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The long daily road
by Thanos Kalamidas
2007-09-04 09:54:01 |
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It was sometime last July, a weird period for me because of a problem with my daughter’s health that kept us really tense, when it came the time for the next monthly issue of Ovi magazine. It was the period we were dealing with the copycats and it was a strange period since we suddenly found many people either copying our name or copying our efforts, even our articles, and the best of all was somebody trying to steal the magazine from us.
It seems that it was a period everything was happening all around the world as well, people were still recovering or dealing from the many faces of tsunamis, wars, misery, sadness and anything else you can imagine, yet here we were talking about the articles we were going to include in the magazine... a monthly magazine. As usual I am the animated one, the one who gets angry, and Asa is the quiet one waiting for me to calm down before starting with his opinion. Well I think that day I didn’t give him much room to say anything and I do apologize publicly for it.
My frustration had started with an article I was writing about an event that included kids and I was wondering about the meaning of writing an article on something that happens this moment and then continue if you can a month later. How many things happen in a month and you must choose the most contemporary, often leaving out the important, things you really want to talk about, such as 30,000 children dying every day somewhere in this world and after a month the number has become 900,000 – you want to be able to scream about it day after day.
When we started the magazine we wanted it to work like a real magazine despite the fact that it was online. We were preparing things days in advance, we even had a list of future themes; still something was missing. Because, despite the fact that we had material ready at the last minute - literally the last minute - we were writing articles adding ideas and changing forms. What was missing was that in our anger to create a good magazine that could also work as printed we forgot that we were online and we forgot how flexible we could be.
I remember our first conversations when we were talking seriously about it, worst-case scenario we are writing one article each a day. Fine, it sounds a lot but after all that’s Ovi magazine. So we decided the date and it was the beginning of September. At the same time Tony was creating the new site. A daily publication has different demands, many demands and Tony was up to it. Of course he had to deal with me a lot when I was calling, “This is good but …” and this 'but' could mean all over again. I don’t want to know what Tony was thinking about me but I have to admit that despite the rumors I have never seen his angry side.
And then we had Ovi magazine daily! I’m sure Asa remembers all the articles we had in the very first edition. Jan Sand has been an unbelievable help from the beginning, he is a big part of our long road with all the difficulties we faced, and I like to consider him a friend in many ways.
One year after a lot of things have change and a lot of people have contributed, we really hope that we have succeeded in some of our aims. We have from the beginning dreamt of a door that is open to opinions, ideas, culture, tolerance and democracy. We have openly supported movements and people who have the same aims, and we have tried to give a warm welcome to anybody who wants to cross our road. And please never forget that every day somewhere in this world 30,000 kids die and we can do something about it.
Thank you very much
Thanos Kalamidas
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