Welcome to East Village Magazine

Welcome to East Village Magazine web site — a work in progress.

We are not finished and we probably never will be. But, what we are working on now should go a long way to creating a valuable resource  for anyone who has an interest in Flint's past,  present or future.

Our first priority is to provide you more new information than we can provide in the magazine — news,  features,  events,  poetry, essays, fiction,  interesting  press releases,  pictures and a variety of other information we  could never  provide in the magazine.  There will be something new every day. It is worth going to the site every day (or even more frequently) if you want information about the current weather or the stock market.

Our second priority is to put on the text of the issues that were not put on during the time we were down (January 2007 to December  2009). We are working backward — most recent first. We have about 15 more to go at about one each day.

Once we finish we will have the information from all of the issues from July 1993 to now on the site. You can search the information using keywords.

Our third priority is to get the pictures on the site. There are about 1,500 pictures that have been published in the magazine, about five hundred that were on the old web site that were not published in the magazine and about a thousand good pictures that were produced while the web site was down.  We have about 3,000 pictures to put on the web.

(About 600 pictures from the first few years are on the Facebook group page,  East Village Magazine.)

Our fourth priority is to update our Links Page. A lot has changed since we set it up on the old site. We meant it to be a directory of nonprofit groups rather than just a listing of names and web site addresses,  so we had a lot more information than normal on the site. But there has been several  elections,  groups have changed their web sites and e-mails,  every group seems to be on Facebook,  MySpace and other networks which should be included,  phone numbers have changed,  some locations have changed and some groups have ceased to exist.

We are making a big effort to check the accuracy of our information. Expect a call from us to get the information if you are a nonprofit group and your web site does not contain all of the information we include in our listing. Better yet, if you are part of a nonprofit group, check the Link Page and then e-mail the missing information to us.

We want to do everything we can to support Flint's nonprofit organizations — tell our readers about them, run their press releases and provide the basic information about them in an easy to find location.

(As soon as we figure out how, we will make a direct link from our Link Page to their web site.)

Our fifth priority is to put on the web site images of all 5,734 pages we have run. You will be able to read every magazine we have published since 1976. The information will not be searchable,  but just like in the old days, you will be able to read the magazine.

(We could use some help if you happen to be know Adobe Acrobat. We are having trouble putting all eight pages of an issue into one PDF. The original documents are on QuarkXPress 5.0 and we have Adobe Acrobat 5.0, Adobe Streamline 3.0 and Adobe Photoshop 7. Our computer is a Macintosh.)

Our sixth priority is to covert the magazines published between  July 1976  and June 1993 (before we were publishing electronically) to text files so the contents can retrieved  by keywords.

Finally, a continuing priority is to catch the typos that worked their way in when we transferred the information from the old web site file to the new one. Most frequently,  it changed all possessives ("'s")  to a space-hyphan-space  (" -  ")  and changed some quote marks to nonsense characters.  Occasionally,  there is not a space between  the first and second paragraphs of the stories. We are trying to fix them when we find them.  You should keep these things in mind when reading our copy. It going to take us a long time to catch all of the typos.

Those are our priorities.

It won't be quick but when we are finished our web site should be invaluable to any one interested in Flint's past,  present and future.

- G.P.C.