Slice in the L.A. Alternative

Posted by Adam Kuban, January 19, 2006 at 3:38 PM

This website gets a passing mention in a story in the Los Angeles Alternative (wow: all the LA love lately). The story's called The Internet Killed Xerox Zine-sters, and you can pretty much guess what it's about. Unless you don't know what a zine is.

What they say about Slice:

“For writers, publishers, photographers and more, a blog is the easiest way to get what you create in front of people,” notes [LAist editor Carolyn] Kellogg. “When I was an editor at The Fizz, it took us two months to do all the editorial, layout and production of our newsprint zine. A multi-contributor blog can do that process in a single day, and individual contributors can publish their own pieces once they’re ready. An individual with a blog is a whiplash-fast publishing machine.”

Blog readers certainly fancy themselves well informed, and well armed against the powers of filtered news—ready at any moment to rise against those powers with one click of key.

You can also use blogs to rise up and get a slice of pizza (SliceNY.com catalogues the best Pizza in New York, complete with an interactive pizza map).

It is in these situations, (the democratic one, not the pizza) that alternative media sources have been effective in forming popular opinion or, conversely, breaking it from rigid paradigms of thought.

Not that you care, but Slice was originally conceived of as a zine at some point in 1998 or 1999. (I should see if I still have the original quarter-page mock-up laying around corporate HQ.) I scrapped the idea, however, figuring it'd be too much time and effort to copy, collate, staple, and distribute a print version. Plus, who the hell was going to read a zine about pizza in Portland, Oregon?! (That's where I was living at the time.)

The Internet Killed the Xerox Zine-sters [L.A. Alternative]

Thanks to reader Joe in L.A. for hipping me to this story.

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Tags: Press