Sociology Magazine No.1: Risk Society:

Some time ago we shelled-out for new Publishing software to replace the tried-and-trusted PagePlus we’d been using for donkey’s years. It’s replacement, Affinity Publisher, was not so much a change as a continuity under another name: Affinity is published by Serif who also published PagePlus (please keep up at the back).

To cut a long story short, I decided it was probably time to:

a. Learn how to use it: this was not as difficult as it might seem given that most of the stuff I understood from PagePlus was present in Affinity. It was more a case of finding my way around the new interface.

b. Change the way I published stuff as pdf documents: I’d always done this in a textbook stylee.

Unfortunately this was a textbook style popular about 25 years ago so I thought it might be interesting to have a mess around with something different. Something a little more ambitious. A little more, dare I say it, modern?

So I decided to have a go at a magazine-style document.

And for the debut version of the New Magazine style I thought it might be interesting to re-publish the Risk Society document we produced from the interview we did with Beck a few years back (I’m putting the finishing touches to a new Risk Society script that I hope we can find time and space to film over the next couple of months if you prefer to wait for the film of the book).

I’ve decided to call it Ulrich Beck: Risk Society to differentiate the two.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the original. I think it’s perfectly serviceable but I was looking around for something on which to practice and this is what I chose.

The decision was also influenced by the fact I really wanted to create a Flipbook Magazine (I’m sometimes a little meta like that) containing some video (roughly 5 minutes) and since we’ve put out a couple of risk-related clips – Beck explaining Risk Society and Prof. Brian Wynne on Reflexive Modernisation – I thought this was something that might work. If there’s a hyperlink to the Flipbook Magazine it has. If there isn’t I’d take it as (un)read that it hasn’t.

Either way, at least you and your students get to enjoy the spiffing (if not a little spoofy) new Magazine format.

Issue 2

If this Issue has whetted your appetite for more, the Mass Media Issue is now available.