 |
 |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
Can’t get published?
Stymied writers launch own culture magazine
By Danielle Masterson
|
|
|
Citizen Culture magazine staffers: (seated, from left) Heather Holcombe (GRS’06), Sara Jones (COM’06), Damien Power (COM’05), Joelle Asaro Berman (COM’05), and Robert Favuzza (SMG’05); (standing, from left) Jonathon Feit (UNI’04), Evan Sanders (CAS’03), and Maria Knapp (COM’07, CAS’07). Not pictured are Allison Keiley (COM’04), Timothy Patrick (CAS’03), Kevin Spector (COM’02), and Ross Schneiderman (UNI’04). Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
|
|
|
Jonathon Scott Feit felt strongly that an investigative report he wrote as a BU undergraduate, about a neuropsychiatrist, was a solid and interesting piece of journalism. He pitched the article to major magazines, but he got no response.
The experience convinced Feit (UNI’04) that there was a need for a magazine that would publish work by up-and-coming writers. He took the idea to some friends, and together they recently put to bed the inaugural issue of Citizen Culture. Aimed at “the young intellectual,” the monthly magazine hit newsstands across the country in September with a distribution of 10,000.
“The mission of this magazine is to be a career launchpad for new writers, authors, and critics,” says Feit, who founded Citizen Culture with Evan Sanders (CAS’03) and recent Harvard graduate Irfan Shabeer. “When we did some market research, we realized there was nothing like that out there.”
Feit and several other BU students developed a business plan and a prototype for the magazine last January, as part of an annual business concept competition organized by SMG’s Entrepreneurial Management Institute. Feit arranged an international distribution contract with Disticor Magazine Distribution Services, of Ontario, Canada, the following month and then recruited staff members and solicited submissions through online advertisements.
The magazine’s staff, which consists mostly of BU students or recent grads, grew and expanded this year to include young professionals in New York City and Washington, D.C., in addition to Boston. Submissions poured in from all over the country. The staffers received guidance, meanwhile, from Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House (Hon.’03), who is also a BU trustee, Peter Russo, an SMG professor of strategy and policy, and Caryl Rivers, a COM journalism professor.
Sara Jones (COM’06), the magazine’s designer, says she contacted Feit and Sanders about working for the magazine because she was “looking for an internship that would let me have some real-life experience in a publication without the usual coffee-fetching.”
The COM junior is responsible, along with Sanders, for laying out the majority of the magazine’s pages. “It’s given me a lot more confidence in what I want to do for a living, and it has made me excited to be a part of the publication industry,” she says. “Professionally, the experience of being a part of a magazine from the very start is a great jumping-off point into other jobs.”
Feit, Citizen Culture’s editor-in-chief, says each issue will focus on a particular theme. The unifying concept of the September issue is “diversions,” or activities people enjoy to escape their normal routines, and includes features on live electronic music and “the art of the road trip.” October’s issue focuses on conflicts, from the political to the personal, with columns about literature and lifestyle issues, personal profiles, photo essays, point-counterpoint political pieces, and entertainment and travel stories.
Feit says that Citizen Culture, which is financed primarily by its founders’ families, is selling well in several markets, including New York City and Sacramento. But while the magazine is a full-time job for many staffers, it’s not paying the bills at the moment. Feit hopes to turn a profit within three months and says the magazine is searching for outside investors.
“We did what we said we were going to do,” he says. “I have told people that if we go three issues and can’t sustain it financially, I will sleep well at night knowing that 60 people or more have gotten published who probably wouldn’t have elsewhere. We have done our job.”
Citizen Culture is sold nationally at Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores, and online at Amazon.com, MagazineCity.com, and StudentAdvantage.com for $3. For more information, visit www.citizenculture.com.
8
October 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations