We have heard from our readers and subscribers all over the world, and one thing is clear: You want to keep the spirit and community of No Depression alive. So do we. To that end, while the reality remains that this is the end of ND as we know it, we have some promising news for you, on a couple of fronts.
As noted in the announcement we posted at nodepression.com about the magazine’s cessation, we’re moving forward with plans to expand the No Depression website. You can help us find our way into the future by visiting nodepression.com and voicing your opinions about the continuation of ND online. We’re very interested in hearing your thoughts and ideas about what you’d like to see on our site.
In its current form, nodepression.com gives you the opportunity to interact with the reviews and blogs by posting comments. We’ll be adding more reviews and other content over the next few months, as we work on creating a new, enhanced website and a global ND community. Our goal is to continue being your trusted music source, and to engender a two-way dialogue.
We’ll be keeping you updated with future developments as they unfold. The best way to stay in the loop is not only to visit our website, but, once you’re there, to sign up for our listserv (it’s free, of course). In addition to news about our future plans, we’ll also be sending our listserv folks occasional perks provided by some of the record labels who have been longtime advertisers in our print publication.
And speaking of print publications, we’re not entirely disappearing from the old ink-and-paper medium. You may recall that we published an anthology in 2005 with the University of Texas Press (The Best Of No Depression: Writing About American Music), as part of our tenth-anniversary celebration. We’re happy to announce that our affiliation with UT Press will soon be continuing.
This fall will bring the first edition (though we’ll dub it “#76”, in tribute to our magazine’s legacy) of a new semiannual No Depression “bookazine” series to be edited by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock, and published by UT Press.
The bookazine (whatever that is) will be different from the magazine; for starters, it’ll come out twice a year rather than six times a year. As with traditional books, it’ll be on the shelves (with the music books) rather than in the magazine racks at the bookstore, and there will be no advertising in its pages. It will be priced more like a book, though there will also be subscriptions available; if you’re a current subscriber, you’ll shortly be getting a note from us in the mail regarding the transition.
As when the magazine started, the bookazine will become principally a hobby for its editors, at least for starters, with the possibility that it may grow into more. In terms of the content and presentation, we’re going into largely uncharted territory here — also much as was the case when we started the magazine.
Some of the details will become clearer as we get further into the process of creating the first edition. Generally speaking, what we envision is that the bookazine will continue to provide a home for our long-form pieces which have less chance of transitioning to the website, where the editorial focus will be on more timely elements such as live reviews, record reviews, and news reports.
We envision these two endeavors complementing each other in a way that allows No Depression to move forward into the new media frontier, both on the web and in print — albeit at a different scale in both realms than we have been in the past.
As for this final issue of the magazine: We remain extraordinarily grateful to all of you for allowing us to publish No Depression for such a great stretch of our lives. Without our community of readers, subscribers, writers, photographers, artists, and advertisers, we’d never have gotten this thing off the ground in the first place, much less sustained it for more than a decade as an independently-owned entity. We’re especially thankful to this issue’s advertisers, who stepped up to the plate and allowed us to provide a nice, full, 144-page goodbye.
So…take a moment, if you will, to appreciate what we’re losing. But, most of all, take another moment to value what we’ve gained, talking about music in these pages for the past thirteen years.
