[PRs meet the media] Design a magazine

There's a fine line between loving beautiful things, celebrating style and creativity, and being pretentious. One Small Seed crossed that line. And then crossed right back.

"We had a reputation for being a bit pretentious," explains Sarah Jayne Fell, One Small Seed's editor. "But about two years back we lightened it up."

The mag's tagline is 'The SA pop culture magazine'; it used to be 'The SA contemporary culture magazine'.

It's a tricky line to walk, because by its nature art and design does pretend - to be more, better, edgier, authentic, gritty, refined, raw. Pretension in an arty magazine is an occupational hazard - as is making yourself too inaccessible. This explains the decision to include more music and pop culture in the magazine - to appeal to a broader audience, and to be a more entertaining read.

One Small Seed has a circulation of over 10 000, but only 3 200 are paid. It is a very, very desirable readership for advertisers and PRs to target - but it's definitely on the small side.

"This is the problem of being too niche - which is why we give them a Jack Parow article," says Fell.

One Small Seed was launched five years ago by Guiseppe Russo, a Luxembourger of Italian extraction who came to South Africa to do 3D renderings for an architecture company. Seeing the need for a platform for SA talent, he decided to rather plant his own small seed. No previous publishing experience, just an idea and a lot of energy.

The publishing ideology behind the magazine is to be a regular and continuing showcase of the best of South African creative talent, appealing to other creative people. "It's not a demogaphic, it's more of a mindset," explains Fell.

Readers range from hipster teenagers to fifty-something art directors, but the profile is typically independent thinkers who are interested in the arts. The audience is not just SA - it has an extensive online presence, and recent initiatives have seen the mag being pushed out through distributors to global markets to build the profile of SA's creative industry abroad (no numbers have come back yet, so success is unknown).

The magazine runs quarterly, with a cover price is R48.50 - not cheap, but half or a quarter of the price of equivalent international publications. A large part of this cost is the quality of paper and printing, which is vital to this type of publication.

Fell doesn't think cover price has much influence on One Small Seed's sales: most readers are fairly affluent, used to paying for the finer things in life. This doesn't apply to the student population though, which is why the unsold back issues are distributed free to schools such as Vega and Red & Yellow to get it into the hands of the next generation of creatives.

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Central to One Small Seed's identity is that it is not just a print magazine, but a number of media properties which includes video (www.onesmallseed.tv), web community (www.onesmallseed.net) and an online hip culture magazine called Joe Bubble (www.joebubble.com) and a photography mag, just launched, called Picture This (www.picturethismagazine.com) (www.picturethismagazine.co.za).

A lot of media, a lot of content, and a lot of work for a very small team. Over-stretched? Over-ambitious? Over-worked? Perhaps. But One Small Seed is inside the tornado of new media, and wants to ride it to the top.

Online strategy

One Small Seed is all about online. The team has to put the mag together, then bash together content and design work for the various websites, and everyone pitches in to post content to the social media sites.

There's a Facebook group with 4052 members, a Facebook page with 1918 members, 1852 Twitter followers on @onesmallseedSA, and the www.onesmallseed.net social network. Twitter is mostly used to highlight new content or news; the Facebook pages are more interactive with a lot broader reach, driving traffic to the onesmallseed sites.

The team is looking at integrating the online properties more, and have some great initiatives such as Selected Creatives - where people can submit work to the onesmallseed.net community, with the top voted work being featured in the magazine - which gives new talent a chance for some sunlight.

Who's who

• Editor: Sarah Jayne Fell (@ sarah_j_fell). She'll be the main point of contact for stories and pitches, and will farm them out to the right person if necessary. Email moc.deesllamseno@haras.

• Copywriter and manager of onesmallseed.net: Sarah Claire Picton (@SarahClaireP).. She's the person to send event info to, or if you have ticket giveaways, etc. She's also a good person to pitch an idea for a blog post - or to send cool products to for review. Both Sarahs are very open to reviewing stuff, from albums to restaurants to gigs. Email moc.deesllamseno@erialcharas.

• Traffic manager: Hailey Koch. For specific matters relating to production, and if you want to pitch something related to onesmallseed.tv or video. This applies to editorial content (stuff that's welcome includes event coverage, behind-the-scenes documentaries for ad campaigns, music videos, fashion shoots, etc), as well as commissioning the team to do corporate video production. Email moc.deesllamseno@yeliah.

• Advertising sales: Michael Littlefield. If you have a campaign and want to pull in One Small Seed's media production capability, or for other paid-for projects. Email moc.deesllamseno@ekim.

  Head designer: Katrien Scott.

  Cameraman and editor on one small seed TV: Shaun Blomkamp.

• Founder and editor-in-chief: Giuseppe Russo (@GiuseppeRussoSA). Is the big-picture guy and creative director across all the channels; not usually a PR contact.

  Music editor: Jon Monsoon (@jonmonsoon). Albums, concerts, band interviews, he's your man (contact him through Sarah Jayne.)

How to pitch

Like many busy media people nowadays, first choice is pitch stories by email. Be concise, explain in a line or two what makes your story relevant and interesting. Include full copy as appropriate. If you have supporting pics, make sure you have good quality, high resolution images. First send the team low res images, so that they can request hires images for print if needed. If you're only interested in web, low res is fine.

The most common pitches come from publicists of bands and artists (who are successful enough to afford them), but One Small Seed likes to get stuff from independents. The editorial team subscribes to newsletters of galleries and venues, so make sure if your client is being featured at a venue that some material gets onto its newsletter.

The magazine is quarterly, and works in four production cycles: mid-Sept to early Oct, mid-Dec to January, mid-March to April, mid-June to July. Now is a good time to pitch December ideas.

Things to pitch

• Work from creative individuals and agencies, fashion and design (high quality pre-packaged submissions of photo-shoots of clothing, accessories, etc are welcome), as well as interior design and architecture material. "It's got to look nice and be original," is Sarah's only rule.

• Also welcome: films and books, and designer gadgets (which need to be a bit special, not run-of-the-mill cellphones and wotnot).

• If you're running events, ticket giveaways go a long way to getting the team's ear.

• Publicists can also create profiles on onesmallseed.net and upload their own content, and then pop Sarah Jayne an email to let her know to possibly feature it in the mag or the front page of the site.

• Because of the large multimedia production capability, One Small Seed can produce video/online segments as part of your campaign (paid for or not, depends on how interesting it is).

• One Small Seed allocates a lot of copies to targeted free distribution, so if you have a relevant event and want something for seats/goodie bags, or want to offer subscription prizes for a campaign, contact Sarah Jayne.

Sarah's PR bugbear? PR people that send releases or invitations as nameless document or image attachments inside a blank, subjectless email. It's surprisingly common. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.

Fact file

• Potted bio: Sarah Jayne Fell - editor of One Small Seed

She's had a meteoric rise - joining One Small Seed as an unpaid intern a little over two years ago, quickly moving through assistant copy editor, then copy editor, then features editor, and now editor.

She studied social science degree in Durban, majoring in English, CCMS (Culture, Communication & Media Studies) and Philosophy. She did first-year law and found it incredibly tedious, ending up majoring in all her electives. She followed this up with an Honours in English and Philosophy. She plans on doing her masters in Media Studies part time next year at UCT.

Durban may be a great city, but there's not a lot of media action going on. Joburg may be happening business-wise, but has no ocean. Hence her move to Cape Town.

She runs a website and blogs at www.sarahjaynefell.com.