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By Kat (Age 24, New Zealand)
 Portrait was one of those situations where you get a little idea, think it will be fun and don’t think much beyond that. I never anticipated having received over two million views, a team of over 50 writers, or some of the exciting achievements we’ve had over the years. Now we’re celebrating our sixth year as a magazine (and our seventh year online) I thought it could be fun to reminisce about the road that brought us here and give you, the reader, a little of our history. Portrait was hosted at one-80.net (a site that closed years ago). Through my host website I came into contact with a publicist looking to promote a new young Canadian artist: Jessie Daniels. I was offered an interview with Jessie and sent an autographed copy of her debut EP to review for the site. ‘Hey,’ I thought, ‘this is fun’. Over the following years I interviewed a number of up and coming young musicians and actors and Portrait began to morph into something else. At the time I frequented a number of online teen magazines. They were great, full of articles and reviews that were added throughout the month. I liked the idea but I wanted something a little different – a website that contained an actual magazine issue – like you’d pick up each month on a news rack but free and in digital form. I eventually decided to turn Portrait into an online magazine in the form it is today in September of 2005. Initially my magazine issues were going to be launched every two weeks, with a magazine cover and collection of articles. The bi-weekly idea lasted exactly two weeks before the site became monthly. In those days I wrote everything myself, did all the HTML and made some (awful) magazine covers. It wasn’t until January of the next year that a visitor e-mailed me, asking if she could be a part of the magazine. She had lots of great ideas for articles we could run (I’ll be the first to acknowledge that in the early months I didn’t publish much of anything real in the magazine) and even created a new layout for us. Then she disappeared. Still, her contribution was big and the idea of forming a writing team had taken place. We don’t ask a great deal from people wanting to write for the magazine. You need to speak English, you need to be self motivated and you need to like to write. I’ve never turned anyone away for not having enough experience or being too young and our writing staff over the year has ranged in age from twelve years old through to twenty-seven. Over the years we’ve probably had close to two hundred young people contribute to Portrait Magazine. Many of our writers have displayed the attention span associated with teenagers, getting bored and disappearing after a couple of months. But some have stuck with us for years and can be credited greatly for the site’s success. In May of 2005 I got tired of my own graphic design inadequacy and posted on the Portrait Forums asking the many talented graphic designers there if they’d like to create a cover for the site. The Portrait Forums had originally started as a subsection of my first fansite, KiwiOlsen.Net and over the years grew to offer forums for all the subjects run in Portrait. They’re pretty quiet at the moment but in their heyday we had thousands of active members and would receive up to two thousand hits per day. In those days we held a lot of graphic challenges on the forums. I started a series of cover competitions, where various members would create a cover, the others would vote for their favourite and the winning graphic was used in Portrait. By the end of 2005 a competition was held to hire a full time graphic designer. Sarah (Sunshine) won the challenge and has been designing our fantastic covers ever since. Sarah is an aspiring graphic designer who hopes to someday design for print magazines for a career and I fully believe she has the talent to do that. Surprisingly, Sarah is from New Zealand like myself. We live three hours apart but have never gotten around to meeting in person. After hiring Sarah, I stumbled across Portrait's first writer, Angela. Unlike the majority of our writers, Angela didn’t join the team by e-mailing and applying. I found her on a fansite forum for “Veronica Mars”. I was a huge fan of the show but had only seen the first season as it was all that had aired in my country. I wanted to run an article on the show’s new season but couldn’t write it myself so I posted on the forum if anyone would be interested in writing it. Angela volunteered (turned out she’d heard of Portrait already), she’s been contributing great articles ever since and is the writer who’s stuck with us the longest. Angela is responsible for the many popular polls we run in Portrait Magazine. In 2007 she came up with a fangirl celebration in the form of our ‘Top 10 TV Ships’ feature. We assembled a list of the current young couples on TV and asked our readers to vote for their favourite, ultimately assembling and ranking a Top 10 list that would be featured in our February (Valentine’s) issue. The poll and resulting article was far more popular then we’d anticipated and has become a yearly feature we both look forward to and dread (fangirls can be intense). Its success led to the Top 10 TV Mothers and Fathers and features, as well as the ‘Top 10 TV BFFs’ feature which ran for the first time this year. In 2006 we launched our first ever ‘Top 30 Under 30’ which was inspired by Teen People’s ‘Top 25 Under 25’. The first year we took nominations for celebs to feature and I assembled a list highlighting thirty of them. In 2007 the feature went the way of the TV Ships and we opened up voting to allow the visitors to choose and rank the celebs featured. In 2008 the poll went crazy with over 120,000 people voting and a battle to the death (or in this case the #1 spot) taking place between fans of Tokio Hotel and Twihards (Twilight fans). During this time a lot of people found their way to the site for the first time and we received up to three writer applications per day. 2010’s ‘Top 30 Under 30 is’ looming on the horizon, with nominations beginning soon and voting shortly after that.
Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to continue to interview a number of musicians, actors, athletes and authors (generally via phone and sometimes by e-mail). In 2007 Eleni joined the team. Hailing from Greece, Eleni already had an impressive repertoire of interviews and got to work straight away for Portrait. She’s contributed hundreds of interviews over the years. Since Portrait’s early days we’ve interviewed over 250 people. We continued to publish reviews of the latest albums, books and films at Portrait Reviews. The site now contains around 1,000 reviews. Portrait Reviews is responsible for one of my biggest highlights from Portrait. In 2010 I picked up a copy of Alyson Noel’s ‘Cruel Summer’. I’d reviewed two of her novels earlier for Portrait Reviews but hadn’t requested a review copy of Cruel Summer. It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the review on the front cover. An excerpt from one of our previous reviews had been published on the front cover! As an aspiring novelist it was such a thrill to see even a sentence of my writing printed on the cover of a book. While running Portrait is a lot of fun it’s also a lot of work. I work on the site every single day (we’ve only missed two issues in the six years since launched – one when my Grandmother died and another when I was very ill. The September 2010 issue is the 71st issue of Portrait Magazine!) and at times it feels like a full time job overseeing our writing stuff, organizing and coding our issues. As many of you will know the internet is a cruel place and we receive very little feedback from our readers though they’re happy to criticize and complain to us frequently. My hope with Portrait has always been to provide a fun platform for aspiring young journalists and graphic designers to practice and hone their craft while receiving positive feedback and constructive criticism from readers, all the while creating a website that is a fun destination for other teens and young adults. It’s one thing to practice writing but it’s something else when you know people are reading what you write and enjoying it. We recently promoted our first editor to Portrait. So far I’ve been handling organizing all the sections of Portrait on my own. It’s a huge job and something I didn’t expect anyone else to want to help with (especially considering there is now pay). Melissa has been contributing to Portrait for over a year now. At first she was a proofreader and she now contributes up to ten columns a month (if there’s such a thing as a writeaholic I’d say she’s it). She recently asked if she could become an editor and is now in charge of our Film and Television section. I can’t predict what the future holds for the site. I was sixteen when I created it and am now nearing my mid twenties. The real world continues to encroach on my time (I now have a full time job – 7 days a week, up to ten hours a day) and I find I have less to give to Portrait as the site continues to demand more to keep growing. Hopefully we’ll continue to have new people join our writing team who are also willing to help out with more manual work like coding, proofreading, running out subsites or even editing. I’ve considered closing many times but Portrait is like my baby and very hard to give up. I hope you’ll continue to visit the site in the future, to encourage and help our writers and to be a part of our ongoing story, for as long as it continues.
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