A BRIEF HISTORY

In 1993, Alex Mulcahy was working at the Gallery of Sound, an independent record store in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Armed with an English degree and an entrepreunerial bent, and unimpressed by the quality of their in-store newsletter, he approached the owner with a proposal to bring some life to the publication. Within a few years, Alex and his big idea had evolved into Red Flag Media and a portfolio of ten in-store music magazines, customized for mid-size regional music chains from Baltimore to Sacramento.

Red Flag Media’s expansion was accelerated when the Gallery of Sound joined the Music Monitor Network, a national marketing group of like-minded mid-size independent retailers. Through the spring of 2007, Red Flag Media produced customized magazines for many members of the network. Starting in April 2007, the individual magazines were consolidated under the MonitorThis! moniker, and the unified magazine is now distributed to every store within the network.

One of Alex’s first employees was fellow Gallery of Sound alum Albert Mudrian. A music buff and particularly devout fan of extreme music, Albert started by writing metal reviews, but eventually became a full-time editor. Alex saw potential in a two-page story Albert wrote about the history of death metal, and encouraged him to expand the piece. After years of painstaking research, Albert produced Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore, a revered genre chronicle now available in 5 languages.

Albert’s determination and the success of the book eventually lead to the creation of Decibel Magazine, Red Flag Media’s first national newsstand publication. Decibel covers the entire spectrum of extreme metal, from platinum acts to genre pioneers to the best of the underground. Aggressive from the start, Decibel launched in Ocotber 2004 as a monthly magazine and hasn’t lost a step in three years. As sharp as it is funny, Decibel has been called “smart and adventurous” by the New York Times and the Village Voice says it’s “the best music magazine around right now.”

From its inception, Red Flag Media has actively embraced emerging technologies to create production efficiencies. In the early days, retail partners would fax in pages upon pages of ad requests, and managing these projects became a serious problem. To streamline this operation, RFM created a custom online database application that managed all of the ad data in a central location. Many of our retail clients now use AdMinister to manage all of their advertising programs, from RFM publications to outside print and broadcast.

In 2005, seeking to capitalize on its production expertise and growing portfolio of in-house titles, Red Flag Media became one of only a few publishers in the country to bring prepress operations entirely in-house. RFM would output, process, proof and impose pages, ultimately delivering separated 1-bit TIFF files to longtime partner Dartmouth Printing Company. DPC would simply make plates and print magazines. With this optimized workflow in place, RFM began to provide prepress services to other Dartmouth customers including Tableware Today, The Big Takeover and Carpe Diem Communications.

Today, Red Flag provides publication design and consulting, prepress production, ad traffic, web design and identity design services to a wide spectrum of clients. Contact us to find out how we can help you communicate with your customers.

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