Kickstarter

Dear Friends and Supporters of Howler,

We're really excited to share something we've been cooking up these past few weeks. It's called Turnstile, and it's our take on a digital reinvention of the classic match program.

About six weeks ago, as we were preparing to launch our Kickstarter campaign, we got a call from a representative of a sports management company called Kentaro. Mark and I had met him at MLS Cup back in November. Now, on the phone, he explained that Kentaro manages the Brazilian national team's summer tour. Would Howler, he asked us, want to make a mini-edition about the Brazil-Argentina match that will be taking place tomorrow at the Meadowlands in New Jersey?

It didn't take us long to say yes. We figured this would the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the kinds of writing and art we'd been working on for Howler, and it would come out just as we were trying to spread the word about the magazine. It was also a unique editorial challenge: How to make a satisfying, short magazine focused on a single match, in just six weeks' time?

We're very proud of how the project turned out. While it's not the same thing as a digital edition of Howler, it is the best possible way to introduce readers to the kinds of art, design, and writing you'll find in issue one later this summer.

There are several ways to get Turnstile: You can download Turnstile, for free, in iTunes. For this first preview, we've limited ourselves to just one format, the iPad. If the iPad format isn't handy, you can get the same content in a hi-res PDF (the embedded videos are functional as long as you're viewing it in Adobe Acrobat). That's a large file (121mb), so we're making it available without the embedded video here. Finally, we'll be putting some of the stories up on our new tumblr, here.

The costs of producing the app were paid for by Kentaro's partner Nike, which allows us to give it away for free. We think it's important to point out that this project was done at cost—all of the resources went into paying the writers and artists, and of publishing the app itself. For us, the Howler team, the benefit is being able to show our readership a polished, engaging app that demonstrates our ambition for Howler in a way that simply describing our vision for the magazine could never do.

We hope you enjoy Turnstile—but even more, we hope it gets you excited for Howler itself. The more subscribers we get this month, the more we'll be able to invest in the writing and art of the magazine and the closer we'll be to achieving our ultimate goal: Delivering the highest-quality magazine we can possibly create.

Thanks for your support, and we look forward to hearing what you think about Turnstile. And remember—please continue to tell your friends about Howler. The support we've received and the enthusiasm we've seen for our project has been tremendous, and we want to keep pushing to reach our goal.

—The Howler team