History
Smith was founded January 6, 2006 — National Smith Day — by writer/editor Larry Smith and designer Tim Barkow. Previous to launching Smith, Larry Smith was articles editor of Men’s Journal, and has been the executive editor of Yahoo! Internet Life, and senior editor at ESPN Magazine, and a founding editor of P.O.V. and Might magazines. Tim Barkow is a former editor at Wired and the online general manager at Portland Monthly.
The site focuses on "personal media": blogs, memoirs, diaries, viral videos, social networks, "the mash-up between the professional and the amateur, and art projects rooted in personal. It’s all about the highly personal take on everything." Since its 2006 launch, Smith has been heralded as “a vision for the future of populist storytelling,” “a gigantic cocktail party to which everyone is invited to come, listen, and contribute their own personal stories," and “the pulse of today’s cultural narrative."
In the spring of 2006, Smith launched the critically acclaimed webcomic Shooting War, which became a full-color graphic novel from Grand Central Publishing in the fall of 2007.
In January 2007, Smith launched its second webcomic, a true story of Hurricane Katrina called A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New chapters appeared monthly on Smith through the summer of 2008. A.D. received coverage in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Toronto Star, Rolling Stone, AlterNet, Boing Boing, Wired.com, the USA Today blog "Pop Candy," and NPR, as well as hundreds of blogs. A four-color hardcover book edition of A.D. is forthcoming from Pantheon Books in August 2009.
In February 2008, Harper Perennial published the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs By Writers Famous and Obscure, which came from a six-word memoir contest held on Smith (and co-sponsored by Twitter) in 2007. Not Quite What I Was Planning collects almost 1,000 six-word memoirs, including pieces from celebrities like Stephen Colbert, Jane Goodall, Dave Eggers, and more. Vanity Fair magazine wrote that Not Quite What I Was Planning "will thrill minimalists and inspire maximalists," while Publishers Weekly said it made for "compulsive reading and prove arguably as insightful as any 300+-page biography."
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)