Editors Note

 Editors Note. By Kris Makuch, july 2015

“I run a magazine, you know”

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 I recently found the words “I run a magazine, you know!” Drop out of my mouth and into the ears of an uninterested barman. The poor guy. He tried hard to appear enthused as I awkwardly tried to reign in my ego.

“We’ve only done one issue, but it’s really good.”

He politely smiled, handed over my pint and we both pretended nothing ever happened.

British customs are the best.

And so here we are. We’ve done one issue and it was really good. 914 hits on the website and 74 likes on the Facebook page. That’s a lot of people!

And it’s all thanks to the team’s efforts! Great work! All contributors should have all received their portraits in the post. If you haven’t let me know.

From last month’s issue the top articles were:

• Ben’s Blankness article with 111 hits;
• Breast is best, but breast ain’t easy by Eden with 78 hits; and
• Jane’s post on what #GE2015 means for the north-east received 77hits.

A few little wins to mention:

Ashley’s Maltby street market review got a retweet by @MaltbyStMkt who have over 8,000 followers. And Jen’s article about the future of housing was favourited by @brettalegrewood who has 6,500 followers!  Finally, Eden’s article got a load of pickup on the Facebook page and generated a huge amount of clicks through to the article.

Result!

So coming up in this month’s articles we have:

The regulars –

• #food dip and flip review;
• Almost viral;
• Tech review of LG G4; and
• Film review of magic mike xxl (particularly hilarious).

We then have:

• Our latest haiku;
• A day in the life of zoologist;
• What is procrastination?; and
• A newbie – the beer review

We also have four guest posts about:

• The future of YouTube;
• Nick Clegg post-election,
• How rosé wine can get you out of a tricky situation; and
• The mental health campaign #weRallbananas,

There are also a few updates on the structure of the magazine:

• We now have larger images (We love visuals!);
• We’ve introduced a hall of fame to showcase past contributors;
• On the back of that we will now release the new avatars on the 21st of each month given the success of last month;
• We’re also still dabbling with adverts and have plugged in a sponsor page; and
• There is also a link (below) to buy me a coffee! This might could be a nice touch to generate revenue – who knows? Let’s test it…

The big thing to note is that Facebook is generating a lot of traffic to the website, so we’re really trying to push our Facebook page so that we can post our articles in our audience’s news feed. So make sure to invite everyone to like the page!

A big thanks, again, to everyone who has helped this month. Sterling work all around!

Finally, next month is all about Disney, so I will be in touch soon with the crack of what is going on!

Cheers everyone!

Kris/Koo