Bloggaday 14 The Sand Canyon Review Critique pt 2

Bloggaday 14 The Sand Canyon Review Critique pt 2

The following Bloggaday is part 2 of a 2-part critiques paper I wrote for my English Class. In this class, we actually create Crafton Hill’s College’s annual literary magazine. You can find The Sand Canyon Review here -> http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Sand-Canyon-Review/238231044021?ref=ts or the Press Enterprise article on it here -> http://www.pe.com/localnews/sbcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_N_nsand20.48cbd26.html As you can see, the deadline is March 15th, 2010. So you can submit poetry, essays, short fiction, and art to SCRsubmissions@gmail.com


Bloggaday 14 – The Sand Canyon Review Critique pt. 2


Aside from looking back to the previous issues, I have a couple of ideas to move the Sand Canyon Review into the future. My first problem is the limited availability of the issues. It is my understanding that we are currently limited to the thousand-run prints that we do the year of the publishing. Advertising and class work has had us go through several copies of the last two magazines. I do not know how many of the magazines we have left, but they are an exhaustible resource for our class. If we had readily available PDF and Word versions of the magazine, not only would it help us with assignments, but also people who want to read it would have easy access to it. This would allow people outside of Crafton’s immediate area to have instant access to a copy of every issue we put out.
Having electronic versions of the magazine online at sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Crafton Hills College’s official website would give submitters a chance to look at our production quality before deciding to submit. If it were on other sites, people who would never have heard of the magazine otherwise would be able to read it. An electronic format also allows students to email and share it with friends and families, furthering our expansion even more. At our fundraising event at Giovanni’s, we ran out of last year’s issue very quickly. If we had the digital versions of the magazine on cd’s, then we could have given those out to people interested in the magazine.
When we ran out of copies of last year’s copies, interested people were given the first issue, which had several errors in it. If we had the digital copies, these errors could be fixed for redistribution. This way, we seem more professional, giving out polished work to people new to the magazine.
To build even further on the electronic possibilities for the magazine, if the class started a podcast, this would have many possibilities. With podcatchers like iTunes gaining a more mainstream foothold in our culture, it is exposing people to new things. Not only could we put the PDF’s of our magazines into the feed to gain more exposure, we could actually start recording content for it. Each week, we could feature the journals of our groups. This would keep the students more honest about the journals as well as attract people to the unique view we are offering the world. It would also offer a platform for us to share the stories and artwork of the submissions we get, giving them more exposure, which could in return, get us more submissions and of a higher quality. We could also add a personal touch by having the authors themselves read their works. It would also allow us to interview willing submitters and have audio versions of them in the feed. This extends into the actually published interviews which we could record.
The benefits of a podcast wouldn’t require much more than the cheap or even free hosting for the content. Sites like podbean.com offer free basic hosting until it get’s popular or we have too much content. That particular site gives 100mb of storage and 5gigs of bandwidth for free. That’s enough to at least try it. Ourmedia.org also has free, and unlimited hosting but is a very difficult website to use, so I would not suggest it.
Our magazine gives hopeful authors and artists a chance to be published with notables in their field. Giving this opportunity to them endows us with a responsibility to put out the highest quality magazine we can. I have offered several suggestions in ways of improving the magazine’s next issue as well as the future of the magazine itself. These improvements came from critiquing last year’s issue, comparing the first two issues, and including some other ideas.