Sifting through blogs on the internet is pretty hit or miss. Sometimes you find a goldmine of information – sometimes you find incoherency among photos of someone’s breakfast or dogs. Because of zines, this was a problem even before the internet. But that’s a pretty unfair way to describe them. Zines have made a huge impact on the rise of independent publishing. It’s a medium that may now seem a staple of the past, but is still extremely relevant, and may even be making a comeback.

Basically a zine is a self-published magazine. It’s made without the help of a publisher or distributer, and usually has a staff of one. Each zine focuses on a specific subject. Those subjects are often obscure and niche, and also tend to have content that is fairly personal to the maker. Authors assemble, then copy their work, and either give it away, trade it for other zines, or attempt to sell them and possibly make a profit.

[“The Book of Zines”: The ultimate zine culture recap]

Technically, the concept of a zine has been around since writing has. Following the zine-guidelines above, any collection of ideas, written down and distributed, counts as a zine. The form was more clearly defined in the 1930s, when science fiction fans started writing, and publishing, and trading their own stories. They called them fanzines. Slowly, other subcultures started picking the idea up and using it for their own. The most advantageous for the medium was the rise of punk zines in the 1970s. These came at the same time photocopiers emerged, so zines were much easier to share, causing a huge boost in their prevalence and popularity.

[Check out an overview of the history of zines here.]

The most important thing the rise of the zine did was enable creators to speak their minds. Like blogs, they help similar people find each other and build a community of independent writers.

Zines made the statement that anyone with an idea could get it out there. People were creating and trading their own stuff, and others were reading and buying. One of the points that attracted so many people to the concept was that there was no one higher up to tell them what they could or couldn’t write. This caused zine subject matter to be often controversial, things that people were discouraged from talking about.

There was a freedom, a sense of secrecy, operating in the underground: even a sense of doing what’s right. Now, with the internet, the ideas that used to fill up zines are filling up blogs instead. Sometimes this feeling translates, but the internet gives the chance to be open to any number of eyes, from anywhere, at any time. While the content is still there, part of the fun is in the way you obtain it, and there’s nothing much special about just logging on. The concepts are similar, where anyone can put their writing out there for free. But it loses that subculture of people, laboriously creating and physically putting their work into the world.

[Read about some of the independent voices involved in zines.]

What can come through on blogs is the raw, personal story that’s allowed to be told. In traditional publishing there will always be someone – an editor, a publishing company – that has a claim on switching things around. Zines, and now blogs, create that element of one person broadcasting to the world.

Zines are a medium that have inspired and transformed writing and media. The physical aspect may have been lost in translation, but as “the original blogs”, a lot of writers owe more to zines and their long history than they realize.

[Make your own zine! Check out these DIY instructions.]