A really exciting new digital initiative in linguistics journalism is on the horizon: Schwa Fire. It’s the brainchild of Michael Erard, a Ph.D. in linguistics and a superlative science writer. Erard is seeking to fill the gap between the language blogs (of which you’re currently reading one), where content is relatively short and the authors unpaid, and the literary and intellectual magazines like the New Yorker, where there are occasionally linguistic essays of some importance, but not nearly often enough or in enough detail. Schwa Fire will be a low-cost ($1.99) ad-free digital magazine available on the web and for mobile devices featuring important ideas from people from across the linguistic sciences.
Erard is currently running a major Kickstarter initiative to get his project off the ground, and is over halfway to his $25,000 goal. I supported it today and I would encourage others with an interest in seeing high-quality, long-form, language-related on-line non-fiction (perhaps with not so many hyphens) to do so as well.
Good idea, to be sure. I will ponder it non-hyphenatically.
Already donated $50