I have long been fascinated by The Voice of San Diego, a membership-based investigative news site in Southern California. Their model is one from which many news organizations can learn — they were doing memberships long before paywalls were cool, they understand the importance of covering specific niches in a community, they have a strong focus on watchdog investigations, and they’ve always made reader engagement core to their journalism. Today, the organization has relaunched its website with new software that uses technology to help amplify those goals. They realized that their old CMS was holding them back, and relaunched a spiffy new design in a move from which the rest of us in the new industry could surely learn (but I’m biased).

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The world of publishing is treacherous. Today, coming up with enough capital to fully staff, produce and publish a magazine is a daunting task — and making a profit off of it is almost impossible.

But, it turns out, a new trend is rising that could help startup magazines produce, and even monetize, new and interesting digital content. Although micropublishing is not new — its roots date back into the book industry, when small Print On Demand books would get published — it has been an increasingly lucrative concept as more of the general public owns eReaders and tablets.  And, while its become popular among authors to produce micro-stories on platforms such as Kindle Singles, journalists now have the opportunity to ride micropublishing’s wave. Startups are scrambling to create proprietary CMS and publishing platforms that encourage anyone to produce a magazine.

Here is just a sampling of some of the different ways you can bring a digital edition of your startup publication to the hands of readers. They have different prices and limitations, but they should help you get thinking about whether micropublishing is right for you.

What do you think of micropublishing as a concept? Let us know in the comments.

1.  Zeen: Micro-Micro Publishing

If your work is less of a magazine and more of a one-off long read or a compendium of short articles with a single, then Zeen is the right choice for your micropublishing needs. Currently in Beta, Zeen is a free micropublishing website that enables users to input their own content, enrich it with multimedia (including pictures, video and maps), and lay it out in a “zine-like” digital format for publish to social media accounts or a personal blog. Read more

A group of 100 journalists, academics, software developers, business leaders, designers, non-profits and government representatives are gathered at a hotel in Tennessee this morning to talk about weaving stories and data in the first-ever Tapestry Conference.

NASHVILLE — ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ is a children’s book by Brian Selznick that combines black and white charcoal photos and text to tell a story. And he doesn’t use your normal set of accompanying images like you’d see in most children’s books. Selznick’s images tell much of the story without words. The experience of reading it is integrated and undisrupted.

Hannah Fairfield, who does graphics at The Times, said this was part of the inspiration in creating Snow Fall, a narrative multimedia project that recently won two gold medals in the Society of News Design’s digital competition.

Many of the graphics in Snow Fall animate as a user scrolls down the page, meaning they only change the pace the reader chooses. The graphics don’t get in the way, they don’t distract, they’re not only supplemental to the story — they’re part of the story. They tell the story in a way that text alone couldn’t tell the story.  They’re “immersers” rather than interrupters.

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A breakdown of Tapestry Conference attendees, compiled by Ellie Fields.

NASHVILLE — A group of 100 journalists, academics, software developers, business leaders, designers, non-profits and government representatives are gathered at a hotel in Tennessee this morning to talk about weaving stories and data in the first-ever Tapestry Conference.

Jonathan Corum, graphics editor at the New York Times, opened the conference with a keynote about how he finds stories in data. More about Jonathan:

Jonathan Corum is the science graphics editor at The New York Times. His print graphics have won 15 awards from the Society for News Design and 8 medals from the international Malofiej competition. In 2009 the Times graphics desk received a National Design Award for communication design.

He talked about narrative, exploration, editing, audience and more. Here are the best tweets from his keynote address (after the jump).
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“Snowfall” has become a verb in many newsrooms after The New York Times launched its beautiful multimedia project earlier this year. Though the format was touted as the future of online storytelling by some, The Times wasn’t the first to pull of this type of format. If you’re looking for inspiration to make snow fall in your own newsroom, here are a few other examples, not all of which come from newsrooms, as I think it would be irresponsible of us to confine ourselves to the sphere of news organizations when collecting inspiration for innovative storytelling formats.

1. Pitchfork: Glitter in the Dark

Favorite feature: Layering multiple shots in the background that change as you scroll, mimicking the action of a photoshoot.

2.  ESPN: The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis

Favorite feature: Curtain-style parallax that reveals the next layer of content as you scroll. (Tutorial on how to do this).

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