McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers says his quarterly magazine’s Fall issue intends to prove the viability of print by adopting a newspaper format.
His goal is to create a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. Eggers believes that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space-if you really truly give readers an experience that can’t be duplicated on the web-then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat.
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper-the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We’re going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it’ll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over. The newspaper issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is due out in September.
