Issue 4 5/98

The FolkWorld Editors' column

The online editorial from the Mollis

FolkWorld exists already for half a year now - a good reason for us to look back on the first days of this online music mag.

At the beginning we were not sure if it is already the right time for a magazine published in the internet only. In autum 1997 we said to ourselfs: let's do it, let's start it as a project. So we published our first issue on first of November 1997 - and soon we discovered that there was a lot of interest.
Drawing by German artist Annegret Haensel; for more info on the artist, look at the editorial page During these first months we have made lots of expierences, met many people in the virtual space, many of them now being our readers and some even contributing features for FolkWorld.

We realised very soon that it's quite an amount of work to run FolkWorld. We have written quite a few articles for diverse mags in the past several years, but we haven't thought how much more work it was to publish our own internet thing... It's not just searching for news, writing features, review CDs, etc., it's also doing all the correspondance (answer mails from all over the world, ask for news, stay in touch with contributors, etc.), and put all the informations and features into internet format. We are still searching for further people who want to help us with the work or who want to contribute anything - you don't need to have any basic knowledge on anything, there is something to do for anybody.
In spite of all the work we will try to publish FolkWorld ca. every two month.

Another problem is that at the moment we don't make any money out of FolkWorld, nevertheless we have regular expenses. At the moment we are thinking about possibilities to get at least a bit of money to pay our expenses. We can imagine different ways to do this, e.g. a 'subscription fee', asking all of you who like what we are doing to support us with a small amount of Euros (oh yes we are going with the time!) - of course FolkWorld will still be available for free in the internet, and anybody who doesn't want to pay, does not have to. Other possibilities could be ads (with or without banner) or sponsoring. If anybody has interest in or opinions to advertisement, sponsoring and readers 'fee', or has other ideas or feedback, please contact us!

Meanwhile, we had a lot of nice experiences: We often get very kind reader mails with praise for FolkWorld, suggestions, criticisms, etc. - we have collected some of this feedback (from e-mails and publications) in a quotes listing.
More and more people want to contribute something, and some even want to become regular contributors. It is a great pleasure that journalists want to republish here some of their very good writing they have written for another publication.
We want to thank once again anybody who has helped us, who has believed in our project right from the start, who has invested a bit of his/her time for our magazine, and anybody who has sent feedback, suggestions and comments.

Anyway enjoy reading, and please stay in touch!

Your FolkWorld editors.

Drawing by German artist Annegret Haensel; for more info on the artist, look at the editorial page


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© The Mollis - Editors of FolkWorld; Published 5/98

All material published in FolkWorld is © The Author via FolkWorld. Storage for private use is allowed and welcome. Reviews and extracts of up to 200 words may be freely quoted and reproduced, if source and author are acknowledged. For any other reproduction please ask the Editors for permission.


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