, computers, tablets, and smartphones, that today's digital
natives have access to the most diverse multimedia content, including publications.

Publications
When we refer to publications: books, newspapers, and magazines, we are talking about
different concepts, not objects. A book, more than an object, is a concept. According to
UNESCO (1964), in its recommendations on the international standardization of
statistics on the production of books and periodicals, a book is a non-periodical printed
publication of at least 49 pages, excluding covers, published in the country and made
available to the public. This design is framed in what we always know as a paper object
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book, not as a book in its broader conception. Ribeiro (2012) states that the criteria or
parameters that define a book should be more flexible, referring to the "book" as a
publishing product produced to be read on any device. The book should be a literary,
scientific or other work of a certain length, and not as a physical object. This is the
example of the electronic book (e-book) that should not be seen only as a "metaphor" of
the printed book object.
The same concept applies to other electronic publications: newspapers and magazines.
They are not objects, they are content, regardless of their physical support.
The proliferation of an increasing number of publications, motivated by the growing
number of readers, led to the emergence of different interest groups, giving rise to
specialized publications in different areas. We should not forget that, in the second half
of the 20th century, especially in Western countries, public investment in education
increased substantially, which has led to a growing number of educated and, therefore,
more financially capable consumers, where spending on culture has increased
considerably.
It is also in the second half of the 20th century that technological development has
advanced greatly, in all areas, but especially in the media. This economic, social and
technological development has brought us the great growth of cinema, television, comic
publications and, in the last decade of the century, the Internet. This development
consolidates the mass society which, as Fadul (1993) refers, is the same as the
consolidation of mass communication and cultural industries.
The fascination for industrial production, on the part of the younger generations, if on
the one hand integrated the different generations in a global culture, on the other hand,
created the desire and expectations of being able to integrate that world of illusions that
was transmitted through cinema, television and comics (comic books).

Fanzines
The desire to participate, to communicate and to take advantage of increasingly
accessible resources, such as the mimeograph, office offset printer and photocopiers, led
to publications of low print runs, of an amateur nature, to address very specific topics,
such as science fiction, comics, music, punk culture, etc. These alternative publications
according to Magalhães (2003), Giménez Devís & Izquierdo Cartillo (2016) or Carlos
& Gelain (2018), developed mainly in the second half of the 20th century and came to
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be known as "fanzines", a term constructed by the union of (fanatic + magazine) i.e.,

magazines for and by amateurs on a given topic. Fanzines, as Magalhães (1993) and
Zavam (2007) refer, are printed publications, outside the commercial structures of
cultural production, produced by people interested in the dissemination or
(re)production of comics, poems, short stories, science fiction, information about
independent music bands, graphic experiments, among other artistic expressions.
The character of "marginality", because they are publications produced
outside the market, non-profit and with strong community motivation [...]
they are spokespersons of sectors and artistic expressions despised by the
mainstream press. Fanzines represent the thinking of individuals,
associations and groups of fans who produce their own vehicles as a form of
interaction, exchange of information and opinions. (Magalhães, 2009, pp.
102).

Hipertext
With the massification of Internet access, all these publications, which were originally
developed to be printed on paper, were reinvented and certain projects born exclusively
in the so-called "cyberspace" began to emerge. The creation of the term cyberspace,
according to Ferrão (2005), is attributed to William Gibson in his 1984 book
Neuromancer, in which he develops the idea of cyberspace, later appropriated by the
American scientific community to refer to a potential cybernetic field-space in which all
digitalized media are contained. That is, a virtual space where all devices and their users
are connected in a global network.
This new paradigm of editing and access to content through hypertext in different
electronic devices posed important challenges that allowed the development of some
editing and content reading tools that are today an important factor in the dissemination
of projects from different areas, professional, semi-professional or amateur
communication.

Blogs
Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), have allowed many people not specialized in computer
science and graphic design to develop personal or group communication projects
through websites and weblogs (blogs). Blogs are websites whose structure allows for
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simple and quick updating, based on additions of articles (so-called posts in text, still
images or video). Blogs are organized in reverse chronological order and can be written
and edited by a variable number of people. These websites have a pre-established
graphical look and feel that is adopted by the editors, whose focus of their work
becomes exclusively the publication and periodic updating of the site. As Jacobo (2011)
points out, blogs allow any user to manage their own online site and publish different
types of content: text, image or video, which are content and links to each other by
generating various multimedia contents.

Responsive Web
The computer applications used in the construction of online publications today reach
high standards of adaptability to different devices, which increasingly facilitates the
construction of editorial projects aimed at different audiences in an increasingly global
world, facilitated by the high speed of data transmission. Not many years ago we
thought of websites built exclusively for a device, computer screen, or smartphone,
which, due to their different dimensions, implied different graphic designs. With the
implementation of responsive solutions, these problems have been overcome in web
design. The solution developed is the use of fluid design, that is, without fixed measures
such as pixels (or points, centimeters, millimeters, etc.) in the programming codes. Fluid
design uses flexible measurements and is at the conceptual basis of HTML (hypertext
language) itself. Thus, responsive sites are sites that adapt to all screen sizes regardless
of the device used (France, 2005). These responsive solutions are now present in most
websites, especially those that are built with HTML code with more advanced scripts.

Online Magazine
In the construction of a magazine in the 21st century, and in this context of a pandemic,
where physical contacts have been drastically reduced and social contacts are
increasingly virtual, the magazine proposal that we imagine to build should have an
electronic format. The Internet is part of our daily life and it is through computer
resources that the exchange of information takes place.
The design that was adopted results from the analysis of two main concepts: the
traditional concept of paper publication, whose digitized pages would appear
sequentially on the screen of the different devices. Let's take the example of the
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issuu.com platform that transforms PDF files into e-books, through rigid designs, where
all the options of the graphics adopted for a given grid format are preserved; and the
concept of flexible design, in which a single web page does not adapt to the different
screens of different reading devices.
Our choice was a responsive, blog-based website, where each author has a specific
page. Their contributions are published in sequential order, from the most recent to the
oldest.

Independent edition
Regarding the issue of independence, we decided that the magazine is organized
according to the editor's criteria and whose principles are the acceptance of differences,
respect for different points of view and the rejection of any form of expression that
promotes hatred and intolerance of diversity.
The electronic magazine, although it has costs in the maintenance of the web domain
and the hosting of the content, does not have, on the other hand, printing, or graphic
design costs. The e-zine, which works on a blog structure, also allows each
author/contributor to present his/her work on a personal page, where the most recent
content appears at the top of the page and the oldest content at the bottom. It is a system
of standardized publications in social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter,
which are communication processes that today are perfectly accepted by readers.
When we talk about independence, we also refer to the publisher's ability to guarantee
the financial autonomy of the project, without the support of public or private entities
that could condition editorial policies, and without any commercial advertising
information. In financial terms, the balance sheet for the year 2020 is a monthly expense
of about 10 euros per month, only in content hosting and web domain, not including the
hours of voluntary work of all authors.

Dissemination
Of all the procedures in the construction and development of this online magazine
project, the most complex is the dissemination. The strategies to reach potential
interested parties in a strictly commercial vision have as many costs as the production
costs of the object / artifact itself.
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In the case of a non-profit publication as the one we proposed to make, the bet was on
the dissemination and exchange between the different networks of contacts of the
authors. This diffusion is done through the most popular social networks. Facebook
allows you to share the specific links of the respective texts and comics that are
published throughout the month. Instagram and Twitter are also media, but access to the
website usually originates from Facebook posts that allow you to share your web links.
The magazine is called ASPECTUS, referring to the purpose of giving voice to different
points of view on issues transversal to society, both locally and globally. A dynamic
publication, open to different voices that, through text and image, will address different
aspects of the social and natural context for dialogue and exchange of ideas.
At this moment, ASPECTUS, Art & Science Magazine, publishes an average of 12
chronicles and 3 comics per month, and has a total of 30 authors. The website during the
24 months it has been available has already been accessed by more than 1300 users
(count by IP and not by access). The website has the following URL address:
https://aspectus-online.com/

Conclusions
As Gross Scharf (2012) points out, silence and isolation are unbearable in everyday life.
The media around us have become our companions because they provide us with the
most fundamental human need: communication. The need to communicate makes social
networks omnipresent in our daily lives. Wanting to communicate, share ideas, works
and, in the end, participate in a collective to intervene, giving voice to many social
concerns.
The publication of a magazine is a vehicle to materialize this human need. An online
magazine, because we live in a world where more and more virtual contacts are present
in our daily lives. A website with a flexible structure, adapting to different devices,
present in the main social networks for the exchange of ideas in a large network of
contacts, where we all belong.

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