Greetings everyone! So this is the new BR&S and we couldn't be more excited to be back! Our relaunch has been a long journey of invisible labor that started around Feb of 2012, but it was completely worth it. With a new look, new editors, and new options, it's as new to us as it is to you, so please be patient as we learn how to use this website. What's changed, you ask? Almost everything.
Since BR&S was first designed in 2003, there have been serious changes in the technology available to us. The sweeping advancements changed the internet from a place of flat static pages (remember the web before YouTube?) that you accessed at a desk to an omnipresent multimedia companion that fits in your pocket. If you compare today's blog content to BR&S #1, there is no question that we are able to offer richer content today, and BR&S version 2 expects to commission plentiful original content that is as rich as possible.
We can't help but reflect on our own time and Big Red has been around long enough that you can start to see distinct eras in its history and how it fits the larger publishing milieu. I always assumed that if BR&S was first published in 2009 that it would have been a blog or maybe a hybridized blogazine rather than a recurring journal. Even as the newspaper industry was having serious competitive issues with the web starting in the 90's, by 2004 online publishing wanted to have the deep-rooted gravitas that was intrinsic to magazines or newspapers. Publications like Salon, for example, were searching for the credibility that allows for consistent financial stability. By 2009 everything had reversed. Major newspapers were closing everywhere. Few survived without changing their structures to become more like their online competition.
In 2004, Big Red positioned itself as a Journal. It was how serious people formatted their work. Today, as the blog format has matured from private journals to a valid option for professional publishing, BR&S has adopted the blog as a crucial format for delivering original content. The main day-to-day blog writing will be handled by the 5 new editors, but BR&S will be publishing both new voices and people who have been associated with BR&S since the beginning. If you are interested in blogging with us, look here.
In addition to strengthening Our Daily Red, we are rebooting our Journal. Starting in mid October we will be publishing a monthly collection of commissioned, long-form art writing from all over the world. This will be where we place our more ambitious and longer pieces; essays about consequential ideas, new original artwork, or interviews with various "makers of things." While it's not a paper journal and certainly has no claim to having a mature voice yet, we are looking to the big players who preceded us and we hope to live up to their examples.
