The New Media Diva

I was at war with myself over this post: Part of me wants to keep Monocle a secret; the other half wants to tell everyone about the mag so it can make enough to stick around.

In a time when it seems that quite a few mags are intent on dumbing themselves down, Monocle is a breath of stylish, witty fresh air. The mag, which is the brainchild of Tyler Brule, is a cross between Harper’s, Vanity Fair and the Financial Times, but better (if that can be possible). From its site: “Monocle is a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design.”

I think I picked up my first copy of Monocle at the Toronto airport on my way back from ONA 07. I was hellbent on not liking it, even before I opened the cover. I’d read wallpaper*, which was started by Monocle’s founder Tyler Brule, from time to time and found it to be sometimes too hip for its own good: The correspondents seemed to write as if everything was an inside joke only they had the punchline to.

Or maybe I was jealous that I didn’t glazed ebony bookshelves designed by some brooding Swede.

My snark-preparations were thrown off by an article on Abkhazia, “Breakaway state.” Besides my own shop, I had hardly seen anything in the mainstream press about the state, at least not in-depth I was hooked: I shelled out £75 for a subscription.

If it was just the reporting that mattered, I wouldn’t be as enamored with Monocle as I am: The photography is simple, yet breathtaking. If you get the chance, snag the November issue and check out the photo essay on Berlin’s Tempelhof airport.

Another plus, and you may think I’m being picky: the paper. The quality of the paper Monocle is printed on is the best I’ve found in a mag in a long time. I have no idea what brand of paper is used, but it’s a thick-weighted, uncoated matte. I love the feel of it, the solidness. (Note to The Economist: Sometimes your print bleeds and rubs off on my fingers. Just thought you should know.)

Something else I should mention: For the £75, not only do you get the mag, you get online access to videos that extend the hard copy stories. It’s fabulous blend of old and new media. One thing that stuck out though: There’s no two-way communication between the mag and the reader. No letters to the editor, no actual feedback venue on the site save for the contact page.

Granted, there is a tad bit of wallpaper* in Monocle: It’s very, very upmarket. But, if you can ignore the ooh-ahhs over items such as the Fuji Klasse W 35mm camera - which costs about US$800 - and focus on the actual reportage such as the article on Africans in China (both can be found in the latest edition), you’ll be impressed.

Wired Mag has an article online about an estimated US$30 million effort at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology to literally piece together the work of East Germany’s Stasi. Researchers at the Institute are using digital methods to tape together the 5 percent of surveillance files ripped up by the Stasi during the fall of communism.

From the article:

“That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany’s communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally “paper-wolves” and “rip-wolves,” German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

There’s no way to know what bombshells those files hide. For a country still trying to come to terms with its role in World War II and its life under a totalitarian regime, that half-destroyed paperwork is a tantalizing secret.”

According to the article, Frauenhofer is using a system of scanners to “digitally tape together the torn fragments” from 400 bags. Each bag has about 40,000 fragments. The massiveness of the project equals the size of the Stasi’s surveillance program.

“As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic’s Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler’s Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.”

Via Instapundit. Image: jgaray/Wikipedia

WWD has a great story on Al Jazeera English: Al Jazeera English: Fighting through stereotypes.

As Susan Watters wrote in the article, AJE is hard as heck to find anywhere. That’s why I absolutely love Zattoo. It offers AJE (as I wrote in my last post) and other channels you may be missing out on.

Over at my shop we’ve published our excellent (if I should say so myself) 2008 Prognosis, a 10-part series in which some of our most talented correspondents and academics give their views on what the coming year may bring for international relations and security. Areas covered include the Balkans, the Caucasus, Russia, Africa and Latin America. Also offered are analyses on prospects for the EU, the financial world and the energy sector.

Speaking of predictions, Navigation Arts has posted its 2008 Web Predictions.

Earlier this month fellow ONA member Tim Overdiek posted an entry on his blog listing his favorite non-US news sites. I tried getting in a plug for my shop, but he didn’t bite.:-)

In any case, here are some of the non-US sites I hit up when I can:

Cafebabel: Paris, France. Not a true news site, but it’s a Euro-based current affairs mag.

The Guardian: London, UK: Leans further to the left than Angela Davis at a Black Panther rally.

Al-Ahram: Cairo, Egypt. A weekly (hence, no breaking news) pub that provides in-depth news analyses of the Arab world.

Al Jazeera: Doha, Qatar. The website of the broadcaster. Tip…download Zattoo to watch AJ (and other channels) for free. Just sit through an ad at the beginning of the program.

Aftenposten: Oslo, Norway. I can’t remember how I happened upon this one. I think I was reading a story on an RSS feed about Martha and her angels.

The First Post: London, UK. Probably my favorite layout. Commentaries can be pretty biting.

Der Spiegel: Hamburg, Germany.

Haaretz: Tel Aviv, Israel.

Y-Net News: Tel Aviv, Israel.

Swissinfo: Bern, Switzerland.

All Africa: Johannesburg, South Africa; Dakar, Senegal; Lagos, Nigeria.

Japan Times: Tokyo, Japan.