On Wednesday, Bushwick Daily editor-in-chief Katarina Hybenova announced that the five-year-old East Wlliamsburg/Bushwick/Ridgewood community news website will be launching a quarterly print magazine, Bushwick Notebook.
The 92-page inaugural issue is slated for release on June 1. It isn’t Bushwick Daily’s first foray into print, as the website has published a guide to Bushwick Open Studios the past two years, but Bushwick Notebook will replace that guide and go much deeper into art, fashion, entrepreneurship and culture in the neighborhood.
2015 seems like a strange time to get into the print magazine game, especially one focused on such a specific area, but Hybenova is a “print’s not dead” believer. In addition to simply wanting to make visually appealing physical object, the magazine, which will be available for free at local businesses throughout the neighborhood, will allow Bushwick Daily to reach more and different readers, as well as create more in-depth content that doesn’t exactly fit on the website.
“I think that some forms of print are dead and do better online (such as news) but great longer content, design and photography will live forever,” she wrote in an email to ANIMAL.
“Bushwick Daily has shaped over 5 years of our existence into a news website. Our readers prefer quick, short, super-timely pieces of news. Bushwick Notebook will not be like that at all,” Hybenova wrote. “Its slower magazine content will allow us to zoom onto the trends born in the neighborhood, and talk about them in a greater detail. ”
Hybenova also says that a print magazine is a good cultural fit for the neighborhood. She says that Bushwick Daily’s advertisers, mostly local businesses, value print advertising more than digital, and she projects that the magazine will be profitable. There’s also a thriving community of indie magazine publishers in Bushwick and Hybenova wanted to join them.
The magazine will feature interviews with Bushwick-based indie celebrities, profiles of interesting people and trends in the neighborhood, fashion spreads, and opinion columns. It will include work from regular Bushwick Daily contributors, as well as a feature from writer Vanessa Martir. Hybenova says that there will probably be a magazine-specific website in the future, but for now, the content will just exist in print.
(Photo: Michael Tapp)
