14 Years of Making A Scene!

Contributed by Josh Fryfogle

Social media in print. That was the idea from the beginning, before that phrase - Social Media - became a household term.

I started publishing Make A Scene Magazine as a way for local musicians to take their fate into their own hands, promote their performances and projects, and to support each other by writing about each other. It wasn’t about “making it big”, but making a scene in our own community. Honestly, it didn’t go how I expected.

The core idea was to give the pages of a widely distributed paper to the people of the community, of whom musicians were few. First, the people of the arts community (a few were musicians) flooded my inbox with content. Then, non-arts content started coming in, leading to the eventual development of The People’s Paper. Even though my original idea was to allow local musicians an easy path to publishing their own words, the idea appealed to a much larger group of community members.

Recently we’ve taken over the radio station, 95.5 The Pass. It’s a commercial music station, allowing me to fulfill my original mission – to promote local music... to make a scene. We play local music on the air that I’ve curated, some of the best recordings of the best performances from the best Alaskan musicians I’ve found along the way. It’s a dream come true for me. 

But more than that, and true to our mission at Make A Scene, where we first converted a traditional medium into a social media platform on paper, the radio station receives content from you!

Any community member can contribute, just by picking up the phone! (907-373-0955)

A song request? Of course, but we also enjoy a public announcement, a poem, a joke, your favorite quote, or a word of encouragement for our continued effort to empower local voices like yours - while listening to an awesome mix of popular music (that doesn’t exclude local Alaskan artists.)

Fourteen years ago, I printed the first issue of Make a Scene. Like Facebook, or MySpace before them, Make A Scene Magazine gave a medium for community to communicate. But unlike those online platforms, my company was seeking to decentralize that platform into local-level intellectual action. Unlike those internet bottlenecks, my company was not about consolidation of power, or to create content that trades in outrage, but instead to create a locally-owned platform that truly respects the First Amendment in all its clauses, and thereby truly reflects the spirit of the People in my community. It’s altruism as an antidote to the corporate centralization of our culture.

We are social media in print, we are social media on the air - and it all started 14 years ago this month. Thanks for reading and writing.

Make A Scene.