Archive for the ‘Digital Magazines’ Category
Last week’s launches, Feb.20th
New magazines are launching every day; this is a brief list of some that caught my eye last week.
Conde Nast’s Bon Appétit’s has a new iPad edition that sets out to be “a kitchen companion for home cooks” with a “Kitchen Mode” that gives step-by-step recipe instructions with videos and slideshows.
The publishers of Gay Times and DIVA magazine have launched META, a digital publication aimed at the transgender community.
The Shelf Media Group has launched Shelf Unbound, a digital-only magazine to tell you what to read next in independent publishing. It showcases the best of small press and independent books, with author interviews, reviews, excerpts and photo essays.
In print and digital, Art & Gator magazine combines coverage of Florida’s museums, fine art and theater to the nature conservation and sustainable conservation in the Everglades.
Times Internet has launched Tweek, claiming that it is India’s first iPad only magazine. The weekly packages lifestyle articles across from other properties run by the publisher.
Will e-commerce deals in digital magazines kill editorial integrity?
Flipping Pages Poll | Vote on Quipol
Reporting on a deal between Hearst and Amazon this week, Adweek asked, “Is it a magazine—or catalog?”
What’s the difference? Well there are a few, but the biggest is editorial independence. Catalogues are put out there with the sole purpose of selling product; magazines, traditionally at least, try to tell a story. Link magazine content directly to e-commerce facilites, especially where the publisher can look forward to a revenue share, and the lines all of a sudden get blurry.
Is this about giving magazine readers what they want? 70 percent of tablet owners say they would like to be able to buy items by clicking on the ads in a digital magazine, according to a survey by GfK MRI. Or is it more insidious, risking the very independence of magazine content as publishers push product to gain affiliat revenue? Hearst says shopping links are added after editors are done so there is no interference with the editorial process. Other see it as the thin end of the wedge.
What do you think? Will e-commerce deals in digital magazines kill editorial integrity? Yes or no? Vote on Quipol.
Read Adweek’s report on Hearst Linking its Digital Editions With Amazon.
How do you read on the plane?
I just read a post on Australian Business Traveller. Not something I’ve ever done before, but this could have been written just for me; Editor David Flynn is asking Australian flyers how they read in-flight.
This is a subject close to my heart. I reckon I spent at least 200 hours in the air last year, mostly transatlantic. I had to get the calculator out, but that’s 8.33 days stuck in an aircraft seat with not much to do but read, play games or watch movies. I’ll watch the odd film and play the odd game of seatback backgammon, but I spend most of my flying hours reading.
My routine is pretty predictable. On the way out I buy a real-live copy of the New Statesman, that gets me through the personal electronics device blackout of take off to my meal. After the chicken or beef I move to my iPad, where I bounce between Instapaper and my newest favourite magazine. But I can’r read too long on the iPad screen and eventually I’ll move on to the Kindle and one of the 10 books I’m reading at any given time.
It’s pretty much the same on the way back, magazines, iPad, Kindle, although Newark’s Hudson News stores seem to offer a wider choice that Manchester’s WH Smith.
The point in sharing my inflight reading habits really has nothing to do with my reading habits or the flight. The travel scenario just brings the range of choices available to magazine readers into narrow focus. In everyday life, on planes, on trains, in living rooms and bedrooms, offices and cafes, people are reading pixels and paper in all sorts of formats and for all sorts of reasons.
The challenge for publishers is to make sure that their content is available on the formats that make most sense for their audience in the places that their audience wants it. Quick hits on the move, get on smartphones; lean-back long-form, paper’s probably still your best bet; if you’re thing is searchability, the web on the desktop makes sense; and if you’re pushing social sharing, tablets could be the way to go.
There are no easy answers, like me on a plane, everyone is using multiple platforms. You need to figure out which ones your audience uses most and be there for when they need you.
Read the original Australian Business Traveller article here.
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue delivers on digital
Way back in December 2009, I blogged about the Sports Illustrated iPad demo and the future of the magazine industry. Well it seems the future has well and truly arrived for SI.
In that demo video, SI editor Terry McDonell imagined that the swimsuit issue would come to life on the iPad; 2012′s swimsuit issue has just been released and it sounds like it might just live up to the 2009 fantasy with a packed digital portfolio.
This year’s issue will be available on the iPad with more than 150 photos and 2 hours of video alongside an iPhone app that gives users a 360 degree view of bodypainted athletes. The tablet edition of the magazine will also be available for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Barnes & Noble Nook Color, Amazon Kindle Fire, and the Motorola Xoom.
SI’s swimsuit edition reaches more than 70 million people a year through print and digital publishing, broadcast and merchandising. This year, with ties into social media to allow readers to follow models on Twitter, see behind the scenes videos on Facebook, and vote for the first time for the magazine’s Rookie of the Year, it’s digital efforts have really come of age.
“You will see innovation on every Swimsuit platform this year,” said Terry McDonell, Editor Time Inc. Sports Group in a launch release. “The magazine tablet app showcases the highest levels of photography through scrolling-panoramic sequences, we created a new music section on SI.com, and on your iPad and iPhone the 360 degree views of bodypaint will offer an entirely new perspective on Swimsuit.”
For a magazine concept that was dreamt up in 1964 to beat the post-holiday advertising slump, SI’s Swimsuit issue is really working the medium.
UPDATE | To see how the Swimsuit issue cover has changed since 1964, take a look at Next Issue’s historical cover collection.
New Yorker magazine loads first crowdsourced cover
Don’t reset your router, your internet connection is fine. The New Yorker magazine cover on the left looks like that on the newsstands.
The inspiration for the ultimate print-digital integration cover came from reader Brett Culbert’s entry to the magazine’s annual Eustace Tilley competition that has readers submit their own interpretations of the publication’s original 1925 cover illustration by Rea Irvin.
Two things are interesting about this. Firstly that the competition entry actually made it onto the cover and out to the newsstands. Winning entries have been featured in the magazine before, but never on the cover. This says a lot about the growing acceptance of crowdsourcing as a legitimate way for magazine brands to develop content.
Second, just a few years ago very few people one would have had a clue what this image was about. “It’s blurred, there’s a daisy wheel, what does it all mean”. Now, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets we all know immediately that it means “Page Loading”.
While I hope this is just the beginning for magazines bringing their audiences into the creative process, I really hope that the slow-loading allusion soon becomes every bit anachronistic as Mr Tilley’s top hat and monocle.
To look at the other 2012 submissions to the Your Eustace competition go to the slideshow here.
Apple Newsstand helps Future find the future
What was that noise? A huge collective sigh of relief perhaps, as Britain’s magazine industry heard the news that media group Future had passed a major industry milestone. The group announced this week that it had posted enough digital revenues in the last quarter of 2011 to compensate for print revenue falls in the same period. UK digital circulation and advertising revenue grew 51 percent year on year, due mainly to Future’s early entry into Apple’s Newsstand. The group was amongst the first publishers in the Newsstand, releasing 65 titles with the service’s launch in October.
The launch of the Newsstand gave publishers a first glimpse of the scale that was possible with digital. paidContent recently reported that in the month after the Newsstand was launched the free container apps for Future’s tablet editions were downloaded nearly 10 million times, generating 75,000 subscriptions. “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets,” said Future CEO Mark Wood in an Interim Management Statement.
via Milestone: Digital Gains Offset Magazines’ Decline At Future | mocoNews.
Less content, more traffic. Who knew?
Kerry Lauerman, Editor-in-Chief at Salon.com, blogged a surprising statistic this week | 33 percent fewer posts on Salon brought 40 percent greater traffic, year on year. That’s right: 33 percent less content, 40 percent more traffic.
That’s not in the script. What happened?
Lauerman says that – completely against the trend for more content, faster – Salon slowed down its process.
We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January).
The Salon EIC pitches this more thoughtful approach against an obsessive focus on traffic and talks about the efforts Salon made to increase output while cutting staff by cutting story length |
In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big story, and tried to link generously to the original source. At its worst, we monitored Twitter and Google for trending topics, and dispatched an intern to cobble together our own summary, posted it quickly, then prayed to the Google gods that the effort would win, if only briefly, their favor.
Lauerman bemoans the pressures of the last ten years on journalists to “second-guess everything we know” and celebrates Salon’s return to it’s primary mission of “originality”.
Before you abandon digital’s drive for fresh content and return to print-era publishing schedules, a quick reality check. Even on its reduced story count Salon serves its seven million visitors around 600 pieces of fresh content each month. There’s no question that you’re going to have to publish more frequently that you used to – it’s the only way to get the attention of your audience and Google’s algorithms. But maybe Kerry Lauerman just gave you permission to think again about the value of what you are posting as much as the volume and to re-consider quality alongside quantity.
Read Kerry Lauerman’s original blog post, ”Hit Record”, here.
Readers don’t like variation in digital magazine formats
Variety might be the spice of life for digital magazine designers, but maybe not for readers. Data from GfK MRI’s iPanel points to some reader frustration when it comes to digital magazine formats. A recent survey showed that 72% of tablet owners who read digital magazines on their devices said they would prefer all digital magazines to be formatted in the same way.
Other negatives: 48% of tablet magazine readers say electronic magazines take too long to download; 46% said they consider video be “just a gimmick”; 43% said it is too difficult to find the magazines they want to read on their devices.
Better news for publishers is that the same survey found substantial interest in e-commerce via digital magazines; 70% of tablet owners who read digital magazines on their devices said they would like to be able to buy items simply by clicking on ads.
via MediaPost Publications Tablet Owners: More e-Commerce In Digital Magazines 02/06/2012.
Astronaut Magazine, DMA Launch of the Year 2011
Every now and then, once a year if you’re lucky, you get to see something that changes the way you think about what you do. That’s how I felt the first time I saw the Sports Illustrated iPad demo back in 2009, the volcanically crowdsourced Stranded in 2010 and Astronaut, Launch of the Year at the 2011 Digital Magazine Awards.
Astronaut was among the magazines I was assigned to judge for the 2011 DMAs. At over 1GB it was a hell of a download and I have to admit, I had my doubts. As it turned out, it was a privilege to be reviewing what other judges on the panel called a “lovely experience” and a “groundbreaking magazine”.
Astronaut is made in Berlin and is all about giving independent filmmakers a forum to present documentaries and projects. It’s this mission to showcase video that makes it so special. The magazine is made for the iPad, quite deliberately made for iPad, and it uses all tricks of the developing tablet trade to seamlessly integrate classic magazine content with video.
Astronaut was first conceived as a print magazine with an accompanying DVD, but it works much better on the iPad where the video is right there alongside the words, helping to tell the stories. The publication presents a total of 80 minutes of video content in clips that run from four to 20 minutes long. But far from being a glorified show reel, each video is embedded in a long-form feature article that practises the best of old-school magazine crafts – writing, typography and photography.
June 10th’s launch issue features film of photographers and artists at work alongside the narrative of their ideas and aspiration. There’s a profile of Robert Rath, founder of the Erased Tapes independent record label accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful music video (below) from one of the label’s lartists. There’s a behind-the-scenes look at video game design and “Zoomer’s Treasures” a found-documentaryabout a junk lovers paradise stumbled upon by filmmaker Sam Huntley as he drove through rural Kansas.
Through 12 feature articles, the editors and designers have blended classic magazine content with video wonderfully well, making great use of layered text for both navigation and design. Unlike many made-for-iPad magazines, it’s difficult to get lost in Astronaut. The page progression remains fairly linear and a screen tap on any page will bring up a scrolling TOC that will take the reader to wherever they want to be in the publication.
Priced at €2.99/£2.49, the magazine is available from the App store, where you’ll see the best reviewer comment you could ever hope to see: “I enjoyed this first edition… when will issue 2 appear?”
Olafur Arnalds – Lojso from Astronaut Magazine on Vimeo.
Digital Magazine Awards Launch of the Year, 2011
Astronaut Video Magazine
Twitter: @Astronautmag
Download Astronaut from iTunes
Digital Magazine Award Winners 2011
While I was stuck, delayed, at Newark airport Wednesday night, the shining stars of the digital magazine industry enjoyed a gala evening at the London College of Communication to hear Wired UK announced Digital Magazine of the Year 2011.
In its second year, the competition attracted entries from 31 countries and the advances in such a short space of time has been quite remarkable, proof positive of the phenomenal change that is taking place in the digital magazine space. The most notable shift has been the move away from flash publications – more than half of the titles I judged this year were on the iPad.
You can see a full list of the winners over at DigitalMagazineAwards.com with the winning lineup including Wired UK, The New Yorker, BBC Focus, TRVL and British Vogue.
I’ll review the category winners here over the next couple of weeks. First up, launch of the year Astronaut.
