Old media meets new media in the latest edition of style mag Marmalade, which has been filled entirely with content from MySpace. But does the culture clash come off?
For those of you who don't know Marmalade - its website is here and its MySpace page here - it looks like the sort of mag you occasionally see piled up in Soho clothes shops. The strapline says it is for "good looking, smart people". I don't usually read it.
The idea of handing it over to MySpace was to give print space to up and coming talent. Which begs the question - why would up and coming talent want to appear in print when they have got the whole of the web to have fun with instead?
The first few pages of the mag are filled with snippets of news and information, all of them accompanied by the address of a MySpace page or website. On the web I could click straight through. In a mag I have to scribble them down and remember to look at them later. Now that's progress.
Flip a few more pages and at least the web addresses dry up, and you stop wishing you were reading it next to a computer.
It slowly begins to resemble more of a traditional magazine with a fashion spread featuring Pixie Geldof. So how did she end up in there? Did she contact the mag via her MySpace page, all off her own back? Maybe.
"Fashion, style and music magazines used to dictate what to wear, where to go and what to think," says the Marmalade editorial. "We don't think that's right today, when a glance at MySpace shows that the breadth of individual diversity has replaced the rigid hierarchies of an older way of reporting on the world.
"We can't hope to include everything we like in one issue. But we hope the collaboration between Marmalade and MySpace proves once and for all that it's the readers who run the show." Until next month, presumably.
