Bant
Music, art, cinema...
Bant is a monthly music, cinema, art and etc magazine, based in the city of Istanbul.
For the past 4 years, Bant has been a platform for sharing and discovering local and international talents, as well as including and interviewing recognized names. Bant also steps out of the frame of ‘just’ being a magazine wit organizing gigs, exhibitions, workshops and screenings in Turkey and abroad.
Our ongoing monthly concert series at Babylon “City Star Nights”, the European Popular Journalism Workshop held here in Istanbul, last year’s Nike ‘Run’ Exhibiton, the Young Istanbul Event we did in Stockholm are just a few of the other projects we do/did besides the magazine.
Bant Magazine is open to local and international contributors and owes much of it’s existence to the works of them.
Istanbul, Turkey
merkez mah mazhar oktem sok. no: 14 / A sisli
Email: agungor@bantdergi.com
- Category: Art, Cinema, Music
- Periodicity: Monthly (10 x / year)
- Language: Turkish
- Format: 205 x 255 mm
- Circulation: 80,000
- Price: 5 YTL
- Web: http://www.bantdergi.com
Founded in 2003
Exclusive Interview
It would be great to publish magazine and never think about the printing costs and advertisements inside..
What is your magazine about?
It is about ideas, art, music, cinema and street art, books etc.
Who’s behind the project? Tell us about the founders, their backgrounds and their motivations!
Founders are Aylin Güngör, James Hakan Dedeoglu. It started as a friend project to discover what is happening around our neighborhood than it turned out to be a world-wide ideas magazine with more than 50 contributors. After that to create this magazine we find very special editor (Ekin Sanac) and great art director Umit Kurt, and it became one of the interesting, creative ideas magazine of Istanbul- Turkiye. Bant magazine also have a tv show and a radio show and it is all related with the founders.
But our publisher is the guy who is young and talented investor. Also he is toy collector, his name is Selim Varol and he lives in Germany.
How do you produce one issue? How much time do you spend on it? How big is your team?
In the office we are 5 people. Editor team and art director, director. And production of one issue is nearly 20 days for every month. Mostly interviews takes long times and also most of the time we are waiting for illustrations.
What have been the important steps in the life of your magazine?
Organizations we did such as European popular media conference, exhibitions (art exhibitions with Bant Magazine’s artists), concerts (Cat Power, Damon & Naomi, Brazzaville). Being the local sponsor of Resfest Istanbul. Contributors all around world. etc
Which are the key ingredients for the success of your magazine?
Friendship comes before our professional business life and it makes us alive during working. It has never turned out to be a boring process to create a magazine.
(First we discovered our writers from their e-mail writing style or sms writing style or telling a story style..and we wanted them to write for us and tell about a music or a movie etc. and it worked)
What are the difficulties you are confronted with? What would be “the” thing to help the magazine to improve?
It is always the same. Always more money! It would be great to publish magazine and never think about the printing costs and advertisements inside..
Where do you want the magazine to be in five years?
We want to create it worldwide with other contributor editors. It should be multi cultural.
Tell us about your audience! Who are the readers of your magazine?
Bant Magazine readers are mostly between 18 – 40 years old. They are all interested in music and illustrations, art and movies. They are open-minded and multi cultural.
Is remaining independent important to you? Is it part of the strategy?
Yes. Sure! Otherwise we should change all our covers and put local pop icon’s images to our cover, or at least we should change our editorial team!
What’s your relationship with advertisement? Does it influence your content? Do you care about advertising-driven-editorials?
We usually don’t want to think about advertising but if we have to think than we would like to have creative design ads…
Which is your relationship with your printer? Does he play a main role in your development?
Yes, it is the most important part of the magazine. They are quite expensive so they make us to change our ideas into simple ones .. esp. for the cover art…
Which magazines did influence you most? What are you looking for in other magazines?
There are so many different magazines and what we did is not to influence any of them.. but sure it is hard not to influence. We love little white lies magazine, loose lips sink ships magazine, plan b magazine, the wire magazine, rojo magazine, lodown magazine etc.
What do you think of your issue 01, when you look back at it?
Owwwww, it is horrible to look at it : ) it changed a lot and that one was too much design. It was not simple and it was kind of amateur. Anyway it was so original and doesn’t look like the others, it is so special. There was beastie boys in the cover.
How many magazines do you buy / get / read each month? Do you qualify yourself a maniac?
I really like to read a lot. But there are some magazine I just would like to see images and design or illustrations. We are trying to find magazines from all around world. It is hard to count how many but so many.
E-mail interview from “27.06.2006”. © Colophon2007.com – Mike Koedinger Editions SA (Luxembourg)
- 2044
- 5180
- 2482
- 662
