INTRODUCTION

Creating a magazine helps students gain basic knowledge while developing skills (critical thinking, teamwork) and building character (encouraging curiosity, perseverance).

CREATING AN ONLINE MAGAZINE STEP-BY-STEP

1. Getting started

The first task is to put together a team of very motivated individuals that will bring the project to life and see it through.

This will be the editorial ‘core’ who will be in charge of

• and writing articles
• Taking/finding photos and videos for the magazine
• Finding interview subjects, interviewing them, and writing up the interviews
• Publishing the magazine on social media

The most effective way to do this is to organise regular meetings of the editorial board so that everyone knows their role in producing the magazine based on their preferences and abilities.

2. Coming up with a format and identity

• Ask what the aim of the magazine is: Do students want to actively shape the life of their school or club? Allow as many young people as possible to express themselves? Encourage their own discussions on a particular topic?
• Set your target audience: Students in a school? Members of a club? An entire community?
• Ask what the editorial line should be: Keeping your target audience in mind, try to summarise the magazine’s ethos in a few lines: its mission, preferred topics, tone (serious, lighthearted, humorous), type of content, and how it will be covered.
• Choose a title for your magazine that will set it apart, affirm its identity, and (literally) make a name for it.
• Finally, you need to take stock of the resources you need for your magazine and desired publication frequency. The number of team members, their commitment, and their availability are major factors as well as your available equipment.

3. Choosing content

To maintain the interest of your audience, draw them in, and pique their curiosity, you need to be sure that you supply information in a variety of ways.

Here are the main genres of journalism available to you:

Reports, investigations, interview pieces, editorials, reviews, summaries, portrait pieces.

Pick an angle for every topic

To avoid ending up with an article that is too long, convoluted, and difficult to read, you need to pick an angle, or point of view. You need to pick out which of the topic’s aspects you want to highlight and which ones your do not.

Example: The opening of a new cinema is a topic.

The effects on local tourism from the new cinema is an angle.

4. Assigning roles

In a newsroom, people do not all do the same job. The Madmagz model suggests dividing the team into three groups:

• one editor-in-chief (in Madmagz: ‘super chief redactor’)
• editors (in Madmagz: ‘chief redactor’)
• writers (in Madmagz: ‘redactors’)

(See appendix to sheet 17). You can adjust these roles if you do not wish to follow the Madmagz model.

In order to write an article, every writer needs to remember to ask the six essential questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?

People must also agree on the length of the article and the level of language of the magazine before writing begins (not to formal or informal).

Other roles you might want include:

• Illustrator: An illustrator draws pictures, takes or uploads photos or other images, sounds, and graphics (either free from copyright or with the source cited) to illustrate the magazine.
• Community manager: A community manager looks for ways of linking the content created by the writers to other sites. They are also in charge of social media and promote the magazine to maximise its audience by focusing on additional enhancing features for the articles such as the headlines, ledes, photos, and snippets to show up in search engines.

5. Publishing the magazine

Once the magazine is ready, you can to publish it online or in print (see appendix to sheet 17) depending on your preferences, aims, and target audience.

MADMAGZ

You can use the application Madmagz to create your online magazine. Its interface is set up for working in teams and makes formatting and adding graphics easy.

Madmagz (https://madmagz.com/) is an app that helps you create a magazine or newspaper simply and as a team. It is highly customisable with options to create all types of publications (school newspaper, conventional newspaper, newsletter, etc.). Your only limit is your imagination!

Madmagz allows its users to work collaboratively to create an online magazine that, once finished, can be made into a print magazine.

The platforms tools help you to do the following:

• Choose the right magazine template for your content
• Create page categories (covers, table of contents, editorial, article, etc.)
• Write and proofread articles with hierarchical collaboration functions
• Add, modify, edit, and delete pages
• Choose formatting options
• Add photos, sounds, videos, and links to other websites
• Publish your magazine online or in print once you have proofed all of the content.

These steps are all explained in detail in the appendix to sheet 17

PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES

• You can use this lesson sheet as a basis for creating a magazine or newspaper with young people.
• See also the appendix to sheet 17 for more information on Madmagz