Streethawk, Web Falcon

Vancouver's Quinn Omori, editor of the online music magazine Streethawk, is modest about how his adventures in publishing began: over beer one night on the patio of the Cambie.

Get enough writers in a room, and eventually someone will start complaining about editors. The three founders of the magazine were doing just that. At issue that evening was the constant back and forth it takes to get stories published, which prompted one of them to declare that "sometimes I feel like I should just do it myself."

This particular patio table quickly realized it had the right talents sitting around it to do more than just complain. The website's designer Ryan Corbit jerked his head pointedly at Jordie Yow, a computer programer, and laid a clever trap. "It's to bad we don't know anyone who can design websites and is totally into computers."

Things started to happen soon after that, starting with a custom built infrastructure by Jordie Yow, "[He] just built it", Quinn recounts, stressing how sudden it seemed "which is probably why it's kind of buggy."

Their site went up in October of 2006, then just the skeleton of the online magazine. A cobbled together piece custom coding, put together on a shoestring budget. "We split a pitcher and pretty much called it even."

From there, the site has grown, and now it claims an impressive roster of young writers, and has a rather prodigious output, posting mare than 75 articles since it's launch.

It's still sparse-looking. Unclogged with advertisements, or flashy toys, the biggest gimmick steethawk employ is occasionally serializing. It's a labour of love, and it's all about the words.

Amongst honest and occasionally snarky live reviews and the expected album summaries, where Streethawk shines is its features.

And now it's making a name for itself with pieces like Jackie Wong's "Moving a and Shaking through Rock and Roll", a recent exploration of Vancouver's creative future in the time of condo. And with the "Placing Labels" series by Jordie Yow, in which he interviews a sequence of local music publishers, to find out what goes into making a label.

Streethawk is ambitious, and it's talented staff is what makes it more than just a blog. It's a magazine.

Streethawk is always there at:streethawkmagazine.com