Meridian…the Online Magazine?

The Meridian redesign is coming very soon!

When I learned that David Alan Harvey’s Burn Magazine won the Lucie award for best photography magazine of 2009, I sensed some parallels with President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize – awarded not only for the good that’s been done, but to give more momentum to the change that is coming.

Burnmagazine.org, being the first online magazine to win a Lucie in its category, may have raised some eyebrows for its nontraditional format.  But the award was no fluke; Burn wasn’t even the only online nominee (Lunaticmag.com was also nominated).

This got me thinking once again about how easy it is, at least on a technical level, to publish a blog, or even a fully-fledged online magazine.

That was about when Kevin Costner whispered “If you build it, they will come” in the movie that runs in my head.  And so I’ve been hammering away at the keys, simultaneously updating and applying my slowly expanding knowledge of WordPress, PHP, and HTML…all in an attempt to upgrade the Meridian experience.

I’ve realized that Meridian has never really just been a collective with a website and…oh…a blog too.  The blog has been at the forefront from the beginning, both to highlight our hard work as well as to reach out to our fellow emerging journalists.  A clearer recognition that our blog can be (and has been) more than an online bulletin of our endeavors in other media outlets has necessitated a change.  Meridian is an outlet in an of itself.

So, the redesign I’ve been working on will more accurately reflect our mission by revamping the way we deliver articles.  Soon we will have a more attractive home for our finished projects in the Featured section, as well as categories for the resources we so often find and share, our behind-the-scenes anecdotes and the posts gleaned from our friends across the world.

Soon disappearing is our totally weak homepage that hasn’t done much besides provide a link to the blog. You will find all our articles directly at meridiancollective.org.  Make sure to update your RSS feed with the right address.