Volume 14, Issue 6
April 2009
Sexuality & Sensuality
Enlarge Cover

"Traditions"
Contribution Poster
Submissions Due:
Fri 01 May 09

For ten years now, from its lair in the basement of McLaughlin College at York University, a strange creature has been brooding, growing, bubbling up from the fiery depths beneath the college. It is an expanding tome of power and knowledge. It is a box of brainjacking ideas and emotions. It is a collection of earnest and self-conscious dialogue, expression, angst and grandstanding. To some it is just "the Magazine." It is MacMedia, and it is hungry.

MacMedia is the official student newspaper of McLaughlin College. It is published monthly throughout the school year as a result of the dedicated work of a small cluster of elected staff members, the generous funding of the McLaughlin College Students' Council and the McLaughlin College Master's Office, and the sizeable talents of its contributing writers [ie. "Viewers Like You"].

Every month, the magazine casts its focus on a different theme, although contributors are always welcome to write about any subject and are never restricted to the prevailing theme. The themes range broadly throughout the year, from the fun to the political, the bawdy to the absurd, and each issue's content usually manages to replicate that sort of spread in microcosm from within the month's topic. MacMedia is a vessel for the concerns, aspirations and imaginings of McLaughlin students and a platform from which they can speak to the entire York University community.

Contributing to the paper is easy and low-key. Watch for upcoming themes and deadlines to be advertised in the current issue, in the hallways of the college, and from here on out on this website. Then send us your contributions by e-mail to macmedia@yorku.ca (preferred) or drop them off in person under the door of Room 004C, McLaughlin College. If you can, e-mail your articles as attached word documents or .rtfs, this makes them far easier for our staff to process than articles that are simply pasted into the body of an e-mail message. Be sure to include your name, and a title for you contribution.

Publication History
Although McLaughlin College has existed at York since the end of the 1960s, for the first few decades it was served only intermittently by a student-run publication. The McLaughlin Mirror had occasional publishing years during the 1980s and early 1990s, but never became a consistent part of college life. Microfilm is available in Scott Library of the Mirror's runs.

The fall of 1995 saw the birth of MacMedia. Under its first Editor-in-Chief, Danny Ciraco, it published monthly in a folded tabloid format and immediately raised the bar for scope, consistency and creativity over its predecessor. The tabloid format would be retained until the winter of 2000, when the publication switched to a magazine size and format that has remained to this day.

Somewhere along the way we became proud and well-regarded members of Canadian University Press and helped to found the now-dormant York University Press. Previous staffs considered (and thankfully rejected) hairbrained merger schemes with the Founders paper, printed a crazed joint issue with Stong College counterpart The Flying Walrus, took an unhealthy level of interest in the University President, and clearly spent way too much time in the bunker that is our basement office. MacMedia survived scandals, funding cuts, strikes and countless all-night production sessions to celebrate its tenth year of continuous publication in 2004-2005, and has now reached its real tenth anniversary in 2005-2006. Please do contribute to making this year's magazine even better than those that have come before.