The Development of Orsai 77

“Lo que empezó siendo un blog puede convertirse en cualquier cosa” (“What started out as a blog might become anything”)5. This is the tagline one can find at the homepage of the current Orsai website (editorialorsai.com). With these words, Hernán Casciari succinctly summarizes the story of a blog that became a print magazine, an electronic magazine, a publishing house, a bar, a podcast, and iPad application, a ‘university’, and in many ways an online/offline community in itself. For those of us following the project for at least over a year, the tagline is also a wink to the electronic migration Orsai went through from a regular blog site at the bitacoras.com domain, to its current convergent site. This change saw the project expand from one blog to three blogs and a web

magazine section. The move, no doubt, obeyed the increasing demands of the changing project, but it probably had much to do with the overflow of readers eager to participate in Orsai in as many ways as possible.

5

Orsai has been characterized by media change. As a matter of fact, the move to

editorialorsai.com was not the first time Orsai underwent major media transformations.

Orsai stayed a rather standard blog for several years (2004-2010); one-directional media transformations from screen to print were not uncommon as many blog posts were re- edited by Casciari and collected in his print books España decí alpiste (2008) and El pibe que arruinaba las fotos (2009). The blog was radically rearranged during the last quarter of 2010 when the magazine was first projected and announced. orsai.bitacoras.com stopped being just a blog and was split into two sites: one remained an all-containing blog, the other a sort of sales point for the print magazine. The two sites were so closely interwoven and there was so much overlapping and mutual referencing and linking that they could hardly be regarded as two sites. To a great extent both sites had become ‘the backstage’ of the main enterprise: the print magazine, “Y así es como… Orsai se transformará, el día sábado uno de enero de 2011, …en la revista Orsai. Y este blog se convierte, desde hoy, en el detrás de escena, en el backstage de ese sueño” (“And thus,

Orsai will become, on January first, 2011, Orsai magazine. And starting today, this blog turns into the behind the scenes, the backstage of this dream”; “Matar la crisis a

volantazos”). Since then, every new media or adjustment to Orsai have been proposed and incorporated to the larger project through the blog; these developments have also been incorporated into Orsai’snarrative. For Casciari, the budding idea behind the project “was to develop a uniquely direct relationship between authors and readers – one which would cut out the obsolescent 20th-century middle men” (Quijones, par. 11). The blog has become a forum of exchange with Orsai readers and the response has been staggering.

The print magazine came out in January 2011. Orsai N1 sold over ten thousand print copies. Out of it, a few electronic versions became available: a kindle version, now unavailable but re-launched for later issues; an iPad version that has now been

refashioned; a PDF version that was posted for free download on the blog itself and, later on through issuu.com; and finally, a web version that was only publicized on the very last page of the print magazine:

de este número, pueden entrar a ORSAI.ES/N1. Allí hay un foro para cada texto, un sistema de comentarios y la posibilidad de que cada autor, si quiere, pueda conversar con sus lectores. (Orsai N1, 206)

Readers who wish to leave comments on this issue’s texts and chronicles, can go to ORSAI.ES/N1. There is a forum for each text, a comment system and the possibility for each author, if he/she wants, to chat with their readers.

As can be seen, the web version was distinct from all the other electronic renderings in that it took the form of a blog too, i.e. it offered readers the possibility of commenting directly into each piece as they could on OrsaiBlog entries. Nevertheless, the web version did not include all of the texts in the magazine.

Inadvertently, however, because of the proliferation of media platforms related to Orsai

and the constant references to its different versions, little by little and increasingly more with every issue, the backstage narrative of the project came to the forefront. As the frame containing the print magazine, and responsible for encouraging readers to support it – the narrative of Orsai, the story of its production, edition and distribution ended up overshadowing everything else. At that point it became evident that Orsai was, to a large extent, about Orsai. The popularity of the project and, indeed, the huge involvement of its readers granted the print magazine continuity, even when it was not originally

contemplated to go past the fourth issue. Very much infatuated with the project’s narrative, readers pushed the story forward — and kept the production of the magazine going. As Comequechu, one of the project’s collaborators warned both Casciari and Basilis, “La revista no se toca, ya no es tuya. No la hicieron ustedes solos” (“You can’t touch the magazine. It’s not yours anymore. You didn’t make it on your own”; “Bar Mediante”). The level of economic security granted by a considerable number of readers allowed Casciari, Basilis and other collaborators both to take the print magazine into its second year and to develop the project further.

The first addition was OrsaiBar. Interestingly, any addition to the project is also an addition to the narrative, “tengo muchas ganas de ir contando, desde hoy y cada jueves, el

backstage de cómo se monta, a la distancia, el mejor bar de Buenos Aires” (“I really want to tell, starting today, each Thursday, the backstage of how, at a distance, the best bar in

Buenos Aires comes to be”; “Bar mediante”). After Orsai was moved to

editorialorsai.com in early 2012, OrsaiBar got its own blog in the convergent site

dedicated to events taking place there. Some of the posts originally published in the first blog were migrated to OrsaiBar.

Similarly, by the end of 2011, aside from the print magazine, for a few months Orsai had started editing books: Casciari’s own and, the illustrator, Horacio Altuna’s in June. The prominence of Orsai as a larger project became much more evident at the end of 2011 when the much anticipated EditorialOrsai was announced. Supported by the economic push of more than five thousand magazine’s subscribers’, EditorialOrsai would open up to other writers, not just their past collaborators, and rely on the readers’ assessment to pick out publishable works. Although up to now this model has not yet been

implemented, at the time, the proposal was successful in persuading over five thousand readers to buy a yearly subscription, thus ensuring the sustainability of the print

magazine. These developments have been possible to visualize through the graph

database. In the following set of images we can see the development of Orsai from just a blog in 2010 in Fig. 3, to a much larger project involving the blog and the print and the web magazines in 2011 in Fig. 4, to an even more complex one including the different blogs in 2012 in Fig. 5.

Figure 3 Orsai in 2010.

The scope of Orsai with only one medium and one author was still rather limited

Figure 4 Orsai in 2011.

The project’s network becomes a much larger and complex as the print magazine and the web magazine are incorporated in 2011.

Figure 5 Orsai in 2012.

The media ecology of Orsai further develops in 2012 with the move to

editorialorsai.com and the division of blogs.

The increasing complexity of the project has not only influenced the number of

publication media, but also the many authors that have collaborated with the project and the growing global narrative. As I proposed above, an interstory consists of one uniting narrative or story published in various media pieces, in Orsai that global narrative is the very unfolding of the project, and the story is also the history of its media additions.

The relationships between Orsai’s narrative components can be complementary, episodic and reiterative depending on where we read them. Turning points in the narrative of

Orsai have also been crucial moments of the project’s media developments: the magazine, the iPad application, as well as new forms of distribution, etc. As a consequence, key episodes for the project have been the passage from blog to print

magazine, from print magazine to e-magazine, opening OrsaiBar, the embargo suffered in Argentina late in 2012, and finally the transition from blog-magazine to publishing house. These episodes do not just deal with media changes in the project; they also stage it by appearing in interconnected fragments in those very media. The ways in which readers have been able to buy a print magazine or partake in other aspects of the project have filled both page and screen.

Along with the different media used in Orsai, another aspect that has changed as the project has developed is the distribution and sales system. Although smaller changes have been made in-between, sales and distribution strategies have been constant for each year of publication. Just like it happened during late 2010 when the magazine was upstarted and projected to go on during the following year; in late 2011, Orsai was re-launched for 2012. Sales and distribution systems, as it might be expected have not only had an effect on pricing and technical editorial details such as type of paper, number of pages, and number of issues (four during 2011, six during 2012). It has also evidently impacted the kind of content published in the blog and the magazine and some of its literary features. For example, the framing narratives: entrada (appetizer) and sobremesa (a sort of after- meal conversation) which ‘bookend’ each article, interview, review, comic or short story from N1 to N4 were reduced – and were completely removed in N5. A similar

development can be observed regarding the goteos (leaks) published in the blogs and aimed at promoting the content of each new issue. I will come back to this.