KUSHAL DAVE/YH

Half magazine, half web, all new

"It's pretty mysterious," says Phil Fortino, SY '00, of the look and feel of his web-site-in-the-making, Blueapple.net. However, the summary might just as easily describe the entire project, from Fortino's departure from the Yale Daily News for this "different kind of project" to the blue posters eliciting submissions and the site's current bare skeleton.

There is evidently a strong precedent for Fortino. Stefanie Syman, PC '92, co-founded FEED, one of the Internet's most popular publications.

But first Blueapple.net needs to get off the ground. It was supposed to finally launch this week, but in a meeting a few days ago the team opted to delay for approximately two weeks, giving them adequate time to pull the various parts of the publication together. Fortino alluded to "problems with getting our code to jive with the server." He added, "The first issue is going to probably be pretty simple."

Although the page will eventually offer extensive interactivity, the initial issue will simply focus on content. "We've had a pretty good mix of articles," Fortino said, explaining that among the content would be drawings, a screenplay, nonfiction anecdotes, some fiction work, and possibly a short animation. Fortino will also include a serialized novel in the first issue. "I'm actually writing it as I go, which makes it more exciting."

Blueapple Appeal

Why online? Fortino offered a number of reasons. He cited the difficulty in funding a print publication and contrasted it with the ease of putting a dynamic, widely-accessible, full-color publication online. "It has wider exposure [and] it's pretty easy for us to update," he said. He also pointed to the ability to link directly to previous articles in an online archive. Furthermore, an online publication lends itself to other media, such as music, video and hypertext. "We think we can have other draws," he said, adding, "Really, the possibilities are limitless right now."

The site is Fortino's innovative response to a desire this summer "to do something literary." He felt there was "some disconnect between the literary world and colleges," bothered by the fact that "the most respected campus publications are newspapers." With blue standing for English and apple representing the fruit of wisdom, Fortino says that the name that "refers to our goal, which is to encompass everything that can be learned in college in the form of art." Although Fortino has no particular agenda right now, he says they are "really into being a forum for a very particular group of [college-level, experience-relating] writers."

Fortino is considering is providing a variety of ways for readers to give feedback on articles to help the writers improve. "What we want to eventually do is have forums where people can submit responses to what we publish," he said, though he had no idea if people would actually submit responses. "I know we have a very opinionated student body," he said. "I do think it's worth trying."

A variety of dynamic features are under development, including improvements to the calendar available on the site. Currently around fifteen people are working Blueapple.net, although more people have expressed interest. "Right now, we're still in the process of still organizing our staff," he said of the ad hoc process. He characterized it as "a lot of enthusiastic people doing a lot of different things."

Plans are eventually to move from a monthly production schedule to a biweekly one. Also, though so far advertising has only been on campus, they've "thought about getting submissions from people outside Yale." Since this desire precludes them from being an undergraduate organization, they plan to make money from advertising.

Fortino says responses to his efforts have been "only encouragement or neutrality." He added, "Nobody's really spit on the idea." That is, with the exception of Rumpus. "We have been in the Rumpus once," he said. "The editor of the Rumpus promised us they would [put us in Remedial Media]." He added, "I expect reviews, maybe." However, Fortino said they "don't want too much exposure" until they have gotten the kinks worked out.

As for some typical criticisms of online publications, Fortino had ready answers. He said that much of the reduced credibility of online publications is the result of editors who "tend not to print it out and look at it," which they will do. He hopes that the quality of Blueapple.net will speak for itself the way it has for The New York Times' Cybertimes feature. "I don't think the medium itself will determine people's response," he said. As for readability, Fortino acknowledged, "We're definitely concerned." The publication will eventually offer a version formatted for being printed out. But Fortino points out that people read monitors every day when they use email.

Icon See Clearly Now . . .

Fortino admitted that he visited few electronic magazines on the web prior to this project, sticking instead to newspaper's sites. He says the magazine will probably have a similar layout. "I thought the newspaper format was really great," he said. In preparing Blueapple.net, he discovered Icon, an electronic publication from a group of students at Harvard. But Fortino is not sure how much of a model it represents for Blueapple.net. "It's a very flashy site," he said. "We want to steer away from some of the faults of over-designing."

According to Parul Singh, Icon's editor, "A group of friends and [her] felt that there needed to be a space for creative exploration of the web medium." They chose the name "because it had so many different layers of meaning." Among those she cited were the roles of "icon" in computing and pop culture. "We were really interested in storytelling, and stories are so often layers of symbolic meaning. We wanted to touch upon all these strands of meaning in our name."

They built it, and people came. "Most people who look at our site seem to really like it, especially the design," Singh said. "We've been really pleased with the response." However, generating traffic was not easy. "Publicity has been fairly important for us. As a new organization, we've had to get our name out to people on campus. Print publications are able to put something physical in people's hands — we've had to find other ways to reach people." She added, " Credibility has only been a problem in that people may not have heard about us yet.

Icon wrestled with different issues of readability than Blueapple.net has. "We've had to shorten the length of our articles.," Singh said. "In our first issue, we had some 3000 word spreads, but we really had to cut down — we found that people weren't reading the really long articles, or were printing them out."

However, the benefits have outweighed the unique challenges of being online. "It's really great to have the freedom to use so many different media," Singh said. "A writer came to me today and said, `When I write a story, it has a soundtrack,' and to be able to tell her that we could do that. Also, our costs are really low, which frees us to concentrate on the creative stuff."

Now, Icon has a team of between 20 and 25 people. "Producers work with contributors who provide content and sometimes an additional technology or design person," Singh said. "But we're also running a comprehensive web seminar this semester, and training people to be able to not only conceptualize their own pieces, but also design and program/implement them."

Singh's publication unlike Fortino's, receives funding from Harvard even though it accepts external submissions. "A lot of our readership comes from outside Harvard, maybe 20-30%," Singh said. "We do accept submissions from outside Harvard, but haven't focused on this much yet. We get money from on-campus funding sources like the Undergraduate Council, the Office for the Arts, and a projects fund run by the Dean of Students Office. We also get revenue from outside advertising and have a lot of our software donated by outside corporations."

What's in Icon's future? "We joke about going public in the future," Singh said. "But that's just a joke."

Meanwhile, of course, Fortino is focusing on a different kind of "going public." A body of students, and the world beyond, awaits his debut effort.

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