Signal is a daily edit of writing on design, art and culture, sound, collecting, history and film, published by Small Revisions, an independent publishing label and retailer in New York City.
Every issue carries twenty four pieces, four in each of six sections, plus one lead article. To date there are 47 issues and 1174 pieces drawn from 375 publications.
One question decides it: could another outlet have written this from the same press release? If the answer is yes, it is circulated and a reader who follows the field has already met it. What Signal looks for is the opposite, writing that required somebody to go somewhere, interview someone, handle the object, read the archive, or remember something first hand.
That rules out most of what fills a feed: exhibition and product announcements, reworded press releases, brand collaborations, roundups of other people's roundups, trend pieces, wire copy. It rules in reported pieces, interviews with a real transcript, process and technique writing, institutions writing about their own collections, obituaries carrying first hand memory, close readings of one object or one record or one building, corrections to accepted accounts, and writing translated from another language.
Not by a fixed window. A site posting five times a day always has something from this morning, and a museum journal publishing twice a month almost never does, so a flat rule selects for publishing frequency and reads like quality. Instead each source is measured against its own cadence: for a daily publication Signal takes the last three days, for a monthly one the current piece. The principle is to take whatever is currently that publisher's newest work. Anything pegged to an event keeps the tight window regardless.
One article per issue may run at any age if it is still true, marked evergreen.
An article's section is decided by what it is about and what the writer actually did, never by which publication ran it. Design covers product, graphic, architecture and interiors, one each. Arts & Culture covers art, photography, fashion and subculture. Sound is anything music related, from live performance and composers to instruments, producers, sound installation and film scores. Collecting is any collected thing, however unlikely. Document is the recorded past examined by someone who went and looked. Film is moving image.
A new issue every day at signal.smallrevisions.com. The RSS feed carries each issue in full.
