Origins of a Webzine: From Concept to Creation

Introduction

As we reach the 10th issue of The Player, I thought I'd reflect on how the webzine came about, especially since my memory gets hazier by the day. It takes a surprising amount of work to get a webzine running. Coordinating it isn't an easy job, but I'm glad that all of the hard work to make this webzine has paid off.

The Idea

On May 18th, 2014, I sent Scene a PM on PS. At the time he was a newly promoted Leader and a good friend of mine. It was originally an idea to port staff interviews onsite, but I thought that there was a little more that we could do with it. We often had discussions about improving PS, but I was pretty surprised that he took it on. We'd both had experience doing media for both PS and Smogon before, so it wasn't too hard to transition, but running a webzine was obviously a completely new ball game. I sent him a draft PM later that evening, and things got rolling pretty quickly. We had a target of seven articles per issue, and that's still (mostly) met to this day!

The Name

We decided the name internally with no community feedback or anything. We probably should've asked you guys, but we thought that we did a pretty good job of picking it. Scene suggested the names Showdown Lowdown, PS Times, and The Player to start. The Player stuck. Although it didn't have PS in it, it was definitely the least cringeworthy of them all.

Zarel, however, wasn't totally convinced by the name, but he eventually decided to go along with it.

Zarel: man
Zarel: that just sounds like a PUA magazine name
Zarel: "10 tips for picking up women"
Zarel: "drugs that will knock her out cold"
Zarel: "'no' means 'yes' if you ask enough times"

The Beginning

The PS senior staff approved the webzine, and we were off. I set up the hub and started working on the layout for the issue home page, while Scene focused on the progress management of the articles. The layout is still used today, along with the edits made by Quarkz. However, we still had to actually compile the first issue. Scene was due to go on holiday during early July, leaving me alone to handle the first issue. As a startup publication, we didn't have any other staff. I was left alone to handle the onslaught of article submissions, HTML approvals, and subsequent upload. That month was incredibly busy. I was making dozens of posts a day and spending hours working on them. To make it even more chaotic, I was leaving the country on release day, making upload an even bigger squeeze. I remember reading the comments in the release thread using the Heathrow Airport's Wi-Fi. Good times.

But we had a magazine! We had strong support from our reader base and ten whole articles, and Blue Frog even made us an awesome logo and cover art. He still handles applying the text to the covers and does a great job every issue.

People

We had an explosion of people interested in contributing after the first issue. HTML was crazily busy and the team is still too big. The Player had a healthy stream of writers and people going for staff positions too. Scene and I were both editors together until he vanished at the end of 2014, and we ~~argued over~~ discussed everything at the start. Every decision was done as a team, and it was a really nice way to work. Over time, new staff members joined. antemortem, hollywood, and shaymin were the original additions to the staff, and we've grown even further since then.

Conclusion

Well, I hope this wasn't totally boring. Writing has never been my thing; I've mostly stuck to the technical and organizational side of things. The Player is still growing, and I look forward to seeing it continue to grow in the future. The staff team is great, and it's really weird to think that this was all nearly a year ago. It's nice to see how far we've all come. If you want to be involved with The Player, we'd love to see you join us!

« Previous Article

Home