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The art on the walls of Scott Crawford's Silver Spring home features legendary alternative music icons like Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash, colorful personalities that defied mainstream music during his youth.

On the living room floor there are scattered "My Little Pony" toys, icons of his three small children's youth.

Such is the life of a man whose quiet suburban home is his office and whose job is to buck convention as the publisher of Blurt, a new print magazine aimed at readers not interested in top 40 hits.

"We're not trying to appeal to the Wal-Mart crowd," Crawford, 37, said Friday from his "office," wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

Crawford, who released 30,000 copies of the first print edition of Blurt last month, launched the magazine at a time when the publishing industry is struggling. The glossy 106-page magazine joins a growing Web site at Blurt-Online.com that was launched last June and receives more than 2 million views per month from independent and alternative music fans.

Blurt is based out of Crawford's home and managed virtually, with editors in places like North Carolina, Philadelphia and Utah and freelance reporters and photographers nationwide.

Decisions are made through e-mail, conference calls and instant messaging and hundreds of CDs are delivered straight to Crawford's doorstep, bringing a global, increasingly Internet-based music scene literally into his living room.

"If you had said eight years ago, ‘Oh, I'm doing this all virtually,' people would kind of look at you like, ‘What?'" said Crawford, who launched a similar music magazine, Harp, out of his basement in 2001 with only two full-time staff members. "One of the dirtiest secrets in the publishing world is it doesn't take a huge staff to put out a quality magazine."

He's not the only Silver Spring resident employing this strategy.

Silver Spring resident Zuberi Williams's home-based Web site, Poptimal.com, culls user-generated film and television reviews from writers across the country. Williams said the site has thrived because of Silver Spring's proximity to the District and the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre and Cultural Center on Colesville Road. Plus, it's just a short-train ride to New York City and a wealth of potential stories.

Through connections with production studios and public relations firms, Williams and his writers have landed red carpet access and celebrity interviews in New York and Los Angeles.

But many of the site's roughly 100,000 unique visitors per month are local, Williams said. Poptimal records podcasts from Mayorga Coffee in Silver Spring where local residents can chime in. The site is also offering summer internships to local students.

"It's not just location, it's the people here, it's the level of smarts, it's the sophistication," said Williams, whose revenue comes from investors and advertising.

When he was younger, Crawford also capitalized on his proximity to Washington, D.C.'s flourishing punk rock scene, publishing fanzines through his time at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington.

After working as art director for Silver Spring-based magazine Jazz Times, Crawford launched Harp in 2001. The magazine was similar to Blurt and established a niche among young adults despite little marketing, Crawford said. But in March 2008 the magazine's financial backers, which included Jazz Times, pulled the plug.

Three months later, with the help of former Harp staffers, financial backing from friends and his own money, Crawford started Blurt Online, featuring daily record reviews, blogs and features with exclusive streaming audio and video.

"I got a crash course in this [Internet] stuff very quickly," Crawford said.

The success of the Web site led to the print edition. So with other publications failing across the world, Crawford spoke with hundreds of friends in the music and publishing industry – as well as Blurt Online readers – to gauge the viability of a print component. While he had his fair share of detractors, Crawford was encouraged by what he heard.

Now Blurt is available quarterly on newsstands at places like Barnes & Noble and Borders. The magazine's first cover celebrates its versatility and alternative nature, featuring acts like female punk band Vivian Girls, independent folk-rock mainstays Grizzly Bear and alternative rock veteran Bob Mould.

With the expanse of the Internet and the consumption of pop culture, Crawford said the success of his Web site and magazine is dependent on working tirelessly to stay on the cutting edge.

"Our reputation is on the line every time we get behind a band," Crawford said. "The name of the magazine is ‘Blurt'-ing it out, letting people know for better or worse, this is how we feel and we all have strong opinions."