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How to Start a College Magazine, Part One: Ground Rules and Structure

 

Want help starting a magazine?

I might be able to answer some questions or provide specific guidance. Feel free to contact me directly.

 

This is the first article in a four-part series on starting a college magazine, written by the Chairman of the Yale Record, America’s oldest humor magazine. There’s a lot of information here; pick and choose whatever seems helpful. 

 

As the chairman of the Yale Record, and the person whose email is connected to this web page, I get requests from students around the world to advise them on college magazine projects.

I looked around the internet to find resources on this, but most of them were written at least a decade ago, or applied only to newspapers, rather than the humor magazines/fashion blogs/scholarly journals people were asking me about. So I decided to write a series of posts explaining most of what I know about college publications.

This is part one of the guide, which deals with “ground rules”: things you should do, or think about, before you start writing and recruiting.

For part two, which deals with building a staff, click here. For part three, which deals with creating content, click here. For part four, which discusses growing your publication after you start producing material, click here.

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Seventeen Years of Amazon Shareholder Letters

On the advice of Bing Gordon, I recently spent an afternoon reading through the last 17 years’ worth of Amazon shareholder letters, written by the somewhat strange and mostly wonderful Jeff Bezos. This was an interesting experience; if you like entrepreneurship, or business in general, I highly recommend it!

Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

1997

Humble beginnings:

“We brought [customers] much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields).”

1998

“I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.”

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How to Have (and Remember) More Ideas

My third post for Applied Sentience is up:

http://appliedsentience.com/2014/08/29/making-better-use-of-humanitys-most-valuable-resource-good-ideas/

Check it out for some thoughts on Srinivasa Ramanujan, David Foster Wallace, Jean-Paul Sartre, and why Quora isn’t living up to its potential (on which more later).

* * * * *

Related: I cannot emphasize strongly enough that you should keep a file for your ideas (however strange or impractical) and get in the habit of writing them down. Habits that help:

  • When you have an experience that gives you a strong emotional response (laughter, joy, anger, confusion), think to yourself: “How could people have more/less of this experience in their lives? What would have to be invented or changed?”
  • Keep a journal. You’ll remember more experiences like the ones I mentioned above, and you’ll be able to notice very easily when you write phrases like “I wish…” or “If only…”
  • Sit down for a formal brainstorming session once in a while. If this doesn’t sound appealing, try it once, for ten minutes. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it again, but if you do like it, you might find it becoming a valuable habit.
  • Use Workflowy, which is the best tool I’ve found for quickly making lists. Evernote is also good, but not quite as fast.

If you have an idea-generating habit that I didn’t list here, put it in the comment section! I’m always looking for ideas about how to look for ideas.

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The Hexagon Game // Surrounder

Three weeks ago, I was sitting in a bathroom with hexagonal floor tiles. As I stared at the floor, I began thinking about geometric patterns involving hexagons. (I’m going to assume everyone does this until I hear otherwise, and if you tell me otherwise, I might refuse to listen.)

The thoughts went something like this:

What if these hexagons were one color? And those were another color? What patterns could you build?

And then:

Wait. What if, when one hexagon was surrounded by hexagons of a different color, it got “killed” and taken away? Like the hexagons were soldiers in some kind of horrible hexagon civil war? And the battle continued until every scrap of territrory was owned by one of the two sides?

After washing my hands, I power-walked back to my desk in the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and began to prototype a board game. (This was long after the end of the workday, because the Institute is air-conditioned and contains fewer spiders than my house.)

After three games, I thought I really had something. After six games, I was convinced that the game was terrible. Then I expanded the board, and the cycle began anew. When things began to look really promising, I did some research on game design (which, in the tradition of Aaron research, included useful activities like reading the entirety of the manga Hikaru No Go and the biography of Christian Freeling).

Finally, I posted a picture of a finished game, and people were curious enough that I felt the game itself was worth blogging.

So, here it is. I call it “The Hexagon Game” inside my head, but a better, more Google-friendly name is “Surrounder”. I hope to hack together a playable app for it once my Javascript skills are up to snuff, but for now, I play in… Microsoft Paint. Such are the trials of game design.

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Ridiculous Ideas For Your Future

Yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned that he’d been hearing the following words from many of his friends.

“I don’t know what to do with my life.”

Often, someone I know will say this with weary resignation, as though they are a literary figure doomed to wander the earth for decades, rootless and without purpose. And if they aren’t resigned, they’re panicking: “I don’t know what to do with my life!”

(You might hear the “panic” version a month before graduation.)

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How to Change Your Mind

My third guest post for Applied Sentience is up!

http://appliedsentience.com/2014/07/25/2038/

This one wasn’t very original, but I thought it turned out well. Essentially, I took some of Less Wrong’s fantastic material on How to Actually Change Your Mind, then threw in some examples from my own experience. Plus, you get some fun mental training exercises to go along with the stories!

Credit goes to Paul Chiari, editor extraordinaire, for the photos and captions.

 

Here’s an excerpt:

From the ages of 13-16, I spent a lot of time arguing with people on this political forum. I changed my mind a few times in the process, but by the time I left the site, I was pretty sure I’d found the “correct” side of every major political issue, even though I never had that thought explicitly.

If you’d asked me: “Do you actually think you’re right about everything?” I would have answered no. But if you’d asked “What are some things youactually think you might be wrong about?” I’d have stared at you for a while and then started to mope. (At least, that’s what happened whenever I asked myself that question.)

 

If you can only click one link from the guest post, make it “Steelmanning”, by Chana Messinger. It’s much more fun to argue with people when you pretend their arguments are better than they really are, as opposed to worse.

(It’s also a relief when other people show you the same courtesy.)

 

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Belated Philanthropy: Update

Last December, I wrote a post about a concept I call “belated philanthropy”.

In summary: When someone solicits me on the street, asking for money, I don’t give it. Instead, I make a note of the incident in my mind. Later, I donate to a charity based on how many people have asked me for money since my last “belated” donation.

Here’s why:

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Introducing: Yale Effective Altruists

Update: This post is out-of-date. YEA now has its own website, where updates will be posted on various things we do. The website is also out-of-date, but to a lesser extent.

 

I’m starting a club!

The name of the club is “Yale Effective Altruists”, or “YEA”. It exists for three big reasons:

  1. To help college students use their time to make other people’s lives better in a manner as effective as possible.
  2. To introduce more college students to the ideas and methods of the “effective altruism” (EA) movement.
  3. To help the wider EA movement complete more projects and put more ideas into practice, for the good of humanity.

 

Members of YEA will:

  • Meet to discuss the current state of the world, and realistic ways we might improve it
  • Plan and develop projects that might improve the world (more on that later)
  • Talk to cool people who like improving the world, some of whom might be famous
  • Learn how to persuade people (useful in general) and get expert advice on choosing classes, careers, and more

There will be one recommended meeting each week (30 minutes or less), plus a variety of projects to work on and talks to attend if you’d like to be more involved. We’ll also hang out together (for more, see “good parties” below).

If you’re already curious, you can sign up to learn more!

(I’ll also give you the link at the end of this post.)

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