Procrastinators beware: Method Magazine, a new student-run magazine, and Method Life, a new student-run blog, may be the best excuses to put off your homework since Facebook. 

The new publications aim to be dangerously witty, entertaining and pertinent to student life on campus.  Editors-in-chief Ivy Menderson ’11 and Robert Alvarez ’11 have worked diligently all year to get “Method Life” off the drawing board, and their work has paid off: the blog launched on April 4 and the first issue of the magazine is set to release on May 1.

“Method Magazine is sort of like New York Magazine or Vanity Fair geared towards Wesleyan life, and the blog is a subsidiary to that,” Alvarez said.

While many media outlets focus on student life on campus, the Method publications will aim to cover every sphere of student activity and interest—from music and technology to sex and politics—and thus fulfill the longtime goal of Menderson, Alvarez, and other older students.

According to Kendall McKinnon ’10, who works on photography and layout for the magazine, there has long been the noticeable absence of a publication that highlights students and their accomplishments, needs and interests.

“All the student publications are aimed at very specific things,” McKinnon said.  “We have a literature magazine, a psychology magazine, and a political magazine, but when I came here as a freshman looking for a magazine that encompassed all student life, with events and culture included, I couldn’t find it.”

McKinnon began to discuss starting up such a magazine with her friends in 2007.  Then, in September 2008, she learned that Alvarez had a similar idea and decided to join forces to create Method Magazine

The titles of the magazine and blog have multiple meanings.

“The idea behind it was to be a play on Wesleyan as a Methodist University,” Alvarez said.  “Method is also a way to go about things, and the magazine and blog highlight the way students go about their lives at Wesleyan. We then called the blog ‘Method Life’ because we didn’t necessarily want it to be connected to the magazine.”

Menderson and Alvarez weren’t new to blogging when they began “Method Life.”  They began their blogging career with a style column for the Argus.  However, they found the Blargus did not offer them the kind of flexibility they had been hoping for.

“There are no hard feelings because of our break with the Blargus,” Menderson said.  “We just wanted something broader and deeper.  We have so many interests, and a lot of our friends have expertise in different areas, so we thought, ‘If we can create our own blog, we can incorporate everything.'”

Though at this point, the blog has only five entries, the content—including an interview with alumni rap duo Das Racist and a poem by a sex columnist under the alias “Smear Prudence”—already has far-reaching, entertaining, and student-oriented pieces. Additionally, Alvarez and Menderson report that upcoming blog entries will feature opinion editorials, book reviews, and student photography.

“The blog, like the magazine, gets into the untapped creative atmosphere of our school, and we can update the blog constantly as an extension of the magazine,” Menderson said.

As for the magazine, the first edition’s theme is “Who are we, and who are we going to be?” an in-depth look at the student body that highlights students’ achievements.  All of the students featured were included in a photo shoot both directed and shot by McKinnon.

“The photo shoot went really well and we had great participation,” McKinnon said.

Along with successful production on the part of the magazine staff came some unexpected outside help: $1,000 in funding from the Student Budget Committee (SBC).  Menderson says that she was surprised to get the request fulfilled, due to what are widely known to be difficulties in funding Spring Fling and other student activities.

“The SBC was very enthusiastic about the idea behind Method Life and Method Magazine,” Alvarez said.  “It’s not a hard idea to sell. It’s something the Wesleyan community really needs and will use, and that benefits so many different facets of this campus, from prospective students to student groups.”

Because of the SBC’s financial boost, Menderson and Alvarez now have open pages originally set aside for paid advertisements, which they plan to give to student groups and causes like the College in Prison program.  But despite adequate funding for the current issue, “Method Life” fundraisers will be necessary to keep the magazine coming out twice a semester.  Moreover, the staff is currently doing layout and production in the CFA computer labs and meeting in the Usdan Student Center, but hope to one day have money for their own workspace.

For now, however, the staff is pleased with the progress of “Method Life” and is focusing on maintaining and increasing traffic on their blog and meeting their projected release date of May 1.

“We hope to create something that will have a very long lifespan,” Menderson said.  “We have two more years to see them grow, so there are tons of possibilities.”