About Us: A Daily Online Art Magazine

The orginal adobe airstream. Photo: Kate Russell

The Mission

To voice the impact of new art for the new west.

To be the leader in arts news, reviews and analysis for the art, film, music and design of Santa Fe, Denver, Austin.

By reporting and delivering original multimedia content daily on contemporary art, design, music, film, theater, green living and style, AdobeAirstream has become effectively the arts voice of the new west. We present critical news and features from Denver, Santa Fe and Austin every day. Our site is where award-winning journalists in the west innovate new media storytelling. We stay ahead of all other sites that focus solely on a single art type or a single city as their milieu.

The History

Award-winning arts journalist and editor Ellen Berkovitch founded AdobeAirstream in summer 2008 as the first online arts magazine serving the Rocky Mountain and Southwest. In March 2009, the first site launched on a Joomla CMS (content management system), and visitors at first numbered 30 per day. Our numbers rapidly grew and by the time of our re-launch on a customized WordPress template in April 2011, we were seeing upwards of 650 visits a day. That number has doubled again in the last year, and we expect future growth on account of our soon-to-be-launched AdobeAirstreamMedia (A2Media) podcast.

The concept for the site was part intuition and part research on the shape of creative cities, and what makes the creative cities in the Rocky Mountain West distinct from a hyper-local concept being practiced in digital media from denser urban centers. Credit to Atlantic Monthly contributing editor and urbanist, Richard Florida, for his forecasting creative super-regions in which creative class workers would aggregate, forming vital economies. The Rockies  fit that description, being home to cities – namely, Santa Fe and Boulder –  that in 2012 ranked numbers 1 and 8 in Florida’s “location quotient” of  small cities that have the largest numbers of creative arts workers, per capita.

Our inaugural suite of cities and their nearest major airports continues to drive the regional content mix: Santa Fe (and Albuquerque); Denver (and Boulder); Austin (and Dallas; all the way west to El Paso and Marfa.) Subjects that lead our coverage include visual art, film, music and design.

Three years plus later, we have more than 1200 visitors per day, and serve with our creative content and mix of media a region and a diversity of arts.

Ellen Berkovitch in 2012 was a semifinalist for a John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford University.

Contributors

Kudos still attend the work of our founding contributors in the arenas we cover: David D’Arcy wrote the screenplay and co-produced a new documentary, Portrait of Wally, that screened the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival to accolades in Hollywood Reporter and Variety. D’Arcy has been our film editor and contributor attending the major international film festivals and reporting from them for AdobeAirstream. He will be the voice on film for the AdobeAirstreamMedia (A2Media) podcast set to launch May 21, 2012.

Leanne Goebel, contributing visual arts writer, was a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, then went on for several years in Colorado to win Top of the Rockies awards for her individual art blog. She now is running the Colorado Creates dot com website for a network of Colorado creative industries.

In Austin, Katy Crocker, Assistant Editor of AdobeAirstream.com, organizes the weekly contents on music, film, design and visual art from Texas; and writes posts. Groovey writes for us on music from Denver; Don Simpson does the same from Austin. In Santa Fe, writer Hannah Hoel is excelling in arts coverage. Our new contributor list grows by the day.

The Future

One year ago, April 2011, we relaunched a new updated version of AdobeAirstream, introduced pages dedicated to each of our three key cities -Denver, Santa Fe, and Austin – as well as for each of our content areas – art, design, film, music, theater, green, and A2 Radio. New design and green bloggers have joined us, and if you want to know how to contribute, click on the Write for Us! link.