As if Jack London’s Bernal roots and New York Times domination and lots and lots of books aren’t enough to demonstrate our neighborhood’s literary heft, there’s a high-profile media launch happening this weekend, and it’s got some deep Bernal Heights DNA.
The project is called California Sunday Magazine, and it’s brought to you by many of the same people responsible for the insanely popular Pop Up Magazine series that’s taken San Francisco by storm in recent years. California Sunday Magazine is a print magazine with literary-journalism aspirations to cover the world from a West Coast point of view. Here’s the About Us:
The California Sunday Magazine roams across California, the West, Asia, and Latin America, telling stories for a national audience. We also produce a live event series, Pop-Up Magazine. We explore science, business, entertainment, politics, technology, art, social issues, sports, food, and more. We’re curious about everything. The first weekend of each month, we’ll have new stuff to share, on the web, on our mobile apps, and in print—delivered with select Sunday copies of the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Sacramento Bee. Once we get the hang of that, we’ll start publishing two weekends a month and then every weekend. We’re brand new, so thanks for reading!
Did you catch that? California Sunday Magazine has a diabolically clever distribution strategy: It will appear in the Sunday editions of several major California newspapers (most of which have either eliminated or gutted their own Sunday magazines in recent years). So if you usually get the San Francisco Chronicle on Sundays, look for California Sunday Magazine inside this weekend. The content from the first issue is online here. The print edition will be monthly at first, ramping up to weekly.
This is a fascinating experiment, and in coming days it will no doubt attract a great deal of interest in media circles from coast-to-coast and across the galaxy. But as you enjoy California Sunday Magazine, and partake of all the buzz, know this: The publisher and co-founder of California Sunday Magazine is Chas Edwards, your Bernal Heights neighbor. Oh, and the editor-in-chief is Doug McGray, who doesn’t quite live in Bernal, but can be called Bernal-adjacent:
They’re already talking about Cal Sunday in BusinessWeek:
For years, California journalists have dreamed of a Left Coast publication to rival media icons such as New York magazine and the New Yorker. The editorial operations of Condé Nast-owned Wired are in San Francisco, but most publications that tried to set up shop there—such as the Industry Standard, which had a moment during the first dot-com boom—have failed. (The audiences for Los Angeles and San Francisco magazines are loyal but local.) John Battelle, chairman of online ad company Federated Media, helped launch Wired and the Industry Standard and is an investor in California Sunday. “I think they are really on to something,” Battelle says. His first effort at a Bay Area-based magazine, the Pacific, never got off the ground. “The biggest impediment was the cost of circulation,” he says, and California Sunday solves that problem by paying an insertion fee to bundle with newspapers.
Best of luck to the California Sunday Magazine crew. Your neighbors will be rooting for you from the home-team bleachers.
UPDATE: Sunday 5 Oct: Ooh. Look what just arrived!
Here’s to the start of a brand-new weekend ritual:
IMAGES: via California Sunday Magazine Coffee photo by Telstar Logistics
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