Notebook Magazine - A Bittersweet Move Online

Thanks to D.B. Scott at http://canadianmags.blogspot.com/ for this posting about the fate of AMPA member Notebook magazine:

Running on empty, editor of Edmonton's Notebook magazine gives up print and goes online.
Notebook magazine, a quarterly published by an Edmonton art collective, will be releasing its last, 12th, print issue and going online this fall. According to a posting on Prairie Artsters forwarded to us by a friend, editor Steven Teeuwsen has mostly been operating the magazine as a solo business venture.

The magazine, which essentially created a gallery space in magazine format, was launched in January 2007 and has featured hundreds of Edmonton artists and writers and their work across the country. The magazine's view was that work from Edmonton was constantly undervalued culturally and set out to change that. But the financial returns and the editor's energy hasn't matched the magazine's ambitions.

"I haven't put out an issue since January and I stopped paying myself,"[says Teeuwsen]. "I was waiting on funding, but that's not sustainable, unless I sell a lot of advertising. I've fallen behind on that, partially because I'm burnt out. A lot of people warned me about burning out when I started, but I didn't give it much thought. I thought it was an excuse for being lazy! Now, I think it's very real...

"I definitely have mixed emotions. It's bittersweet. I'm really excited to be able to work on something else, but the print magazine was something special too. When I started, I wanted to work on it for three to four years, and I've done that, and I was able to work full time at it for the better part of that time."