Two and a half years ago, inspired by the DIY creativity of a growing number of indie crafters, we launched CRAFT Magazine along with its companion website, Craftzine.com. Since then, we’ve become an integral part of the new craft community. We’ve been fully committed to encouraging more people to discover the joy of crafting.
All along, we have noticed that Craftzine.com has been growing steadily. At the same time, we’ve come to realize that there were more and more challenges in publishing CRAFT as a print magazine, especially with the costs of print and distribution rising, and diminishing interest among advertisers in print. So we’ve decided that Volume 10, our Celebrate Like Crazy issue, will be our last print issue and that the future of CRAFT is online. (CRAFT subscribers will be notified by email today of the changes and how to obtain a refund for their subscription. If we don’t have your email, we will be sending you a letter by post.)
Creating a print magazine was a great pleasure for all of us on our amazing team, and we’ve appreciated the many readers who told us how much they enjoyed CRAFT. Our print magazine helped to gain recognition that craft is thriving today, more than ever. We’re going online exclusively with CRAFT because that’s where we can best reach and serve our audience.
On Craftzine.com, we have a talented team, led by Natalie Zee Drieu, who is returning from maternity leave. She’s excited to expand our efforts online. We have a lot of work to do to bring the best of the magazine to the website but the team has started to pursue that goal. We will focus on bringing you more craft projects, just as the print magazine did but we’ll be able to do so with greater frequency. We want CRAFT online to be visually appealing and easily accessible; we want it to be fun but also useful. CRAFT will continue to venture into new territory, creating projects that integrate high tech wizardry and high fashion.
I also want to assure you that craft and crafters will continue to be an important part of the program for Maker Faire. We have always regarded crafters as we do makers, a creative vanguard who are remaking the world in ways that are especially vital today. Also, we will continue to publish MAKE magazine in print. The closure of CRAFT in print allows us to focus our limited resources on growing a single DIY magazine instead of two.
As we’ve talked to some of CRAFT’s contributors and advertisers about our decision, we felt that they understood why we made the decision. Nonetheless, the initial reaction is one of disappointment. I suspect many subscribers will feel the same way. However, as we talked about the future with all these stakeholders, they also became as excited as we are about the possibilities. I look forward to exploring what lies ahead. I hope you will join us as we share our deep interest in, and appreciation for, the diverse approaches to CRAFT on craftzine.com.
Update 2/11 4:40pm
From Heather Harmon our Circulation Director:
There have been a lot of questions about the Digital Edition. We are working on the back-end programming, which will take a little bit of time, but this is the plan:
*If you are a CRAFT subscriber, you will have access to the entire digital archive of CRAFT (Volumes 1-10) through April 1, 2009, even if you cancel your subscription.
*If you are a CRAFT subscriber who transfers to MAKE, you will have access to the entire digital archive of CRAFT (Volumes 1-10) through April 1, 2009 or for as long as you are a MAKE subscriber, whichever is longer.
The CRAFT digital archive is available at http://craftzine-digital.com
You can also get back issues of CRAFT Magazines in the Maker Shed.
Related:
CRAFT Print FAQ
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