Spring Break(!!!) Part Two: Berkeley, San Fran, and Napa.... and Founding One's Own Magazine

Well, spring break is starting to seem like a distant memory, but a fond one. I love California. Coming back to cold, rainy New York, I started to wonder why we don't all just pack our belongings and head west. But spring is beginning to bloom in the city that never sleeps and I am feeling happier.

Hmmm.... to quickly sum up Berkeley/Northern California: running past cows at Inspiration Point, running past strangely gopher-like squirrels at the Berkeley Marina, running past students on Berkeley's campus (I ran a lot over spring break), inadvertently watching burlesque at El Rio in The Mission, hiking in Napa Valley (photo at right), and thrift store vintage apparel shopping in Santa Cruz.

Upon my return to New York, I saw this article in the Times: Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick . It's a California-based (of course) service that allows users to self-publish magazines:

With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter’s volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

NYU should probably have a course on this at the Journalism Institute, since it's how we grad students may be most likely to see our words on the printed page.

Speaking of, yet another magazine has announced it's ceasing "real" publication, though it will live on in Web form. R.I.P. Blender. I kind of loved the US-Weeklified-Rolling-Stone imitator.

Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick [New York Times]
Print Version of Blender Magazine Will Cease Publication [New York Times]