Behind the scenes….
Looking Back and Forward / Winds & Waves / November 2016
Change is not easy, even when we agree it’s needed. It means learning new ways of doing things. Things may look different. It can take time to get used to a new look. So it is with our decision to turn to Medium, an online platform, to publish our magazine, Winds and Waves.
Winds and Waves was created to be a global forum for sharing stories of achievement, by people, communities, and the natural world in which we live. Stories from the grassroots — that bottom up level where so many people are creating change — often don’t get the attention they deserve. The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) has had a long history of global publications, including Network Exchange, Edges, Pacific Waves, and in more recent times, Winds and Waves.We are deluged with stories about what isn’t working. As ICA’s global publication, Winds and Waves celebrates what is working!
The dedicated Winds and Waves editorial team concluded, after a recent readership survey, that it was time to approach publication differently. We wanted to find a way to publish stories that could be shared easily, widely, and with less ‘behind the scenes’ effort by a small group of people.
After much exploration, the Winds and Waves team suggested Medium — something new for all of us. Most of us knew it, but thought it was a blog platform. So, in a recent Skype call (challenging to arrange given our team’s far-flung diversity), we had many questions. Given that you may well have similar questions, we thought we would share the key points here.
As well as being a blog platform, Medium supports magazine publication, organizing articles, pictures and videos into an appealing format. (See https://medium.com/winds-and-waves) Thus, in addition to articles, Winds and Waves also will be able to accept and showcase videos and photographs as well.
Excellent editing has always been a great strength of Winds and Waves. So we wondered ‘if anyone can submit an article, how do we edit it?’ Then we learned that articles could be submitted in draft form, allowing the designated editors to edit it. The article isn’t ‘published’ until it’s been edited.
Our Winds and Waves team, in fact, became quite excited by the possibilities of the new format. With videos being part of our ‘virtual’ magazine, we can include many languages other than English. Photographic essays become much easier to manage in this format. And ‘producing’ a magazine in this way requires much less labour ‘behind the scenes’ for a small team.
We gain access to a broader audience, sharing stories of the power of human development more widely and more regularly than we can do now. Medium produces a daily digest of articles that it circulates widely, so if one of “our” articles appears in that digest, it will gain much wider circulation than we can currently offer. Additionally, readers will find it easier to share stories on social media platforms, including the new ICAI website.
We know that many of you will miss the format in which we have been publishing Winds and Waves for the past six years. We are marking this transition — and celebrating it— by profiling 10 articles from previous editions, along with several new articles. Thank you to all the authors who have shared their learning, wisdom, reflections, and news over the years, and to all the team who have laboured behind the scenes to produce Winds and Waves in that format.
We hope that you will join us on the journey to a new way of publishing. To make it easier, we are preparing a short ‘how to’ guide for authors, which will give you the key points of how to submit story drafts, videos, and photographs for review by the editorial team. Even if you aren’t a writer, photographer, or videographer, we’d be delighted if you were willing to become a ‘story scout’, helping us identify stories all over the world that are crying out to be told and shared globally. Join us!
