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slack haunts web, millions flee in terror |
Well, it's been a long month since our last issue came out, and much has
changed. In a sense, slack has died and gone to cyberspace. We are
now literally a ghost in the machine, since we have suspended the
our print production for the near future.  There are basically three reasons for this: overhead,
overhead, and overhead. Printing just 5,000 of our 24 page two color
bound-newsprint magazines costs slightly less than a used car, and we haven't
been able to find that much room in Madison's ad market. Of course, we could get just a tinge paranoid and state
that our hard-hitting journalism scared away advertisers, but that
is only true in a few, specific cases (who know who they are and who
know we know, since they told us that much...). No, the main reason
we haven't had sufficient ad volume to remain immersed in black ink is that
slack is created by a vanguard group of artists, journalists and
writers who generally find selling ads to be a real drag... Therefore, we have transmografied, if you will. We are
now noncorporeal, a journalistic wraith--a cyberspectre. We've embraced
"The New Flesh", and found that it was good. Our artists
get to play with all the colors of the rainbow with no concern for the costs
of ink. Our writers can write as many pieces as they wish with no concern
about the costs of adding pages, and our monthly overhead now costs less
than dinner for the entire staff. Everybody's happy. In fact, with our newest
webvertisers, we've already made a small profit (unless you figure in the
costs of having to replace one of our monitors recently due to a cat-barf
incident--don't ask...). The upshot of all this money business is that as
far as the web is concerned, we're here to stay. We've included all the pieces that were to have gone
into the print edition, with the extra bonus color art and multimedia we
promised last issue. We've also added material to many of our online departments,
including some original fiction that promises to be the start of
an exciting literature area. The major players on our staff are now separated
in spacetime by 1500 miles and one hour. This publication is assembled
entirely in cyberspace--no knives, no paper, and no glue. Nobody got hurt.
(note to M2000: sampling is the greatest form of flattery...) We're
actively soliciting writers, artists and investigative cyber-journalists
from around the globe to transform "Madison's Most Dangerous News
Monthly" into "The World's Most Dangerous News Monthly".
Send your submissions and queries to the address below. Our submission
guidelines are linked to this page. We're also adding a "World's
Graffiti Wall" section. Send us links to your home pages and we'll
keep them up for a month (or more, if they're REALLY good). BTW, if you are involved in advertising sales, or
would like to be, here's your chance to break into a frontier market.
If you are the sort of salesperson who could have successfully sold television
ads in the late forties, contact us at the address below for more information.
We hope you enjoy this issue. We'll likely be
adding links on a more frequent basis. We could update this every hour if
we wished, so keep coming back to check. After all, IT'S STILL FREE!! Brian Hill Hank Shaw and the staff of slack Magazine |
slack Oct 94 Table of Contents
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