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These are good questions and they deserve simple, forthright answers. As I struggle to come up with those answers, let me tell you how this website got started: Every time I go to a newsstand, I look for a magazine that does not exist. No, it's not the one devoted to my prehensile-tail fetish (though I'm sure the subject will become a MTV documentary soon) or even my hobby of collecting noteworthy Dixie Cups (only the most slightly used). Rather, I simply want a magazine dedicated to pop culture. No problem, right? Why, every magazine on the rack has something about pop culture, even the newsweeklies and the cigar monthlies. Then there's Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly–what the hell else do you want? Well, here's my quibble: For the most part, all of those magazines are writing about entertainment products, not necessarily "culture." What we typically get are articles interviewing celebrities who just happen to be selling something: a new movie, a new CD, a new TV show, or just their own fabulousness. Consequently, most of the media that's described as being about "pop culture" is really about the personalities of famous people. (And what do you know–they're all uniquely gifted individuals who haven't let fame go to their heads. Amazing!) So there I am, at the newsstand, thumbing past the 500 or so men's magazines, the 100 amorphous style magazines, the 50 hipster music magazines, the three literary magazines… And I just can't find it: a magazine that simply addresses pop culture as a general subject, journalistically covering its history and its creators (whether they're famous or not). I want a pop culture magazine that actually believes in what it writes about. At times, a new indie magazine will raise my hopes, titles like Outré or Giant Robot, but their niches are smaller than what I have in mind. Meanwhile, mainstream magazines like Vanity Fair or the New Yorker will run articles that are what I'm looking for–once or twice every quarter. But so far, no one magazine to satisfy all my difficult yearnings. So I thought I'd start it up myself. Predictably, this proved to be a rather foolhardy quest. But since I'd been an editor and writer in the alternative newsweekly business for an entirely too long time, I thought I had a leg up–I knew lots of good writers and had "ins" with a few publishers. After creating a prototype and cheeky marketing package with generous graphic designer Lisa Horstman, I set out to revolutionize the magazine industry… and got the same reaction from every publisher: "This is great! But there's no market for it." Oh, I tried to argue that there might very well be more people in this country who are interested in pop culture than, say, living near a coastline (Coastal Living), or listening to books on tape (AudioFile), or drinking bottled water (Hydrate). But it was a losing argument, or I just didn't know how to argue it properly. The second most popular reaction I received was: "You should publish this yourself." Yes, indeed, that would be the best way to go. Unfortunately, I lack the basic skills required to beg large sums of money from investors, and am free of the personal savings to launch a publishing empire. Instead, I opted to clench my jaw and ponder the injustice of a world in which no one will give you the funding and distribution to put out your own magazine. After a brief year of that, I decided to do what every other yahoo with a dream he can't afford does: I put it on the Web. So, after a long and bloody struggle to learn Web design, this is the result: PopCult. It's only a basic approximation of what I had in mind for the print version, but it should at least keep me busy. What I'd like the online PopCult to be is simply a repository for really good, journalistic pop culture writing. (For more detailed information on the PopCult editorial philosophy, please refer to the long-winded Contributors' Guidelines.) I hope it will turn into a site that provides a good read, if nothing else. Actually, that's it for the manifesto part. And I hope your questions have been answered. If not, or if you have any ideas or hateful suggestions, the e-mail box is always open. Thanks! —Coury Turczyn
ATTENTION MULTIMILLIONAIRE INVESTORS: Ask for our PopCult Publishing Proposal. It could result in your good fortune!
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