1. Q&A is an online interview project that sells longform interviews as ebooks through Amazon and other online outlets. I used to be a magazine editor and this is what I see as a viable contemporary format for the magazine. It’s inside the network, as it were.
2. Q&A is a magazine, but one that is formed by the characteristics of the context it’s presented within. This means that each individual interview will function on its own and as part of the broader Q&A project. The challenge for the project is to create a context of intelligibility for the idea “Q&A”, an understanding about what this combination of letters means within the context created. This is also a question of establishing a context of trust — trust that the product has a certain consistency and quality, which is what all branding aspires to.
3. Strictly speaking, calling Q&A a magazine is a misnomer. Rather it is a product of the network. Describing the project in this way points to how Q&A gets activated by the interests of its readers. Internet giants’ Google and Amazon are central to how it works. Search and social media organize the Internet today and as such they create specific opportunities for how journalism can be practiced – specifically: 1) through the development of in-depth niche content; 2) for the interest of a non-local (global) audience; 3) with longterm relevance.
4. Q&A takes this form in part due to an understanding that it is very hard to maintain a front page on the Internet. Huge resources are required to keep up with the 24/7 global demand for fresh content it enables. News organizations like the Guardian and the New York Times can manage it; organizations like the Gawker blog network or the Huffington Post take a different approach of producing a lot of content quickly, often on the backs of the major news networks by editorializing on news items they produce and inviting their readers to join in, to create extended online conversations.
5. A lot of the content typical of the latter approach tends towards the prurient or sensational. So, as I like to say, a publisher on the Internet is either a farmer or a troll — the former cultivates an audience through considered development of content, and the latter conjures its audience into existence through one form of provocation or another, in the hope that it provokes a response. My approach is farming with a focus on what I like to think of as the developing culture of the 21st century. This includes interviews with contemporary artists, because they are naturally prognosticators about what it means to live in the present (the edge of the future,) as well as trends that are under-the-radar of broad cultural awareness. The blockchain and its applications (including Ethereum) and the Occupy movement and natural life extension are some examples.
6. Q&A takes advantage of the unique power of the Internet to create a backcatalog of all kinds of content with a high degree of specificity, and distribute it widely. On the Internet any kind of niche at all can be catered to, and is. Q&A proposes to take advantage of this by producing in-depth interviews about topics that might not otherwise be covered. The niche is what I see as an emerging culture of time; i.e., those topics that do not necessarily have a mainstream audience yet, but still is of interest to specific constituencies.
7. The phrase “conversational thinking,” provides a good explanation for my interest in the interview format. I got it from Clive Thompson’s book Smarter Than You Think (2013). Thinking happens in conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise, and I like the way the interview format helps formalize this process. I believe the popularity of the Q&A format is part of the participatory tendency now at work in the culture at large, one that has been fostered by the Internet. It’s interesting to think that the web answers a pent-up demand for collaboration and the active production of knowledge by all kinds of people that, before it was broadly adapted to, apparently wasn’t well-understood.
This text originally published at qqqandaaa.com on JUNE 29, 2015.
Rosemary Heather 