The Y Combinator-powered Hacker News has finally grown into a four-color paper-and-print magazine called Hacker Monthly. Their parents must be proud.
What started as a side-project by Netizen Media‘s Lim Cheng Soon seven months ago has grown into a 3,000-paid subscriber supported, three-dimensional magazine.
As one reader put it:
“Look ma, I’m buying (i.e. paying for) print media! …but it’s based on… free online media!”
Lim described how the crowd does its sourcing.
“The magazine has a unique blend of programming + startups related content and it’s essentially a crowdsourced magazine, with all of its content already published on the web and selected thru voting on Hacker News.”
Although it is a print magazine, you can also buy it for download or purchase the Magcloud version.
This month’s articles include one on staying healthy and sane at a start-up (no indication as to whether it’s fiction), one on new trends in start-up financing and another titled, “How Agile Ruined My Life.”
I thought print was supposed to have died. (No I didn’t.) The whole process reminds me of Imagism. Hey. Sit down and listen. When Imagism came out in the 1910s, some of its proponents said it was The Future and all other poetry would wither and die. Instead, Imagism wound up revitalizing poetry as a whole by giving it concreteness and tangibility.
Maybe this process of re-discovering print on its own terms will produce a generation that faces the anxiety of publishing squarely with no rules but one – Only connect.
