Product Magazine: Scotland's Volunteer-Run Showcase for New Writing and Art
Product is an independent arts and culture magazine based in Edinburgh, Scotland, publishing online at productmagazine.co.uk. It describes its purpose in a sentence that has anchored the project for years: it was established to showcase innovative work by new writers and artists from Scotland and beyond, and it publishes original, compelling coverage of music, film, art and ideas. It is not a commercial title. Product is a registered Scottish charity, run on a voluntary basis, whose writers, contributors, designers and editors give their time and skills freely to produce it.
That model makes Product a distinctive entry in Scotland's cultural media. Where most magazines exist to sell copies, advertising or subscriptions for a proprietor, Product exists to give new creative work a platform — and to cover culture, in its own words, by promoting, investigating and throwing light on ideas and stories often ignored by mainstream media.
Overview
Product publishes across the cultural waterfront. Its site is organised into strands that include books, music, film, art and poetry, mixing three kinds of content: new creative work itself — fiction, poetry, art and photography; criticism and essays about books, records and films; and features on the ideas and scenes behind them. It is, in its own phrase, Scotland's showcase for new work.
The magazine's charitable status is displayed on the site itself: Product is a registered Scottish charity, number SCO 29793. Its footer records Product Magazine with ISSN 2514-538X, and copyright held by Red Herring Arts and Media Ltd, with a copyright span running from 1999 — details that point to a project with roots at the turn of the century, long before its current online form.
History and Background
Product's published history is written less in launch announcements than in continuity. The magazine's copyright line, ©1999–2023 Red Herring Arts and Media Ltd (company SC191861), traces the publishing entity back to 1999. Over the years the project has combined online publishing with occasional print: in 2018 it promoted a 64-page print edition of Product, offering subscriptions for the annual bumper print version together with free entry to literary showcase events — evidence that, even as an online magazine, Product has treated print and live events as part of how a literary community gathers.
Those showcase events matter to the story. A magazine run by volunteers, publishing new writers, gains much of its value from being a scene as well as a website: launches and readings where contributors meet readers, and where the work on the page becomes work performed in a room in Edinburgh.
Ownership and Charitable Model
Product is owned by no media group. It is a Scottish charity run on a voluntary basis, published through Red Herring Arts and Media Ltd. Writers, contributors, designers and editors give freely of their time and skills. Money enters the picture mainly to sustain that volunteer effort: the magazine invites donations towards the costs of paying contributors, promoting new work and publishing the magazine, and it has used subscriptions — such as the £25 introductory offer for its print edition and showcase events — to support the same ends.
This structure explains the magazine's editorial freedom. With no advertisers to court and no proprietor's line to follow, Product can define its job as it does: to promote, investigate and throw light on ideas and stories the mainstream ignores, and to hand its pages to writers and artists at the start of their work rather than the peak of their fame.
Coverage and Content: Books
Books are central. Product publishes reviews, essays and interviews across Scottish and international writing, often with a taste for the overlooked and the re-evaluated. In its series asking which novel a writer would recommend to someone who had never read a word from their country, Alan Warner chose Scotland and highlighted James Kelman's Kieron Smith, boy. Its essays range widely — one substantial piece traces Scottish noir from Taggart and the fiction of Glasgow's cultural emergence in the 1980s through the films of Bill Forsyth and the cool-Caledonia moment, arguing about how Scotland learned to recognise itself on screen and page. This is criticism written to be read, not listings copy.
Coverage and Content: Music, Film and Art
Music coverage mixes obituary, appreciation and scene history. When Brian Wilson died, Product published John Cavanagh's assessment that Wilson's achievement was capturing the untutored brilliance of his sonic imagination on record. Its music features dig into Scottish pop history — including the world of Postcard and Fast Product records, Orange Juice, Fire Engines, Josef K and The Pastels — and into books documenting scenes such as the C86 and riot grrrl era and the women of post-punk. Film and visual art are covered in the same spirit: as culture to be argued with, not merely consumed. The magazine also publishes original photography and art as work in its own right, not as decoration for articles.
New Writing: Fiction and Poetry
The showcase function is most visible in the creative work itself. Product publishes short stories — Graham Lironi is among its fiction contributors — and a steady stream of poetry, from Dorothy Alexander and Anna Viceconti to many others, alongside new visual work. Scottish Book Trust's opportunities listings have directed writers to Product when it has called for fiction, art and photography, with no entry fee — a small detail that says much about the magazine's open-door purpose. For emerging writers in Scotland, a publication that is charitable, volunteer-run and actively soliciting first work is a genuine rung on the ladder.
Editorial Voice
Product's voice is literate, curious and slightly contrarian. Its own manifesto language — promoting, investigating and throwing light on stories ignored by mainstream media — is borne out by the mix: a poem beside an essay on Scottish noir, a Beach Boys appreciation beside a review of a book about Gen Z's turn to religion, in Liz MacWhirter's piece on Lamorna Ash's exploration of young people's faith. The magazine trusts readers to follow it across forms and subjects, and trusts new writers to be worth that attention. It reads, deliberately, like the work of enthusiasts rather than a marketing department.
Audience and Reach
The audience is Scotland's literary and artistic community and its wider diaspora of readers: new writers looking for a first credit, established writers looking for an intelligent berth, and readers of independent cultural criticism. Product's call-outs through bodies such as Scottish Book Trust, its showcase events in Edinburgh, and its mix of Scottish and international subjects give it a reach beyond a single city, while its charity-volunteer base keeps it rooted in the community that produces it. Its tagline claim — Scotland's showcase for new work — is aimed at exactly that readership: people who make culture, not only consume it.
Contributing and Community
Product actively invites submissions, publishing guidance for contributors on its site, and it recruits volunteers as well as writers — the magazine lists volunteering among its routes in, alongside donating and subscribing. That openness is structural: a magazine run entirely on volunteered skill needs a pipeline of editors, designers and writers, and it finds them by being the kind of publication people want to help make. The community around it — contributors, subscribers to its print editions, audiences at its literary showcases — is both its workforce and its readership.
Digital Presence and Print
Online, Product lives at productmagazine.co.uk, where its archive stretches across years of books, music, art, film and poetry coverage, with new creative work published alongside criticism. Print has been an occasional, celebratory extension — the 64-page edition promoted in 2018, bundled with entry to showcase events, is the clearest example — rather than the core product. The balance is typical of independent literary publishing in Scotland now: digital first for reach and cost, print for permanence and occasion, and live events for community. That a volunteer charity sustains all three is the measure of the project.
Why Product Matters
Scotland has many outlets that review culture; it has far fewer that exist primarily to publish new cultural work for its own sake, run as a charity by the community it serves. Product's contribution is that platform — decades-spanning, volunteer-powered, and still introducing readers to writers and artists they have not heard of yet. In a media economy that rewards scale, Product is a reminder that a magazine can be small, independent and non-commercial, and still be part of a nation's cultural infrastructure.
