What About Zeen?

Zeen allows people to create online magazines in a very untraditional way. Basically, once you become a Zeen member, you can just pick and choose various online news, stories, photos, videos, web links, and so on to form a 20 page long magazine issue. Once you think the magazine issue is good enough, you can just hit the publish button to actually publish your magazine issue to Zeen.

By allowing just about anyone to curate online contents into a magazine issue, Zeen seems to care little for the origin of the issue. Nonetheless, it’s very easy to piece a Zeen magazine issue together with popular online contents. So far, Zeen is still in beta, therefore Zeen members can only create 20 page long magazine issue. Being beta, Zeen does face some limitations such as not yet being polished, failing to grab the entire body of the web stories, not clearly showing source titles and so on.

I’m scratching my head with Zeen, because Zeen seems to define magazine as something else entirely. How come? It seems to me, the word magazine doesn’t fit to what Zeen is trying to do. Then again, it seems that time has changed what magazine supposed to be anyway. Or perhaps I should be more specific, the Internet changed what magazine supposed to be.

When thinking of a magazine, online or not, one would think that there was an entire in-house staff zealously made sure the contents within a magazine issue turned out beautifully. With Zeen though, anyone can create a magazine without having to write a single story. Anyhow, Zeen is still in beta, therefore not everyone can join and become a member yet. Luckily, Zeen had invited me to become a member already, and so I was able to create a Zeen’s EssayBoard (August 2012) Magazine Issue.