In 2003, I started a digital magazine, and everyone frowned upon it, and thought that I had lost my mind, trying to bring a magazine, that looked and felt just like a print magazine, online, and often asked if I would take it to print. I would always respond, ‘no,’ because the print magazines would eventually be forced to either bring their publications online, or close altogether.rnI spent days designing pages, finding methods to make the pages flip just as a traditional magazine, and in 2004, I succeeded fully with the functionality, and we were able to bring online, one of the first of its kind, print-like publications, and we never waivered for one moment, and said that we would take it to print, because we knew that in the Internet age, and the evolution of the Internet’s robust power and dominance, that we would set ourselves up for immediate failure, if we had even tried to.rnSo, I am sitting in my living room watching CNN, as I seem to do of late, and I see the headline scroll through, that popular cultural magazine, Vibe Magazine, is closing its doors after sixteen years, because of the recession and the decline in adverts. In its hay day, Vibe Magazine thrived and some of its ads could range in the six-figure range, per page, so, to read the headline, seemed a bit inconceivable, but then again, things can change in a second.rnThe moral of this story is not about a magazine, but about how sometimes you just have to follow your heart, and not listen to what others may say or have planned for you, because only you know best. I know for a fact that my magazine would not have been as big as Vibe in print-not because we did not have it in us, because the fact of the matter is that we were getting the same celebrity interviews as Vibe Magazine while being online, but with the Internet era slowly emerging at the time of my magazine’s release, it just did not seem like it would be plausible. I knew that I did not want to take the chance of losing money, struggling to try to print up publications each month, when I could do the same thing online, and be revolutionary about it. Sure, a lot of skeptics and non-outside the box thinkers could not understand it, but as I see more and more publications come online, I realize that while what we were doing was not the norm, it made perfect business sense, even when I sometimes doubted myself, and until this day, I have lost absolutely nothing, including my will to continue to follow my own dreams and not others. With that being stated, it is important to walk your own walk, and if you falter, then you falter at your own expense, and not the expense of others.
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