Here’s a great way for magazines to make more money: New York magazine has reportedly brokered a deal with International Creative Management to adapt its features for film and television. The New York Times is one of ICM’s other clients, and under…

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New York Magazine Looks for Movie Deals

Mr. Harman made a late-in-life splash by acquiring Newsweek magazine and wedding it with a sassy Web site, The Daily Beast.

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Sidney Harman, Newsweek Chairman, Is Dead at 92

Ousted after just 95 days on the job as chancellor of New York City public schools, former Hearst Magazines boss Cathie Black has opened up about her brief stint in the realm of education. Addressing whether heading America’s largest public school…

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Cathie Black: ‘I’m a Warrior’

South Africa’s subversive new publication takes on the country’s contemporary creative culture Founded to “really assault the dominant narratives in our own unique way,” the South African magazine Mahala goes against the typically glossy grain with an “un-designed” style that allows its similarly raw content to shine. The publication launched in August 2010 and, now on its second issue, supplements a daily website—both the brainchild of Andy Davis. Stories like “Surfing is Wanking,” “Racist Dogs” and “The Colonialism of Small Things”—to name just a few—shed light on topics that affect South Africans, but with its Vice magazine-style journalism, anyone interested in leading-edge culture will appreciate this unconventional upstart. We recently probed Davis to find out more about Mahala’s beginnings, its future, and the overall state-of-mind in South Africa. What do you most hope to accomplish with Mahala? I want to create a platform for a racially-integrated South African youth culture that can interrogate our experience, our culture and really just provide an impetus for people to make good, relevant stuff. South Africa is still a radically segmented place. And we’ve got a whole backlog of shit that’s been swept under the carpet and kept out of view. I want Mahala to pick at those edges, to go where the art, music, literature, etc. intersects with politics, society and weird-ass South African dynamics like race relations and socio-economic disparities. The online site tries to crunch through what’s happening in South Africa on a daily basis. We aim to publish three to four stories a day. The debates we get going in the comments show that our audience really gives a shit about what we say, and they have a stake in the culture so they all pile in and make their voice heard, which is a good thing. But it can be quite rough on the comment boards. We have a non-intervention policy. We don’t delete anything. If people want to hang themselves kak vibes, so be it. We hold the print magazine to a higher standard. We want people to read everything twice. It’s supposed to be a real collector’s item. But it also gives us the latitude to publish photo features, fashion, fiction and investigative journalism that isn’t always suited to online attention spans. What is the most challenging part of creating each Mahala edition? Getting the right mix of words and images, without being too gratuitous or going too hardcore, but still being able to interrogate the culture and experience. I think with our first issue we were sitting on so much unreleased content that we didn’t temper it properly. So it was a bit relentless. With the second issue we got the mix a bit better varying between depth and levity. There were some almost academic style articles, hard-hitting investigative journalism, some great narrative non-fiction, fiction and some nice humor. Another thing we really struggle to do is find good, black writers, photographers and illustrators. That’s not to say they don’t exist, it’s just that South Africa is so systemically fucked up thanks to apartheid that massive segments of the population were actively uneducated by the apartheid schooling system. So, generally speaking, anyone who is black, creative, talented and competent gets employed very quickly. And there just isn’t a plethora of young black talent beating down our doors, desperate to get published. And the last thing we want to be is a group of whiteys sitting around writing about black culture. We want to push this relationship into a “post-racial” space. Things are changing though, and it’s picking up pace. And we certainly don’t want to be those sad guys who do head counts based on skin color. But we’re still a long way off from the ideal of an equitable, meritocratic society. Does each edition have an underlying theme? Not yet, but we may be heading that way. I think at the moment, we don’t need to introduce over-arching themes because the culture is happening all around us and having a theme would necessarily occlude some of the most relevant and exciting stuff. Besides, I quite like the way the magazine jump cuts from narrative to narrative. I want them to stand alone and not have too much editorial unity. We always said Mahala would support a plurality of views, so it’s cool for each piece to stand alone and not be perceived as coming from central editorial authority. What can we look forward to seeing in Mahala 3? I think it’ll be bigger and better than Mahala 2. I thought there were some little failings in the last issue, that I’m glad to have the opportunity to rectify in the next issue. But those are mainly little publishing minutiae and insecurities. Generally the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. At this stage a lot of the content is still in the air. We’re also working on a site redesign and, for our international readers, we’ll be making all the print mags available online as PDFs, from the next issue. To subscribe to the print publication or receive their daily updates, visit the Mahala website. Take our reader survey and enter to win a CH Edition Jambox!

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Mahala Magazine

Frank Rich, who over the course of a three-decade career at The New York Times was theater critic, magazine essayist and Sunday Op-ed columnist, is leaving the paper to join New York magazine.

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Media Decoder: Frank Rich to Leave The Times for New York Magazine

Since the Daily Beast Web site merged with Newsweek, the accomplished editor is eager to avoid any hype about her plan to turn the struggling newsweekly around.

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Tina Brown’s Quiet Restart of Newsweek

Visual histories of fanzines, horror magazines and banned comics, and of the Italian shelter magazine Abitare.

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Visuals: Irreverence You Can Almost Touch

Jack Griffin is leaving after less than six months — forced out because his management style was not a good fit.

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Media Decoder: New Leader Of Time Inc. Forced Out

Google announces a One Pass payment system for magazines and newspaper subscriptions, undercutting rival Apple.

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Google unveils 10% One Pass fee

The documented instance of public eating, or DIPE, has become a fixture of interviews in glossy magazines, in which an actress consumes a meal that might satisfy a hungry dockworker.

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For Actresses, Is a Big Appetite Part of the Show?

Apple has agreed to allow publishers to sell subscriptions through its popular App Store, an issue that has been a source of contention since the iPad went on the market.

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Media Decoder: New iPad Subscription Model Offered

On January 22, 1996, the New York Times unveiled its new online edition at nytimes.com , offering readers access to “much of what the newspaper has published the previous week and access to feature articles from as far back as 1980.” Prior to the launch of nytimes.com, the Times ‘ content had been available through the @times service at America Online, starting in 1994. From a 1996 article by Peter H. Lewis introducing readers to the new online portal, a description of the new advertising and subscription model: Mr. Nisenholtz said that initially, at least, no subscription or access fee would be charged for readers in the United States and that the electronic paper would generate revenue from advertising. Readers who connect to the electronic paper from outside the country will be offered a 30-day trial without charge, but will eventually face a subscription fee. Advertisers that have already announced participation on the Web site include Toyota Motor Corporate Services, Chemical Bank and the Northeast real estate concern Douglas Elliman.  Subscribers will have limited access to archives of Times articles and features dating to 1980, and will be able to copy articles to their own computers for $1.95 each, Mr. Nisenholtz said.   The new service will also offer, for a fee, a customized clipping service that delivers to a subscriber’s electronic mailbox articles gleaned from each day’s editions of the newspaper, based on key words the subscriber selects.  With its entry on the Web, The Times is hoping to become a primary information provider in the computer age and to cut costs for newsprint, delivery and labor. Companies that have established Web-based information sites include television networks, computer companies, on-line information services, magazines and even individuals creating electronic newspapers of their own. H/T Michael Donohoe . Via Michelle Legro .

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The New York Times’ Website Turns 15

Playboy is coming to the iPad in March. That’s nothing special: A lot of magazines are finding new ways to get their content to consumers. They’re using mobile sites optimized for on-the-go readers, iPhone and Android applications and, yes, iPad apps. What is worth noting, though, is that Hugh Hefner, the founder and face of Playboy who recently spent in excess of $200 million to buy back shares of the company and take it private, sent out a tweet late last night that his magazine will be uncensored. If that’s true — and Playboy  takes the form of a traditional iPad application and not just a website optimized for browsing on the iPad — there must be more to the story. Apple is notorious for ferreting out and removing any apps that break a strict set of rules (no porn, no Java, no gambling, no file-sharing, no drugs, etc. — see a full list at ReadWriteWeb ). Does Hefner have a special deal with Apple? Is the company preparing to allow more scandalous content in its app stores? Maybe Tim Cook, the company’s COO who is overseeing day-to-day operations while Steve Jobs is out on medical leave was a proponent of iBoobs, the iPhone application that first brought mass attention to Apple’s strict policies. Created by Mystic Game Development of Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 2008, iBoobs was a simple application that featured a pair of covered breasts — no nudity! — that jiggled around the screen when the iPhone’s internal accelerometer was upset. Apple’s decision to remove the application ( “If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that iBoobs does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so,” the company reportedly told the developer ) probably caused a bigger stir than the application would have if left alone. It’s been more than two years since that scandal. Is Apple ready to reconsider? I contacted the company’s media department last night with questions about the Playboy application, but have yet to hear back. If I do, this post will be updated. In the meantime, bloggers are weighing in. Mashable’s Stan Schroeder wrote that it makes sense for Playboy to release an uncensored application “as we doubt many would be ready to pay for a watered-down version of the magazine.” But that’s not true. Playboy already has a popular iPhone application that doesn’t feature any full-frontal nudity. People, it turns out, really do read the magazine for the articles.

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Is Apple Ready to Allow Porn in the App Store?

Why are people allowed to buy high-capacity magazines?

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Arizona shootings underscore the dangers of high-capacity magazines

Prisoners are stripped of almost all individual possessions. Writing to magazines, one of the few things they can call their own, can provide comfort.

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The Handwritten Letter, an Art All but Lost, Thrives in Prison