Black Ink

If creative artists are leaving New York, then to where exactly are they relocating?

While the city still is home to most of the American publishing industry, the number of jobs in that field fell 3 percent in the last decade in New York, while increasing in San Francisco, Boston and Denver. And from 2001 to 2004, the number of jobs in New York City's motion picture and sound recording industries declined by 36 percent...

Skyrocketing prices on housing and professional space have driven many artists out of the very neighborhoods they helped to pioneer, and other cities, including Philadelphia and Minneapolis, have been very aggressive at luring artists their way with marketing campaigns and housing incentives.

(via Danyel Smith)

Literary anthology The Caribbean Writer has been out since September of this year.  One of the contributors happens to be Montreal-born Robert Sandiford.  There is also a special focus on Bermuda, an island not normally recognized by the Caribbean literary community.  The Royal Gazette takes a look at the Bermudian contributors and how they finally got a foot in the door:

 “Because we are not geographically in the Caribbean, Bermuda kind of gets pushed to the side a little bit,” she said. “And because I was there as a faculty member, people were like, ‘oh right, Bermuda’.
“So, it occurred to the managing editor Marvin Williams, who is also a professor at the university and a published poet, that although they have did special sections on specific islands before – they had never included Bermuda.
“So, they sent out a call for submissions and we had a lot of work come through and we have between nine and 11 poets and short story writers who were shortlisted. The journal is about 300 pages long and about 60 pages have been devoted to the special Bermuda section.”

Yes, there are typos in this article.

Recently the CBC was interviewing a panel of Canadian news editors on a popular morning radio show and they were discussing the year's worst media errors.  Regret The Error has posted its own year-end review and not even YM is spared:

"For some reason, we come across many porn related errors and corrections each year, and they’re usually hilarious. First we have a case of misdirection. In February two publications, YM Your Prom and Teen Prom of Fairchild and Hearst respectively, ran the same ad that contained an incorrect URL. Rather than going to a teen-friendly site, the ad sent people to a "child porn" site. "

I guess YM won't have this problem now that it ceased publication.  How dare they taint the prom issue. ARRGHHHHHHH!

I've always thought about launching a print journal, but of course money is the main thing holding me back.  The Web seems like a viable option to turn to, but I think I'd still need some help [financial and otherwise] in putting it all together. 
Media Week has a fabulous article on why more magazines should pay attention to their presence on the Web.  This information is gold.  I can't tell you how many times I've dismissed perusing a site simply because they've asked me to register or login:

"Keynote speaker John Battelle, the former publisher of The Industry Standard and the author of the Google-chronicling book The Search, implored magazines to eschew a print-focused strategy, while also embracing search engine marketing and user-generated content.

“Magazines don’t need to be equated with print,” he said. “It’s a content-driven model now. It’s not about distribution.”

Since content is so important, Battelle said that magazines need to fully embrace search engine marketing to get readers to that content, including both optimizing their Web sites to get noticed up by search engines and also employing paid search ads on Google and Yahoo!."

What?  It's about content?