The Medium Magazine is Here/Why We Did It
So the first-ever Medium Magazine came out this week, and let me tell you, am I ever happy that its out. It’s been a long two month production period, and it’s really great to finally see it off of the confines of my little macbook screen and out onto campus newsstands.
We went through the possibility of having no magazine at all after putting in so much work because we had no money to produce it, to the reassuring (and financially secure) feeling after the first round of press approvals.
And we didn’t get paid for this project either, we did it out of our own personal drive to put out a magazine for UTM—a campus that always gets knocked for not having enough culture, or history, or character. Well, now we have something that no other U of T campus has, or any other campus for that matter, Medium Magazine.
This magazine is going to come out once a year. At least that’s the plan. As like every new season at The Medium, there will be an entirely new editorial team next year, and thus, the future of Medium Magazine rests on their shoulders. We laid the seed for future Medium-ites, now it’s their choice if they want to continue producing a magazine or not.
We also only have a very limited quantity of the magazine. If you didn’t get one this week, its not because we ran out, or because Medium Magazine has turned into some mythic creature that only comes out on full moons, its because we can only put out a certain number of copies a week—read our “Keep it Green” note on the front cover.
This magazine needs to last for the rest of this year, and for as long as possible next year. Remember that part about it being a yearly thing? We don’t want the magazine to explode on campus for a week, then disappear from everyone’s memory the next. It’s now apart of the history of UTM, and it needs to stick around for as long as possible. We want students to see it on newsstands everyday. We want students to look forward to next one. If it comes out and only lasts for a week, it will be forgotten. If it comes out and lasts for a year, it will be remembered, and anticipated.
And that’s why we—Alain Latour, Editor-in-Chief, Michael Di Leo, Managing Editor and Advertising Manager, and myself, Creative Director, Designer, and Photography Editor—put together and founded this magazine. We want it to be remembered and anticipated. So much of what happens on this campus is either ignored by the apathy of the student population, or disregarded because we’re all too busy and focused on trying to graduate, to write that paper, or to pass that mid term. Medium Magazine does not fall—we hope atleast—into either the apathy or disregard category. It’s a break from what goes on at UTM.
Take for example a conversation I had today when I was putting out some more copies of the magazine at the Student Centre info booth. A girl asked what I was doing, and what Medium Magazine was all about. She picked it up somewhat hesitantly and told me about what she thought about The Medium this year, and how she wasn’t impressed with our coverage of the Student Union. I then explained to her what I said above, adding that, at The Medium, we don’t get paid half as much as other paid positions on campus and that I once worked out my hourly rate to approximately $3 or $4 an hour—clearly it wasn’t about the money, but for giving something back to the campus.
After this conversation, she seemingly forgot about her displeasure with The Medium’s latest coverage. For her, and I hope for everyone else on campus, Medium Magazine can breathe a breath of fresh air into a more often then not indifferent and unconcerned student body, something students can pick up and say “cool, a magazine.”
And that brings me back to why we did it. We did it for the students.
The entire magazine is content directed at students. Do you need to cook a dinner party for your friends? We’ve got you covered. Need a stellar reason for why you’re watching hours of online-streaming Modern Family? It’s obviously because you’re trying to study for sociology. What about if you’re an international student? We’ve got you covered too. There’s plenty more excellent articles in Medium Magazine but I’m not going to give them all away here, I’ll leave that for you to discover.
And at the end of the day, looking back, I don’t think there is anything about this project I would change. If there is one thing I can admit though, was that it was one hell of a learning experience.
Its amazing what you can learn on a project like this, like from what font size to use, to the pre-press processes you apparently didn’t know about that drive your incredibly patient printer crazy. You also learn how you might go from walking into a bookstore on Queen Street and asking the cashier where Dr.Seuss’ How The Grich Stole Christmas is, to busting out a camera, umbrella, and strobes, and executing an entire cover shoot in less then 5 minutes in said store.
We fought, we laughed, and if you read Alain’s editorial, we got rushed to the hospital and cut our fingers slicing onions. But we did it because we wanted to put out a magazine so badly. And at the end of the day, as cheesey, corny, and lame as this might sound, if you really want something, you go get it. I’m going to quote Alain’s editorial once more, because he said it so well: “Let this magazine be proof that you can use UTM to showcase you, rather than the other way around.”
Here’s some of my photographs from Medium Magazine. You can check out the online site here, designed by yours truly, or download a pdf of the magazine, also designed by yours truly here.
