[plug] starting a linux mag?

[Hook]

I agree with everything you've said John - however, how are we going to
finiance this?  To get taken seriously, mags have to be glossy these days
(unless we try for the newspaper look as someone suggested earlier). High
gloss printing costs real money, and I doubt that plug has much. So, do we
look for a sponsor (or are there any government grants that we could make
use of ?), or try to sell advertising up front (difficult for a startup I
suspect).  Anyone know enough about these things to comment?

The Hooker


John Knight wrote:

> G'day all!
> Well I was hoping this would be a team project, so if we set upa wwebpage
> with some kind of forum system, that'd probably help this all out (didn't
> someone suggest that earlier?). Anyway, onto what content I was thinking
of:
>
> We have the usual inbox/opinion sections, articles written by people
working
> for the mag about current issues, a tech help part, all of the usual
things
> in a PC mag, with a few special things of our own. I was thinking of a
> 'Project of the Month' section, where people send in their project ideas
> with a detailed explanation of what their proggy/project would do, and
over
> the page would be feedback on last month's project. This would help spur
on
> developers and help people starting projects get a team together, plus
they
> could get useful feedback for their idea (provided they can wait a month).
>
> The kind of target audience I was thinking of would be the kind that read
> magazines like APC and PC User etc, intermediate but not advanced.
Advanced
> people already have enough help as it is, so a few articles on the usual,
> 'how to set up your firewall with <insert acronym> encryption' for the
mahor
> tech heads, and things geared towards the usual games, desktop,
multimedia,
> productivity, graphics, etc, for the less learned of us. ;)
>
> There is a growing audience of people that have never used Linux before
and
> don't really know much about Windows either that are jumping n on the
scene
> that need helping too, so perhaps about 5-10 pages of the mag dedicated to
> the newbies would be a reader-drawer.
>
> With the CDs, everyone's after the latest distro release or updates, so
> that'd be good to include, plus the other mags tend to shy away from
> multimedia and games on their cover CDs, with the usual filler being SSH
> updates etc. If we cater more for the average user, then not only would we
> be targeting a bigger reader audience (I hope), but we'd be drawing in the
> newer crowd to Linux, the kind that use Mandrake. ;)
>
> Do we have a market for it? Of courses we do, what has PC Powerplay got
over
> PC Gamer US/UK? A great big price difference, Australian currency usage,
> local advertising, use of Australian speech, local goings-on that are
> actually useful for Aussies, the list goes on........ why should Linux be
> any different?
>
> Make lunch, not war.
>
>
>
>
>
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