A new quarterly photography magazine has been launched, edited by acclaimed photographer Gary Night and journalist Mort Rosenblum.

Book-sized with a bold, cutting-edge layout, dispatches is meant for those who seek a deeper understanding of what shapes world events. Its producers say it aims to help fill a "growing void in contemporary news media that all too often is stripped of subtlety and substance".

A close-to-the-news journal, it takes a hard look at vital issues facing our world, and tries to understand what can be done do help them.

The first issue, In America, explores the United States. Author Paul Theroux frames the subject with an essay, "Mind Blindness and the Decline of Hitchhiking", while in "Neckties and Turbans", fabled New York Times correspondent John Kifner shows how Americans ignore history to their peril.

Other features this issue include Muzamil Jaleel, a wry and wise Kashmiri reporter, touring the country as a Sufi Muslim with questions to ask, Samantha Power offering thoughts on American "exemptionism" and Antonin Kratochvil takes his critical eye from coast to coast, in the piece "In God’s Country".

Gerald Scarfe, noted London Sunday Times political cartoonist for 40 years, contributes this issue’s cartoon.

Each issue of dispatches focuses on one critical subject (the next is Beyond Iraq) to add human dimension, historical continuum, and worldwide context that are so often lost because of time pressures, lack of space, or commercial influences. Contributors are outstanding journalists, photographers, authors and experts.

Each issue will be £10, with the first issue "In America" due out in May. Go to the dispatches website to subscribe.

>> Link - Dispatches