Building institutions that bend towards truth, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and guest Clara Collier (editor/publisher of Asterisk Magazine) opened by unpacking the hard, practical constraints of running a small longform publication in the streaming era. Collier described Asterisk — founded in 2022 — as a quarterly print-and-online magazine that tries to blend the transparency and voice of indie blogs with the rigor of legacy outlets. Print matters: the magazine is a 120-page physical product with a fixed printer contract and shipping cadence that forces months‑ahead commissioning and editing. Typical pieces run ~4,000 words, although Collier noted a standout Vaccinate CA package that swelled from ~13,000 to 28,000 words. She and co‑editor Jake Eden make constant tradeoffs between preserving writer voice and imposing editorial taste, and both guests emphasized how much time and budget go to copyediting and fact‑checking — disciplines that are hard to hire for and require judgment beyond mechanical fixes (e.g., decisions about Chinese name transliteration or dash conventions).