That dust storm that blanketed a huge swath of Australia also gave birth to an instant magazine:
Strange Light is a 40-page magazine that Derek just published (in this case, I mean “just” as in “sometime during the night, U.S. time”) using MagCloud.
So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or pre-event planning, captured “a day in the life of a dust storm.” As people with digital tools in their hands are wont to do, photographers and observers began to upload what they were seeing and experiencing and capturing to the web. With the speed and finesse of someone who has an up-close-and-personal understanding of the “community” aspects of photo sharing (trust me on that one) and who helped to innovate much of the processes of web-based “social-media” collaborative magazine publishing, Derek put together a magazine — and has given us just one more glimpse into the potential of the magazine format.
I spend a lot of time pointing out that arguments over the future of magazines are rarely about the magazine format — they nearly always are about some business model related to circulation, advertising or cost-structure.
Via Jay Rosen, “If a magazine can be conceived and ready for sale in 24 hours think what that means for journalism.”
And, if you’re wondering, Brian Palmer explains why orange dust turns the sky red.