Some half-cooked thoughts, not yet popped:
Issues make little sense online. Obviously, they’re necessary for print, but web readers — especially of a less news-driven publication — don’t think that way.
Some content is inexorably tied to a certain date. News and blog posts, in particular. (There’s context again.) But so much is timeless. Why force that content into an artificial issue framework on the web? The web is alive, constantly growing and changing. Does a web reader really care when, say, a great recipe was published?
Don’t think of the website as a repository for magazine stories and the stuff you had to cut from print. And certainly don’t think of the website as a “brand extension” and marketing tool to sell subscriptions. Your site is its own, complementary product. And, yes, you can make money online.
Consider a digital-first approach. Never stop producing stories for the web, and instead pull (and rework for print) the very best for a monthly magazine. Then add to the mag some new, context-appropriate content and you’ve got the kind of durable, evergreen product that magazine people love to hoard. Encourage your magazine readers to visit your website for more great stories, all month long. Macworld is a great example of this model.
Some great writing on creativity, design and the web.
Paul Graham:
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
A classic from Paul Graham:
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
Wise words from W.A. Pannapacker:
Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we subordinated every other obligation to follow it.