Renowned Literary Journal Goes Digital


New York, Wednesday, August 15, 2001 –

Juxta Digital (http://www.juxtadigital.com) and Ploughshares, the nonprofit literary journal at Emerson College, today jointly announced the redesign and launch of http://www.pshares.org, the website for Emerson College's Ploughshares literary journal.

An unprecedented resource for contemporary literature, the website will be the most extensive for any literary journal in the country, offering free access to over 2,750 poems and short stories from past and current issues of Ploughshares. Headlining the site's launch is the newest issue, Fall 2001, which commemorates Ploughshares's thirtieth anniversary.

Supported by a $125,000 grant from the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds, the three-year Web project involved fully indexing every title Ploughshares has ever published and digitizing over 18,000 journal pages. The website has been designed as a literary portal to promote the journal's writers, making a personal Web page available for each of its 2,000-plus authors, allowing them to update biographical notes, announce news, books, and events, and create links to other sites.

Juxta Digital, whose clients include Court TV, Columbia University, and the Academy of American Poets, developed the site, with Ploughshares editor Don Lee acting as project manager.

New features on the site include a news and events area, a bookshelf that highlights book reviews both from the magazine and from online contributions, a content publishing tool, e-commerce support for ordering and subscriptions, and a rights-management tool that allows authors to grant online publishing permissions for their stories and poems. In addition, randomly selected stories and poems from the current issue and from back issues are chosen each morning to be featured from the homepage.

Regarded as one of the best literary journals in the country, Ploughshares has had more selections in The Best American Short Stories than any other literary journal in the past ten years (a record four out of the twenty stories in this year's edition), and nearly every year, stories, poems, and essays published in Ploughshares have also been reprinted in annuals such as The Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize.

Juxta Digital has built several database-driven websites for publishers and broadcasters, including www.poets.org for the Academy of American Poets, www.bbcfootage.com for the BBC, www.hearstbooks.com for Hearst Books, www.fineartlease.com for Fine Art Lease, and others.



About Juxta Digital

Juxta Digital is the professional services division of Juxta Media LLC, a privately held company with offices at 5 Penn Plaza, 23rd Floor, NY, NY 10001. Juxta Digital helps both domestic and international companies extend their brands online, and offers strategic planning, content management, and social network and web 2.0 marketing and development for clients in publishing, media, entertainment, education, and business.

Clients include The Academy of American Poets, the British Broadcasting Corporation, PEN American Center, BusinessWeek, Guideposts' Positive Thinking Magazine, The Financial Times, The Online Publisher's Association, Logicworks, and NextWave Wireless.
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