montlaker

You bet! The Magazine is an ongoing experiment in telling non-fiction stories (essays and reported pieces) at a medium-form length of about 1,500 to 2,000 words. We want to pay writers well ($500 for essays, $800 for reported articles, and extra for photos), while supporting ourselves entirely from subscriptions. (We now have a partnership with Medium in which they're paying us to produce and post some content, too, but it's not ad-driven. No ads on Medium.)

We want to be able to tell stories that aren't being told because they are too long or involved for blogs, and don't fit into the rubric of the very few long-form pieces published in the New Yorker and elsewhere. We're trying to share interesting tales about people that folks who love technology will enjoy even when they're not about technology at all.

The experiment is whether we can continue to bring in enough revenue, as we have so far, through subscriptions and other means.

I'd love to talk about editing, writing, running an iOS publication, Kickstarter, and anything else. Many of my writers are likely to chime in here, too, about non-fiction writing and freelancing in general.

It's a stodgy company that sells hardware that rests on the success of five years from now, and is run by Tim Cook's successor, who seems hellbent on raiding the archives for pictures of Steve Jobs to put into the advertising, but can't seem to come up with anything that really ignites consumers, who are all having sex with robots.

I have a magnetic tractor beam hidden in Twitter?

I am so terrible at self promotion, even though I think I'm relentless at it. Yes! Help us make a book in which everyone in it was already paid for their work when it ran and now will be paid again when the darned thing funds.

Thomas, do you remember the Center for Creative Imaging in Maine? I can't recall if you ever visited. We had Photoshop on 100 Macs there back in 1991, and taught it via classes to artists and others. (We had an unlimited license copy wired to a secret file direct from Adobe.) Photoshop to me seems so fundamentally the same despite interface changes and advances over that period of time: everything I could do in 1991 is just better, faster, more sophisticated now. Are you concerned about the current direction of the software or its evolution?