Zines Are Back

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are the 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole. Hey. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello. Hello. We are all back. Wow. This feels like a rarity recently.

0:48Various people have been busy and going on holiday and stuff. We're all here now. No housekeeping, right, Jason, before we go straight into what we're going to be talking about? I guess the only thing is, if you're interested in 404 Media merch and want to get it before Christmas, you need to order it in the next day or two. I'll probably ship one more time next week or I'll ship this week and then also like early next week and then everything after that we'll have to wait till after Christmas so I know that that was the thing that came up last year so if you're interested in that order now on our Shopify Yeah, definitely if you want to get the green baseball cap that I have or the black one that Jason has or any of the other pieces of merch I've been wearing the hoodie a lot recently definitely get those in All right, let's start with this first story, which is more of an announcement and then, you know, definitely something to chat about.

1:45404 Media is making a zine. Did I say that correctly? I've been so paranoid. because... Zine versus Zine? Yes. No, Zine is correct. I sometimes say Zine just because I'm like, it must be the British Z, Z, whatever. Okay. The British pronunciation of magazine. We all know magazine. That's how I have to do it. I have to go in my head and go, wait, magazine. Okay, it's Zine. Right. Okay, gotcha. We're not making a magazine, just to be clear. That's also a very good point of clarification. Yeah. It's kind of the opposite, the complete opposite of that. And we'll get into that. But we are making this, Jason.

2:31I guess before we talk about print media and how independent media is doing a lot more of it, just concretely, what are our plans here? What are we making exactly? Yeah, I think we want to make this conversation relevant, not just like a product announcement. So I think that we are doing a print zine. It's going to be 16 pages. It's going to be this size if you're on YouTube. So it's like 5 by 10, like a sheet of paper folded in half. And it's going to be about our reporting on ISIS surveillance tactics. So it's a mix of our best reporting and a couple of news stories, reworked versions of our older stories.

3:16We didn't like wholesale reuse anything. But it is like there's a few reasons that we're doing it. I think first and foremost, we've wanted to do print in some format for a while. I think just because it's cool. Honestly, we're able to do things just because it's cool and because we like it. But I think there's something very tangible and physical about the printed word. And I think that I don't know about y 'all, but I grew up being like, oh, I'd like to write in a magazine. I love to just read them. When it's like I go away somewhere and now I'm going to really focus on reading. I don't want to be distracted by the Apple News app or Blue Sky or whatever.

3:59I want to sit down and I want to read something cover to cover. And sometimes I'll do that and it feels good. Yeah, it lets us play with design. It lets us play with tangible things. And then I think critically in what a lot of this post is about is about the fact that we own this company. We talked about the fact that we own this company 1 million times. And part of that is we operate on the internet. And we distribute our stuff through these algorithms that are controlled by big tech. We distribute our stuff on, well, not so much on Twitter anymore, but on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Blue Sky.

4:38And on these platforms, they are moderated by algorithms. Even Blue Sky has a recommendation algorithm. And so much of it is of whether someone sees something that we do is based on whether they are served it by the algorithm, whether it performs well in the algorithm. and you read it and of course you can share it with someone else in a group text and things like that but you know you sort of have to click it and and go go to that thing whereas with print media uh i really like the fact that it's going directly to the people who buy it you know like we will mail it directly to you we're uh doing this as part of a benefit concert here in los Angeles for Cheerla, which is an immigrants rights organization.

5:28And we are going to be handing it out at the concert. So we could print out our blogs and hand it out there, or we could have a QR code and say, go to our website. But I think the fact that we're able to just hand this tangible thing to people is cool. It's a different distribution method. I mean, it's a distribution method that's been around for thousands and thousands of years, but it's one that works. And I think it's one that's not moderated by algorithms. I think we wrote in the piece that, you know, you can read this zine if you get it and then you can give it to a friend or you can give it to the library or you can throw it in the trash.

6:07You can light it on fire. Like you can do all sorts of different things with it that you can't really do with a thing on a screen. And I think that in an age where so much of what we do is moderated by algorithms and increasingly where everything is so automated, so AI focused, we wanted to create something that was really tangible and really human. Sort of as an experiment, but also because we thought it would be cool. Yeah. We'll get to some of the other experiments that you especially have done on Motherboard and then what other outlets are doing around physical media. But before we get to that, just what has some of the process been in designing and building this?

6:49I should say, it also... I mean, it does exist because we've designed it. But it hasn't been printed yet. I think that's going to start tomorrow. So apart from that aspect of the process, which literally hasn't happened yet, what did it involve up until now? Yeah, so we'll make some Instagram posts and YouTube videos and maybe a blog post about the actual physical production and distribution of this thing. But basically the way it works, we're doing a risograph printer, which I talked about in a previous episode of this podcast. But basically it's a type of Japanese printer that's been around since the early 90s, I believe.

7:30And it is a type of printer that was designed for mass production. And basically it's a mechanism of screen printing on paper, more or less. And so you print one color at a time, you layer the colors, you have different opacities for the colors, and you can create these very cool effects because of that. And so basically, we picked three colors that we were going to use. I commissioned an artist to do the cover. Their name is Vary Alarez. They're based here in Los Angeles. And they've been doing a lot of art about ice in general over the last few months. And so I was drawn to their work and, you know, I talked to them and it was a big process of like, well, which colors should we use for the zine?

8:14Like what, you know, we have, we have like a three color palette to play with. Like, what do you think works best here? And so there was like a lot of back and forth there. We also are working with our old friend, Ernie Smith, who runs a newsletter called Tedium. That is, I believe their tagline is like searching for the long tail of the internet. but he writes a lot about forgotten internet things. So check him out. But basically, he used to be a newspaper designer in a previous life and a previous career many moons ago. And so he came out of retirement to help lay this out. So it was a lot of like, we wrote the zine, like we wrote the articles in Google Docs, and then we shared it with Ernie.

9:01and then Ernie did some... I did some phone calls with Ernie being like, well, this is the vibe for this page. This is the vibe for that page. And he did a few different designs, sent it back and forth. And he did some... I think he's going to write about it himself. And it'd be great to hear more later. But he did some crazy stuff with Linux and VMs, which I don't know the details, but I'm very, very curious to hear. Yeah, very notably, he did it all in Linux. And yeah, which is cool because a lot of this work is usually done in Adobe products, which have AI-ified everything. So he did it in Affinity, which is now owned by Canva, but I don't think has been super AI-ified yet.

9:47And he did it on his Linux machine. And it's notable just because of the way that you have to do the file layouts and things for Resigraph printing is sort of notable. and it was difficult to do on Linux, but I think he wanted to give himself a challenge and he succeeded at it. I would say the most stressful part of any of this is like, there's two things. One, it's print deadlines. So we were invited to partake in this concert a couple, like about a month ago now. And so in order to get copies in time for the concert, which is January 4th. You can learn more about it probably in the YouTube description.

10:32We had to get this to the printer very quickly. So we had to do the whole thing relatively quickly because we got to print it. And it takes time to do it and put it together and all that. And it's a very DIY studio that we're using. It's called Punch Kiss Press here in Los Angeles. And not only do you have to print the pages, but because of the way it works, you have to let them dry because it's wet ink that doesn't dry immediately. And then they're being assembled by hand, more or less. So it's very labor-intensive. And then also, it's like you can't have typos. I don't think that we have typos, but it's like if you have a typo or say something a little bit off on the internet, you can go and you can fix it.

11:16You can't do that with print. You could, but it'd be very labor-intensive. And you'd have to get all the copies back. Sorry, we have to go. You have to request them be mailed back to you. I mean, I did used to work at a print magazine. My first job was at Washingtonian Magazine in DC. And every month, they would have a corrections column in the next issue of the magazine being like, here's things we missed in the last one. And I was a fact checker there. So if we missed something, it was very horrible to have a correction. Very embarrassing. But that's one of the things about the printed word.

11:50you all know this is not like shedding any light, but there's like a huge amount of stress associated with like, is there a typo here? Is there extra spacing? Like stuff like that. And I don't know, we've like, we caught things going up to the last second. I'll be going to the printer tomorrow, like when you're listening to this to like watch the process and hopefully help out a little bit. But it is a very manual, very human process that we're doing. and it doesn't have to be this way like we could have found a big company to print these for us and just sent them pdfs and like been done with it but i think that for this first experiment we wanted to try uh to have our hands on all aspects of it and and just do it in this like cool artistic fashion um and hopefully we'll do more at some point no no specific plans on it yet but um this one has gone well so far.

12:49People seem excited about it. Yeah, that's where the fun is. Doing the supply chain stuff for yourselves. And it's the same that you've done with the merch, basically, where we got these designs and you found a local printer to do those as well. That's definitely part of it. But there's this sort of... I don't want to exaggerate it or overemphasize it, but there has been some moves recently with independent media to go back to physical media? The Onion that was bought by Ben Collins and co. recently from the previous owners, and then they've gone back to a physical newspaper. Do you see it in that sort of vein, Jason?

13:36Are there any more examples? I'm forgetting. Onion is the main one I'm thinking. Yeah. So one more thing. I also had to pick out the paper that it would be printed on, which was pretty wild because I went to the printer and they had a bunch of different types of paper that we could have printed on. And she was like, what weight of paper do you want? And what type of... What company and all this? And so that was cool. I don't know a ton about paper. So I basically went with her recommendations. But that's how granular these options were, which is pretty neat. But yeah, you're absolutely right. There has been, I think, in this moment of people getting fed up with social media and getting fed up with the internet and staring at a screen all day, there has been a bit of a return to print media.

14:20I feel it myself. I feel like I want to support human things made by human beings. And so there has been a handful of new magazines or magazines that have existed for a while that have some newfound prominence and things like that. I think the biggest one is The Onion because they were obviously bought last year, two years ago by Ben Collins and a consortium of people. And Ben Collins used to be a disinformation reporter, I believe at MSNBC. And yeah, and before that, I worked with him briefly, the Daily Beast. Yeah. And so he went into that and one of the first things that they did was like, we're bringing back the newspaper, the Onion newspaper.

15:06The Onion used to be a newspaper that was handed out for free for many, many years. But as part of being purchased by other media conglomerates and cutbacks and various things, they got rid of it years ago. And as I understand, the newspaper, the Onion's newspaper subscription has gone really well. Ben Collins actually posted on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago that their goal for 2026 is to have more print subscribers than the Washington Post. Which is... That's a shocking thing to think about. And also... Because Washington Post sucks now in a lot of ways. Obviously, owners have changed and the editorial board is like just going batshit and people are mad and mass unsubscribing.

15:52It seems possible, I don't know. It is possible. It's like they don't need that many more. That's what I was going to say is The Onion, I believe, is now the 11th largest newspaper in the United States. Like one year after relaunching, which is really good for the onion and very scary. Depressing as well. Depressing, yeah, for sort of like the state of newspapers in the US. And yeah, on the Washington Post front, I mentioned this before, but my dad used to work there. He printed the paper there when I was growing up. And they had three printing presses, like three printing plants when I was growing up.

16:31There was one in College Park, Maryland. There was one in Springfield, Virginia. and there was one in Southeast DC. And each of them had like four-ish printing presses. And these printing presses were three stories tall and like the length of a football field. Like they're huge, absolutely huge. And they're printing, I don't know, like a million papers every day, something like that. Huge, huge number of papers. And over time, my dad had to go start working in Virginia when we lived in Maryland because the College Park plant closed. And then the one in DC closed. And then the one in Virginia still exists, but I think they've gone from having four presses to having, I don't know, two or maybe even only one going.

17:20And that's the one that still does it today. That's the one that still does it today. And that one's been around for a long time. But it's just like the physical infrastructure to print these things is like, I don't know, Emmanuel was sending me the other day, newspaper printing presses that are being auctioned off by random companies at this point. Well, similar with book publishing, right? I mean, I didn't have full visibility into it, but I remember doing my book, you have to schedule it somewhere very specific in the year because if you don't, print are going to be busy with something else.

17:57There's such a tiny amount of infrastructure available for this sort of thing. And obviously, we're not mass producing this, but we started to find somewhere as well. And I guess just briefly, why did you want that specific printer as well, Jason? Just because you've been into it for a while? Yeah, I think it's because Resograph is traditionally used for zines. It has a long history of being used for zines, like these smaller run editions of things. and the aesthetic of layering the ink. There's usually minor imperfections in the registration, it's called, which is how the colors layer and things like that.

18:44So each individual one feels a little bit more handmade versus printing it off on an inkjet printer or printing it off in a commercial printing press. And then I think it's also become an art. It's become a very artistic thing. And I'm not saying that we are artists, but the printer, the Risagraph community considers themselves to be doing quite a lot of art. And I think it just has led to a lot of artists who specialize in that type of printing that gave us this big pool of people to work with in that space. And there's a handful of different Risagraph printers, printing presses across the United States.

19:27There's, I think, like two or three in Los Angeles, but almost all of them are run by like one or two people or they're like small collectives. And it just felt like it was kind of the right thing for us to do to start with. I will say also, I mentioned The Onion, but there are a bunch of other like really small magazines that have either launched or relaunched in the last like year or two. One is called Savor Magazine, which is about food. And that's another one that went out of print and has come back recently. It came back in 2024 and is apparently doing pretty well. There's a mushroom enthusiast one called Mushroom People, which is pretty cool.

20:11There's one called Wild Eye that's a photography one. And so I think there is a new wave of magazines and print media that has popped up in the last few years. And I think, theoretically, we want to be part of it. I mean, we'll see how this goes. Again, people seem excited about it, but we'll see how it goes once we start distributing it, if people actually like it, if it is a huge logistical nightmare in terms of actually mailing them and things like that. But all indications are that people are interested in this. And so hopefully we will be able to do more of them. Yeah. And you know what other small media company relaunched this magazine?

21:00Vice Media. I'm just checking. Oh, they did. They did. Yeah. To be clear, not a small independent media company. But I know that's also part of the same conversation as well. Obviously, the circumstances that led to that was... Obviously, they went bankrupt and we saw the writing on the wall. That's why we left and made 404 Media. But they've relaunched the magazine. I mean, that's pretty interesting you bring that up because we were a part of Vice when it went from being a monthly magazine to a quarterly magazine to like, we're going to do this only every once in a while to we're going to shut this down.

21:37Right. And I think we did take part in a few of the magazines that came out. There was a motherboard issue, more or less, where a lot of us ended up writing articles for it. And that was really rewarding and nice. But one thing that Vice did was they stopped promoting the magazine and having launch parties and big things around it. And they started just giving it out at American Apparel. They had some sponsorship deal with American Apparel. and then American Apparel went bankrupt. And so then literally there were... And a bunch of other issues. Well, yeah, yeah. But then there was like a period of time where it was impossible to get the magazine.

22:17They had like no distribution mechanism for it. And so, I mean, that was like a bummer to see. And I think that's something that has happened for a lot of magazines over the years. And I guess it's just like with us, you know, we're starting extremely small. This is extremely small, extremely like experimental. but um that is that's obviously a reality is like it's expensive to do it's slow like you know we wrote these articles and they will be relevant when they come out but it's like we wrote these articles a week or two ago they'll come out in january that's like a long lead time between us writing it and people getting to read it and so the types of things that we can do in a magazine or a zine or any sort of printed product are different than what we can do on the internet.

23:04But I think it's still cool and still something that is worth doing. Yeah, absolutely. All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about one of Emmanuel's stories about some very weird stuff that's going on with Instagram and SEO headlines. We'll be right back after this.

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28:02All right. And we are back. This one by Emmanuel. The headline is, Instagram is generating inaccurate SEO bait for your posts. I mean, there's a lot going on that headline, but it's also kind of right there. How about we go to the first post you saw? How did you first come across this and what was the thing that you saw exactly? So as is often the case, a reader reached out. Someone who is a cosplayer, or I think more accurate to say a cosplay photographer, reached out and flagged that the author, Jeff Vandermeer, who wrote Annihilation, which is a popular book, later a movie, noticed that when he was searching for himself on Google, his Instagram posts would show up with headlines, as in the style and format of headlines, the construction of headlines, with capitalized, every word is capitalized.