dispatch notes 001

The Launch

I am about to break all the rules of magazine publishing - according to the internet, anyway. I am launching dispatch | press – a tiny publishing house – and dispatch Newfoundland and Labrador magazine as its first publication.

dispatch will feature documentary photography about Newfoundland and Labrador. It will be print only– as cheap as I can make it while still looking good; it will be published quarterly; each 28-page issue will be dedicated to a single story spread across 26 of those 28 pages; it will not be a limited edition publication; it will have no advertising except an exclusive four-issue sponsorship opportunity for the right patron; and it will have a revenue sharing agreement with photographers published on its pages.

Another thing that dispatch will publish is a monthly podcast.

So let me walk you through my reasons why I want to try to do this. And comments are open – so feel free to tell me just how foolhardy this is.

NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR FOCUS

This is home. It has been for a long time. It is a complex and complicated place with a long history of documentary photography. It is also a place that is very much on the periphery of a much larger political and cultural entity and we don’t often get a chance to tell our stories. So rather than complain about it, let’s just do it.

PRINT ONLY

This is a big one. There are two broad reasons for this. One has to do with documentary photography as a medium and the other with being human at this point in time. Documentary photography and photojournalism have a bad rap for all sort of reasons. Those are necessary conversations we need to have and I suspect we will have many of them right here. That is good. But there is something I think is special about documentary photography. Documentary photography, unlike many other forms of expression, is always about the photographer telling stories of people other than herself and is always about being present in place and in the moment. This is really important. A good documentary project does not end once the photographs are made or even published. It never ends as long as the rest of us continue to have conversations about the photographs the photographer made. I think those conversations are better when we hold those photographs in our hands. It’s very easy to forget that a photograph is not just pixels on a screen, but also a material object. A sequence in which photographs are arranged matters, the space each photograph is given matters, the relationship between photographs matters, the size of the publication itself matters in terms of how we tell and how we read each story. In the current media landscape, there is no magazine or a newspaper that will dedicate 26 pages to a single visual story. dispatch will. Documentary photographers spend years, sometimes decades, working on a story and I think that we should allow that work to be presented in nuanced and complex ways. And wouldn’t it be nice to take your time looking at the photographs and think about the story they tell, rather than just scroll through a stream of images that neither the photographer nor you have any control over? Give it a try. I think you’ll like it.

QUARTERLY PUBLICATION SCHEDULE

It feels right. It’s a Goldilocks spot - not too often and not too far apart. Just enough to engage with it and have a conversation over each issue and just enough time between the issues to keep you wondering what the next story is going to be.

28 PAGES

Publications have to be printed in increments of four pages when using the process that we are using. A 28-page publication allows us to have a page with basic information about the magazine and the photographer’s bio and the back page with the editorial and other necessary things like bar code, ISSN number and potential sponsor acknowledgment. That leaves us with 26 pages to tell a single story mostly in photographs. That is a lot – more than any other periodical in Canada will dedicate to a single story. At 28 pages, we also have a good handle on printing costs with confidence that each issue will at least break even and allow us to pay the photographer and the publisher a fee while charging you less than two fancy coffees for a copy.

NOT A LIMITED EDITION

This is another big one. dispatch is not an art publication. The goal is not to maximize the price by creating scarcity. dispatch wants to be in as many hands as possible so that you can have as rich a conversation as possible around it. I will print the first issue in 100 copies, but I would love to print a thousand if that’s how many of you want one. So if the first 100 copies sell out, I’ll print more.

NO ADVERTISING

I have no interest in chasing ads. I have no interest in compromising the stories I can tell because of the advertising I run. And I have no interest in giving space to companies that are selling you stuff you probably don’t need. Advertising model is broken and maybe it never really worked in the first place. dispatch will survive because you will want to read it. It’s that simple. I think there are companies and individuals who may have an interest in a year-long, four-issue, exclusive sponsorship because they believe that dispatch provides a value to its readers and they want to support that. Happy to chat if you are one of those companies or people.

REVENUE SHARING AGREEMENT

This is how I think it’s going to work. dispatch sells for $10 CAD a copy. Once the printing costs, website fees, and some other minor expenses are covered, everything else gets split evenly between the photographer and the publisher - up to $2,500 each (that would mean we have to sell some 600 copies per issue so we are a looooong way away from that). If we ever get past that point – and wouldn’t that be wonderful – I will form a foundation of sorts so that we can use all the excess cash to create a documentary photography award to support projects in Newfoundland and Labrador.

dispatch PODCAST

I want dispatch to be a little bit like a family album - I want us to sit comfortably and chat about the people and places in the photographs so that together we build a better story than the one in front of us. To that end, each issue of dispatch will be accompanied by three podcast episodes. The first one will be a conversation with the photographer and the other two will be conversations with two other people responding to the work in that issue of dispatch. All of it will be available through this substack or on the website and wherever you listen to your podcasts. And the comments are always open so feel free to add your voice to the conversations. In fact, I beg you to add your voice to the conversations.

ONE MORE THING

The substack is free. Subscribe for free and you’ll have access to everything we make except the print magazine. There is no special content behind the paywall. If we are serious about having open conversations, then putting a $5 barrier to participate in those conversations seems wrong. However, substack does make paid monthly and annual subscriptions very easy, which is a handy workaround for subscribing to the magazine! If you are able to do that, you can subscribe and pay either monthly or annual subscription. I will be grateful for that support because the podcast and the writing here does take time and money to make and subscriptions will also help with the cash flow. If you decide to pay for the substack subscription that will count as a magazine subscription as well! So substack and podcasts are free, but if you pay for a subscription you also get the magazine.

That’s it! Welcome to dispatch.