Subscribe to this blog's feed
Re-Thinking Magazines
This is simultaneously a challenging and an exciting time to be involved with magazine publishing. Challenging because of the rapid movement by traditional magazine advertisers away from print and branding campaigns and toward online and direct response/search advertising. Magazines are evolving their subscription models to capture more revenue from readers, but that change will take a lot of time to implement and is not guaranteed to succeed. So the challenge is how to manage the short-term impact of business model change while putting yourself in the best position to succeed in the future.
And that's where the excitement comes in. Editors and art directors are now actively working to re-think what the magazine of the future will be and, in particular, how it will look when displayed on electronic devices. Some of their ideas strike me as crazy. But others are intriguing and give me great hope about the future viability of magazines as we move to new formats.
PaidContent recently published a compilation of 15 different examples of what the magazine of the future might look like. I recommend it to all editors, publishers and their art/production teams. Some of these ideas strike me as too far out and crazy -- but others look very intriguing. And while most of these ideas are strictly directed at magazines, it seems to me that there will be implications for newspaper design as well -- so you newspaper editors might want to check these out as well. Here's the link:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-15-ways-publishers-are-re-imagining-the-magazine/
We recently launched a redesign of Corporate Counsel magazine. It looks very good. But I can't help wondering if that's the last redesign of a magazine that we will ever do with primarily a print audience in mind. In the future, I suspect that the digital audience will come first. What do you think?
Update 3/28: Monica Bay forwarded this link to an iPad cover concept from Sunset Magazine. As she would say, "very kewl"!
Comments
A recent article I read regarding newspapers/publishing and technology is leading us to the idea that yes, the digital audience is next. Especially with arrival of the iPad in the coming weeks, the print industry seems to slowly be dying just as CDs did and DVDs are.
The article, "Apple and Newspapers: One hand will wash the other" can be read here: http://seekingalpha.com/article/193140-apple-and-newspapers-one-hand-will-wash-the-other?source=kizur
The writer's advice: "The place for newspapers remains in the professional content, quality product, that readers can trust for being well researched and polished. This does not mean that newspapers should get out the web business, but they must be careful to protect the core asset as migration occurs."
-Ashley E.
Posted by: Ashley Eckel | March 25, 2010 6:58 PM
I think inStyle magazine via built by the factory is dead on with their thoughts on this matter.
Here is the video since it's been pulled from Bill's original article link:
http://www.builtbythefactory.com/blog/
Posted by: Joseff Betancourt | March 25, 2010 7:36 PM