Abashed Content is a collection of work by students in an experimental & media arts course at the University of Minnesota. This ZINE is full of themes that take on new perspectives of appropriation & remixed digital design.
Inspired by DIY, the work in this ZINE is sourced from internet pieces, text, and photos that are scanned, photocopied, mixed, torn, assembled and photoshopped. Our ZINE admires the free sharing and recycling of ideas.
LOOK. PASS this ZINE On! Copy and Distribute this ZINE!

http://www.mediafire.com/?q02qqyzsw77xxfw

Thank you!
Sajinee Fernando

Back in the ’90s is was quite common for zinesters to run a bunch of advertising for indie record labels and businesses to help pay for larger print runs or color or glossy covers. Publications like Bunnyhop, Answer Me, The Probe, Popsmear, Fizz, Genetic Disorder, Flipside, Genetic Disorder and my own zine were all considered zines, yet could have some or all of the following:

-many contributors
-print runs of 1,000-5,000
-a lot of paid advertising
-glossy or color covers
-Distro through Tower, Carrot Top, Desert Moon, Surefire, Revolver, Mordam and others
-occasionally make a small profit

I think the thing that made me never question their zine-ness was how they self-identified. The publishers called them zines, talked about zine publishing constantly, were at all the zine conventions, and a bunch of them organized the Kill Zinester Tour in 1996. They promoted zine publishing non stop. Those zines were way bigger than a perzine, but still everyone contributed for free and most had a punk/DIY philosophy behind them.

Today there are a lot less of the bigger zines, that model got hard to support because most of the indie record labels stopped advertising like they were, readers moved online, and all the big indie distributors went out of business. Perzines and smaller zines dominate now, as well as the nicer chapbooks Microcosm publishes. But I’m not sure because the environment or aesthetic of zines has changed in this decade, that how we define zines overall should change. In the larger picture of zines, there have always been the small ones done by one person and printed by themselves (Fred from The Match has been doing this since the 1960s) and some with higher end design and printing or advertising for some punk rock labels.

This is good. Diversity and variety makes our community more rich and also makes for more interesting zines. While for cataloging we of course need tags, keywords, or identifiers to organize zines and some broad definitions and categories, there should be a desire to keep zining’s rich diverse history intact. I guess I worry that as the zine aesthetic and ethics (“zine ethics” is dropped a lot in conversations, where there really wasn’t such a thing 10, 20 or 30 years ago) changes over the years, a mostly undocumented zine history could get altered or changed to exclude some of the more important zines in zine history. Like MaximumRocknRoll, which is the zine that started me writing and publishing my own zine and has always been super supportive of the zine community through reviews, promotion and even giving cash to smaller zines in years it made a profit.