Vancouver Island University’s online magazine production students are sharing their latest works of long-form non-fiction.
This month VIU’s online magazine production class launched the 2020 edition of Incline Magazine. The publication, which appears every other year, provides a platform for the pupils’ first-person memoir and topical news feature writing.
Course instructor and Incline editorial supervisor Frank Moher said VIU has been offering the course since 2001. The website currently includes articles dating back to 2013, but he’s hoping to make earlier stories available online as well.
Moher described the class as “a simulation of publishing a magazine as well as actually being a magazine.”
“I think sometimes students are surprised to learn that pieces aren’t just tossed off and posted and maybe that not everything that’s written gets published,” Moher said. “So it’s to give them an actual working experience of what it might be to work in magazine journalism in particular these days when the emphasis is shifting over to online.”
The students are also asked to manage Incline‘s Twitter account and take advantage of online features when assembling their articles.
“I encourage a strong use of the web as a medium,” Moher said. “So some are making videos, either as a story or to accompany a story. There’s a lot of emphasis on interesting photography to take use of that ability the web has to be visual.”
Moher said each piece undergoes “quite an elaborate editorial process” and sometimes deadlines are in place to approximate real-world magazine writing, “but for the most part, the story comes out when it’s ready.”
As much of the work is done electronically and there is no final exam, Moher said students will continue posting new articles from now until early May.
Incline can be found at www.inclinemag.ca.
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