By Scott Harrah

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and it’s also StageZine’s 5th anniversary.

We launched on March 17, 2010.  We’re not people that live in the past, particulary when it comes to both theater and the ever-changing world of digital media and publishing. However, we feel it’s necessary to at least comment on the past half decade: Where we started as a website, the things we’ve experienced along the way, and what the future holds.

We started StageZine.com out of necessity and determination. I came from print media, having worked for many years as a magazine editor and also as a freelance theater reporter and critic for various weekly newspapers. By early 2010, newspapers, particularly local New York City weeklies, were starting to die out, and many were victims of the recession that followed the economy bottoming out in fall 2008 . By then, the
Internet and digital media had already taken a huge toll on traditional print journalism. The papers I was writing for had fewer and fewer ads, and the pay was no longer good. I’d had many great editors, but most had moved on to digital media, and I knew it was time to do the same.

We got the initial idea for starting StageZine.com at a friend’s party in late 2009 after meeting a top editor for a major New York City daily newspaper. When I asked him about job opportunities there, he told me what I already knew: Newspapers were cutting staff, and if one wanted to survive in journalism, it was crucial to “go digital.”

Over the next few months, I started researching building a website from scratch.  Although I had two journalism degrees, including an M.A. from NYU, we knew virtually nothing about the technical aspects of digital publishing. Without going into the dull details, we found a company to help us get online, created a logo and a template, and by March 2010 we were ready to go live.

The transition to a digital publication wasn’t easy, but fortunately we had the support of everyone I’d worked with as a print journalist: the Broadway League and all the great PR firms (Boneau Bryan-Brown, Jeffrey Richards and Associates, O and M, Polk, and others).

The most rewarding thing about editing and publishing StageZine, besides covering so many great shows and working with numerous outstanding and accommodating people, has been getting reviews up in a timely manner, as shows open (which, during the Tony Awards crush of April, with shows literally opening every night all month, can be challenging).

Besides learning rudimentary HTML, Web editing software, every aspect of social media and tons of technical things, we’ve discovered that digital publishing is vastly different from old-school print and is constantly changing.  Writing reviews alone isn’t enough to sustain the public’s interest. People want more and more photos, video, contests, etc.

This is hardly an industry where you can rest on your proverbial laurels and stay in business.  However, we recently redesigned StageZine.com so that it is responsive (meaning you can read our site on iPhones, Androids, iPads, Galaxy, Kindle and other devices because more people read us on these than traditional desktops).

Thanks to all of you who have read us and supported us the past 5 years. We look forward to bringing you the latest theater news, reviews and views for many years to come.