If you’ve seen an edition of Late Nite Magazine floating around campus, consider yourself lucky — there’s a limited supply.
The first edition, which came out in January, features a bright yellow cover and a grainy image of a masked person, only furthering its intrigue. The whimsical, borderline quirky contents only intensify as you flip through, featuring a sketch of “big-boned Billy,” satirical driving advice for elders and “grammy gripes and roadside reveries.”
The magazine could be more accurately described as a “zine,” a self-published, noncommercial form of print work produced in small limited batches. This zine in particular features album reviews, short poems, movie recommendations and graphic design pieces.
The zine is local, founded by students at Northeastern University and Wentworth Institute of Technology, but it also has contributors at College of the Holy Cross. Owen Gaffney, assistant art director at Late Nite Magazine and a fourth-year studio art and psychology major at Holy Cross, describes the publication as “collaborative, creative, editorial, for young artists, makers, writers or anyone who has something cool to share.”
The Valentine’s Day edition, which came out in February, had a little section on pickup lines, including examples like “Did it jiggle when you fell from Heaven?” and “Is your name Ken? Because I can be your Barbie.”
Stephen Giannikas, a law school student at Duquesne University who attended Holy Cross for his bachelor’s degree, contributes as a writer.
“All the writing I’ve been doing at law school is interesting but boring. It’s not very creative, it’s very factual, black and white, so I was looking for an outlet to write about music and give suggestions for playlists and things like that,” Giannikas said.
Instead of featuring the contributors by name on every page, there is a small shape on each page corresponding with a key that features the shapes next to the creator’s names. Gaffney said that this cryptic way of expressing credit is important to the creators.
“There are sections with movie recommendations or just featuring people’s art, but no matter what it is, we want to focus on giving people proper credit,” Gaffney said.
As far as grand visions go, Gaffney said the magazine is meant to be a “celebration of local creatives. The inspiration comes from personal experiences, like the people we meet and the things we find interesting.”
Gaffney said that providing that outlet, especially for people who may not consider themselves traditional “artists,” is very important to the team.
“A lot of our contributors wouldn’t even consider themselves as artists or writers, but all of a sudden, they have pieces in a magazine, and that’s great because they probably wouldn’t get that opportunity in many other spaces,” Gaffney said.
This sentiment, the team said, is especially important in more academic cities like Boston.
“Young creatives don’t usually get the shine that they deserve in Boston and big cities in Massachusetts, but there are so many creative people in the area, and they end up moving to places like New York or California because they’ll get credit,” Gaffney said.
In terms of growth, the team will have a table at the Cambridge Festival later this year and have been accepted into an art fair in Chicago.
“We’re not in it to blow up on Instagram or get recognized as credited, attributed writers,” Gaffney said. “We just saw a need for something like this, where people feel welcome to submit and get that feeling of pride when they see their work in a magazine. And if you couldn’t tell, we want people to submit, the more the better.”
Sophia Rodrigues, a fourth-year international affairs and international business combined major at Northeastern, said the light-heartedness of the magazine caught her eye.
“I like that it’s light and doesn’t have to be too serious,” Rodrigues said. “It makes it inclusive for people who might not be serious artists.”
Though this is its first kind of collaborative project, Gaffnet said that Late Nite Studios has been around for a while, producing short video projects and other small creative endeavors.
“The hope is that we can keep distributing it for fun. It’s like how artists submit tons of songs to Spotify, but probably only 10% of those songs get heard,” Giannikas said. “But if 10 people hear it, and it touches them, that should be enough for an artist. That’s how we feel.”
