Tired of reading magazines with hundreds of adds and very few articles. Well look no further than The University of Memphis, because it has its first and very own e-zine.
Blueprints, which is a magazine on the World Wide Web, is a collaborative effort between a magazine editing class, a Web class and Professor Merrill Morris that will feature articles about the Memphis area.
“The articles ended up being a lot about food, for some reason,” Morris said. “I think that’s because the (magazine editing) class meets at 5:30 p.m. and people are hungry.”
Blueprints started in January when the magazine editing class, which is offered through the Journalism Department, sat around a table throwing ideas at each other.
The theme, title, fonts, articles, pictures and about ten other items had to be discussed to get the e-zine off the ground.
The magazine class however, had a diverse offering of skills.
“I found that most of the students in this particular class had a lot of good editing, writing and to some extent, production skills” Morris said.
Those production skills included knowledge of Dreamweaver and developing Web skills which the magazine class lacked expertise in.
This is where the web design class came in. The magazine class produced the articles, ideas and themes while the web design class made those dreams a reality.
This hands on teaching is supposed to make magazine career focused students realize how a magazine works and all the steps involved in getting one going.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for e-zines and other forms of self publishing on the web right now” Morris said.
Zac Nelling, senior Journalism major who took photographs for the e-zine, said he felt the experience better prepared him for a career in journalism which he begins in May.
“I think Dr. Morris is a great teacher and she shared her experiences with the class which really helped,” Nelling said.
Morris, who is leaving to teach at Georgia State University, hopes someone will take over the e-zine and maybe produce it at least once a semester.
Catch Blueprints on the web sometime in May. The address is www.people.memphis.edu/~jourlib/blueprints.
