Last week, HRDCVR, a project to create “a book-shaped magazine by and for the new everyone” more than doubled funding goals on Kickstarter, raising $67,230 from 516 backers. On Monday, Emiley Mallory wrote about the magazine and its founders, journalists Danyel Smith and Elliott Wilson, for All Digitocracy.
The magazine, with just one issue planned, will come out Nov. 28.
HRDCVR’s mission is to challenge the lack of variety in society’s narrative and to bring more diverse communities forward. HRDCVR is, in essence, an ode to the culture. It’s not solely a hip-hop magazine and it’s not just about politics either, Smith said.
Wilson is a host and a television producer who runs the popular and influential website, Rap Radar. Smith is the former editor-in-chief of VIBE and was the first black editor at Billboard. She is currently a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
With more than 20 years of journalism and media experience between them, HRDCVR, Smith said, is about authentic storytelling.
In the video for the Kickstarter campaign, Smith talks about working for mainstream publications in the past “and their idea of who everybody is just doesn’t really reflect who the actual everybody is. It’s a multistream, it’s not a mainstream, and that’s who we want to serve and interrogate and celebrate with HRDCVR. That’s what we want to do.”
The magazine itself is also a celebration of print, and, it sounds like, a space to explore and play with the medium. From Kickstarter:
HRDCVR is a print publication because we believe print is still a powerful medium, and still hasn’t been pushed to its extreme. Part of this project is about developing a new aesthetic for print. A new vocabulary. We’re thinking about dry-transfer and dye-transfer. Emblems. Text as image. Sticker paper. Monumentality. Entire stories built in pull-quote. Wide-width satin ribbon bookmarks. Matte paper and glossy paper at the same damn time
