Part One

SNEAKER FREAKER started in 2003 and is the first and only international sneaker magazine to document the modern footwear craze as a global phenomenon. The magazine is only produced twice a year (usually in June and November) and is sold into the best stores in something like 25 countries. Woody is the super cool editor and I tracked him down to find out more about his career and in particular his experiences in the fast pace world of journalism.

Angel: Tell me a bit about your career background? What did you do before Sneaker Freaker?

Woody: Well I had my own design firm for about 8 years, and most of clients were in the arts, fashion or music. I also used to work on big budgetAmerican films made in Melbourne, designing money for bank robberies, creating entire police stations and graveyards and all kinds of shit, whatever was required for the script. The film jobs were great, unfortunately for a lot of reasons the ones I did turned out to be stinkers like Ned Kelly and Queen of the Damned. So I was more of a designer than a writer actually, although I have written for a lot of magazines about cars and different stuff.

A: Wow thats pretty interesting, we’ll have to go into that another time, but for today I want to learn more about your writing background, did you study journalism at College?

W: No I didn’t. I did a sister course to Journalism at RMIT in Melbourne called Media, which means we did radio production and wrote about cinema and politics, it definitely helps me now but it wasn’t journalism as such. During that time I was one of the editors of the student newspaper which was fun, and really got me started on the addictive hard slog that is magazines.

A: As the editor run me through what your job involves?

W: Well it’s increasingly about email, email and email. I spend all day long begging people to give up their best shoes so we can get them in the mag. But my job is a bit more complicated as I’m also the owner of the business – so I gotta do a lot of boring sh*t like see the accountants and deal with distributors and make sure the staff are on the ball. I also write stories and edit the text, brief designers and work on our tee shirt line and get money from brands and write proposals for events and travel round the world talking about footwear. It’s a crazy job.

A: How many people work on each issue?

W:Up until a year and a half ago I did everything myself which was nuts and unsustainable. But now there’s three part time staff who work on the magazine and website as well as a bunch of people who submit articles all over the world, so it’s very much a group effort. I enjoyed the masochistic discipline of doing it by myself but it was mad hectic I gotta say.

Part Two coming shortly

For more information click on the following link

www.sneakerfreaker.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Fashion, Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.