New Collective Website, Melge March Madness, and more!

Hey everyone,

Happy Day After St. Patrick’s Day! Here’s some updates about Melge:

We have a new way of keeping you informed!
From now on, emails will give you brief information, and you can click through to read the full text. Because we understand that you want to get through your day with as little actual thought as possible. The newly suped-up melgemagazine.com has everything you’ll need as a member of the Melge Collective.  This front page is actually a tumblr itself, which you can submit to if you want to post a message to the collective, ask of if you want to ask us a question, and even follow like any other tumblr. You can click the “handbook” link above to read the original handbook at any time, which will always help with guidelines for posting, visions for the future, or any other basic melge knowledge.

Melge March Madness!
YOU HAVE 12 HOURS TO FILL OUT YOUR MELGE MAGAZINE COLLECTIVE BRACKET!!! It will be fun you should do it. melge.mayhem.cbssports.com.  Let’s compare notes about how we made our picks and the tourney in general, and maybe we can create some cool content from it. Also there will be a winner! Who doesn’t love a winner!?

WE NEED MORE SUBMISSIONS!!
Please send in your artwork, essays, poetry, jokes, videos, music etc.!  melge.com/submit.  As you can see, there is a link at the top of the new melgemagazine.com to submit at any time!

Thanks for making awesome stuff.

Melge
Darren, Kirk, and Kevin

Melge Exists

Hey everyone,

We’ve officially launched!
THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who created, read, spread, or enjoyed the content we rolled out on launch day. It was a HUGE success. Thanks you all of you, we filled the day with awesome stuff. We’ll keep posting new pieces regularly, so keep sending it in. From now on, unless we decide to do another ”____ Day” of posts, we’ll just be publishing a variety of content with regards to form, source, and subject matter. So keep it all comin!

Please feel free to advertise and plug the shit out of anything you’re a part of as an artist or that may be beneficial for artists to know about: comedy shows you’re in, readings you’re in, etc.  If you do this, please make your approach to advertising such that the advertisements themselves have some sort of artistic merit on its own: the post might be a video promo, a poster you designed, a photo you took, etc. We are not a message board or a promotional site, but we are happy to showcase pieces which just so happen to be advertisements.  In essence, we’re talking about branded content, something that adds a really cool flavor to the site while simultaneously spreading the word about non-Internet-based events and endeavors which people may be interested in.   When possible, it’s best if the advertisement or plug comes directly from whoever is involved with the event/project. If there is some kind of event/project/information that might be beneficial to our readers and isn’t associated with any of you directly, email us about it and we can post through the non-specific Melge tumblr account.

Also, if you are in a group of some sort that is made up entirely of members of the Melge Collective, and that group has its own tumblr account, feel free to post stuff from that account (for example, Bleak! might want to post a Bleak! video from the Bleak! tumblr account, as opposed to a member of Bleak! posting on behalf of the group). We’ll list that group as a contributor as well.

Thanks again for helping to create such an awesome launch. We look forward shaping the future of Melge with all of you.

Sincerely,
Darren, Kirk, and Kevin
P.S. The “Tumblr Reads” event is this Friday if anyone is interested!  Email us!

—
Melge Magazinehttp://www.melge.comSubmit your content at http://www.melge.com/submitRead the collective orientation at http://www.melgemagazine.com

Hello Again!

Hello again!
Only one more week to submit Valentine’s Day content to Melge!!  Let’s do this shit!
We switched it up so that http://www.melge.com is now the magazine itself, and is where the magazine will always be.

• This means that the link to submit your stuff is now http://www.melge.com/submit.  Put it on your bookmarks toolbar!

http://www.melgemagazine.com will always be home to the writer’s handbook.  The username/pass will always be “melge”/”collective” and there will be a link to the submission page from there as well.
Send in your stuff!  It’s gonna be an awesome launch!

MelgeDarren/Kirk/Kevin

LAUNCH!

Hey Everyone,

We’re launching Melge on Sunday, February 14th!
Valentine’s Day!
So, in the next 16 days, we want everything you’ve got that’s relevant to Valentine’s Day to get shit a-kickin’: a love letter; a greeting card (it’s one of the best greeting card holidays!); a video break-up; a dope heart-shaped-candy-photoshop-maneuver; anything your Valentine’s Day story might be. Send it over. 
You could publicly ask someone out on a date or talk about how much you love your mom or we could create an Exquisite Valentine’s Day Corpse: a combination of all our ideas regarding the holiday itself.

Help us make the Melge launch awesome. All the material we get for this is what we’ll use to launch the site; we’ll move onward and upward from there. This wonderfully collaborative idea came from Melge member Jared (Neumark) and we’re very excited about it. 
We appreciate his input and—if you ever have any ideas for the site—we’d love to hear from you, too.

So, to review. 
Melge Launch: Valentine’s Day. 
What do you do? Create something awesome for it. 
When do you do it? ASAP. 
Where do you do it? Go to http://melgemagazine.com/submit
What, what do you do there? Submit that shit!

Let’s do it.

Love,
Melge
Darren, Kevin, and Kirk

IMPORTANT! Welcome to Melge!

Hello everyone!

I sent an email out a while back with some introductory information about Melge Magazine.  Many of you have expressed interest in contributing and even helping out administratively.  Thank you for all of your comments and feedback.  I am happy to announce that we are almost ready for launch.  Kevin Mead, Kirk Larsen, and I will be working as an administrative team on the back-end.  We’ve prepared a welcome kit for all of you to introduce you to all the details you need to get started with melge.

Please go to http://www.melge.com and login with the username “melge” and password “collective”, and read through the whole site.  Then, go to the “talk back” section, and contribute any feedback you have so we can get a good discussion going.  You can also download the welcome kit as a pdf, which is a good idea because this website is both private and temporary until launch.
If you haven’t joined the melge tumblr officially, now is the time to either let us know that you’d like to, or let us know that you do not want to, and we can take you off this list.  It’s important to note that we’re trying to establish a collective; a community of artists.  Instead of a site you “submit” single pieces of content to, we’re trying to create something you’re a part of as a regular contributor.  Your name will be on the main website page as part of this.  This doesn’t mean you have to meet any sort of content minimum, but I wanted to clarify our goals here.  We really admire and respect all your work, and we think that all of us working together can amount to something really awesome.

We’re really excited to get this going.  Once people start posting anything they’ve already created, we can get our backlog going and launch right away!
On another note, we have our admin team assembled for what’s needed right now, but if you are interested in helping out on the administrative side when it’s needed, we’d love to hear from you.

Thank you all again for your interest and enthusiasm!
Happy Holidays!

Darren

melge

What are your thoughts about melge?

If you have any questions, suggestions, thoughts, criticisms, or ideas about melge, pleast post them here.  We would like for this to be a completely open discussion.

If you log in to tumblr, your comments will be attributed to your tumblr account, and you can follow this discussion as a tumblr.  If not, you can just use your name and email below too.

Melge Magazine

Hi everyone!

I wanted to email everyone about a new project I’m trying to get off the ground - melge magazine.  I have worked with a lot of you in the past, and/or admired and respected your work a lot, and I wanted to invite all of you to be a part of it.  I’ve mentioned this to some of you; some of you already know all about it and are already involved; some of you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about.  But I just wanted to send one email out to everyone with all the info.

SO, basically I’ve started a new tumblr blog, and I want it to be a group blog that will function as an online magazine featuring original creative content from a “collective” of comedians, writers, and visual artists living in New York.  You can see it online at http://www.melge.com.  I added and back-dated a bunch of posts I’ve made from other websites that might work as examples for the kind of content that would work for the site.  Right now I’m just defining it as any content that you’ve created yourself (or with other members of melge) that can be considered art, OR an editorial piece ABOUT comedy, writing, visual art, etc.  If you’ve seen The Daily What, that site puts out interesting content from all over the internet.  What I’m envisioning is a site that’s like that (only all the content is completely original, created by those who run melge) mixed with McSweeneys Internet Tendency.  We’d create a platform we can all use to get stuff we write, create, etc. out there in a professional context, and in a way that will hopefully draw a lot of followers due to the power of a collective over the individual.  Also, I just think it’d be a lot of fun.

For those of you who have not already agreed to do this:

What do you think?  Are you interested?  Please email me back to let me know what all of your thoughts are.

For those of you who ARE interested in contributing:

If you have content that you’ve already posted on your own blog, or elsewhere, I would love it if you wanted to go through and also add it to melge, and just back-date the publishing date on melge, and this way, we can build up a lot of content from the past and when we have some sort of official launch, we’ll have a much stronger base to start from.

In general, anything you post elsewhere or on your own blog can also be posted on melge.  Pieces don’t have to be exclusive to melge.  Also, your name will be listed under the “contributors” list on the sidebar, and your name and photo will be attached to anything you post, and will link to your own personal website/tumblr.  So the more readers this site gets, the more readers you’ll get too.

If you post a photo, video, drawing, etc., you should add some sort of statement to give context and introduce readers to the piece.

Also, I don’t think there will be much of an editorial process in general, but for now, so that we can make sure to collectively define some sense of what makes something fit (or not fit) as content for melge, I’d appreciate it if you saved posts as drafts so I can just look at them before publishing.  I think it will take a bit of time for us to find some sense of style for the kind of stuff that goes on the site, and I’d like for that to happen behind the scenes.  In the same vein, I’ll probably end up taking some of my own posts off the site once we add more content to make sure that it fits too.

So what does everyone think?  I would love to hear from all of you.  If you’re in, let me know so I can send you an individualized link to give you access to the blog.  I would also love it if any of you have any feedback on what my thoughts are so far, or any ideas for the future!  If you think some part of this plan totally sucks, I’d like to know that too.  I’ve written this to all of you because I have a lot of respect for all of your work, and of course this means I have the same respect for your opinions as well.

All the best

Darren