Seemingly at just the exact moment yesterday when I was posting my entry about storytelling in the troubled world of newspaper journalism, my friend Thaler Pekar was expressing great enthusiasm on Facebook for an upcoming publication, San Francisco Panorama, a one-time-only newspaper to be published by McSweeney’s. Here’s why the publishers say they created San Francisco Panorama:
You can understand why this publication is a one-shot deal; these folks took five months to put together a newspaper. Obviously most newspapers are created in a day (kind of a miracle, I’ve always thought).
More about why they’re doing it:
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time only, Sunday-
edition-sized newspaper–the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.
As you look at the images of San Francisco Panorama pages on the nine-page press release (or download the PDF version), you do get a sense of how this publication combines traits of the Internet and print newspapers — or perhaps magazines to a greater extent — to be a 21st-century newspaper.
If any media company can figure out how to create something this cool in less than five months at a per-copy price of less than the $16 McSweeney’s is charging, it could just be the future of newspapers.
PS: One other cool thing — McSweeney’s collaborated with dozens of out-of-work and laid-off Bay Area journalists, as well as students, to produce San Francisco Panorama.