Last week I got a message from the Granta mailing list that pointed to a video featuring editor John Freeman making a direct pitch to readers for the new issue, themed around “Work“. Having got a copy of the “Chicago” issue, I was already interested to see what this issue would bring, but I got to thinking: how cool is it that Granta, a significant print magazine, would start using the Youtubiverse as an outlet for communicating with “readers”? Not something you see too often in the old guard of magazine publishing. So I fired off a few questions to the editor yesterday and got back these generous replies (below the video).

Bookninja: So when I saw your email promoting the new issue of Granta, I thought, here’s something interesting: one of the world’s great literary magazines advertising a journal printed on paper by creating a direct, conversational online video outlining the merits of the issue. While well produced, it’s really just you talking to the camera with a few illustrations. Other than sales, what are you hoping to accomplish with this?

John Freeman: I think we’ve entered a new age where as readers most of us will straddle the web and print — some publications we’ll read only on the web, others just in print. My feeling is that the publications that are going to last will be the ones we visit in both places, because that’s going to be the nature of modern reading. Hybrid. That being the case, it feels important for a place marker to exist a few times a year on Granta.com where we try to bring the two experiences for readers. After all, Granta comes out just four times a year and we want each issue to be a kind of cultural space, a provocation, a showcase for exciting writers. That’s the main reason for making a video like this — I couldn’t possibly go to all corners of the globe to point out Brad Watson’s story or Julian Barnes’ new story, or Daniel Alarcon’s amazing piece on book pirating in Peru, but this video makes that possible with a much smaller carbon footprint.

BN: Can you briefly outline the editorial thinking and production process(es) that lead to taking this approach?

JF: Granta has often come with an introduction from the editor. In the early days, Bill Buford re-launched it with a series of manifestos almost, but they dropped away as the magazine gained an identity and moved beyond bringing American writers to English readers and vice-versa. Ian Jack, who is a brilliant writer and contributed to Granta before becoming its editor, brought them back in a storytelling mode. I now think the best way to take a reader into a (printed) issue of the magazine is a piece by one of the writers. So in the Chicago issue, Aleksandar Hemon’s essay about playing football on the lake in the city with a grab bag of immigrants from Italy, Tibet and elsewhere felt like the best way to key readers in to what the themes and concerns would come up throughout the issue.

Similarly, with this new issue themed to work, we have a powerful, funny, and sometimes eye-popping piece of reportage by Daniel Alarcon about book pirating in Peru, and in it he meditates on a lot of the questions about work (who does it, are they paid, how does it shape a life, what sort of cultural ramifications does it have) that come up again in the issue. So I wanted to start with that. Still, I think the web is a different experience — it’s somehow less intimate and more so, the place people can go to interact with the magazine in a different way than you do when it’s in your hand, on paper. So the website feels like the right place to put an introduction, because my voice, my framework for the issue, is less in the way of the issue itself and the writers, who are the real reason we exist at all.

BN: Does this change your relationship with your readers?

JF: Yes, a little, depending on how many people view it and if they’re subscribers. I think when an editor is just a name on a masthead, it can seem mysterious and remote. That’s how I felt as a subscriber to Poetry and Paris Review and Story magazine back in its day. This is just a simple hello and look at what we’ve got coming up — a shout out of enthusiasm, and if it makes the magazine seem a little more accessible that’s all the better.

BN: Do you see a future in which Granta starts producing more original material online, whether video, audio, blogs, supplementary magazine content, etc? How will Granta evolve both in print and electronically as more and more readers move online and costs for production and distribution of the print journal go up?

JF: We’re already doing all of the above, and we’ll be doing more this year with the help of our new online editor Ollie Brock. But last year alone we published online only pieces by Joseph O’Neill (on John Updike), poetry by Wislwawa Szymborska, Katha Pollitt and Jack Gilbert, fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Austin Grossman, and a talented young writer named Dave Reidy, essays on Michael Jackson (by Marlon James) and Ghassan Kanafani (by Hisham Matar), several pieces by brand new writers (like Jessica Soffer and Claire Watkins, not to mention Evie Wyld, who just won the John Llelywn Rhys Prize) under the heading New Voices, which appears once every six weeks or so. We also put up loads of memoirs online only by Maud Newton, Chris Offutt, Gary Shteyngart, photo essays, video essays from Kabul and beyond, reporting from Nigeria and Cambodia, reporting on Obama’s inauguration by Daniel Alarcon. We had a goal of publishing something new every day on the web. We didn’t hit it but it was something to strive for, even if it what went up was an amplification of what is in the print issue, like an interview with a writer in the issue (such as the one Helen Gordon did with Ha Jin), or Jeffrey Yang writing about translating Bei Dao, as he did for the Chicago issue. The Work issue online will feature a great piece on the closing of GM factory closings in Janesville, Wisconsin by Steven Greenhouse, the New York Times’ labor reporter, video interviews with Daniel Alarcon and one Ellah Allfrey, our deputy editor, did with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who has a great memoir in the work issue about growing up in a family of 50 brothers and sisters in Kenya as his father was losing his farm.

It’s hard to tell where all this is going in the future. The print issue is still the main focus, and the source of our greatest obsessions — we print photographs in there, so the paper has to be just right, and the cover has to really do something exciting and the articles in there have to last and feel relevant twenty years from now. But like all publications, I think we’re looking at a future in which it will be very hard to be just one thing or the other — just print or just web. So we’ll be doing both for the time being with a strong focus on the beauty of the finished issue. My great hope is that people who read us on the web will want to find it and read it.

BN: What do you see as the role of online “communication tools” for Granta and/or in the world of literary magazines?

JF: I think all magazines — aside from being literature — are community building exercises; a way of entering into a space with other readers and signing on for what comes next. The web is a great way to keep the toot going, so to speak sending links out by Twitter, keeping people in touch with Facebook, but at the end of the day I think it really helps to meet in person, which is why we had almost 100 events around the US last year, parties, panels, readings, discussions. Reading has to be done alone, but the most natural instinct afterwards is to talk to someone else about it, and the web can’t be the only forum for that, so for our Work issue we’re having four events in London next week, and then two in San Francisco in early February (at Modern Times Bookstore and at Book Passage in Corte Madera), and another at McNally/Jackson in New York with Colum McCann, who has a rather beautiful and sad memoir in the new issue.