Magazines Are Digital Misfits
Maybe: in moving to web, value proposition of digital format is greater for newspapers than it is for magazines.*
The other day I twittered that half-baked thought and got several prods to flesh out my musing a bit further, so here you are!
As it concerns the reader, the web’s major advantages over print publishing are content accessibility and delivery speed. The web reaches more people at a faster rate than print ever could, because digital content is lightweight, shareable, and instant. Obvious, right?
Right. It follows, then, that ‘speed media,’ information that gets its importance from its timeliness, adapts better to the web than content whose currency is artistry, opinion, or depth. A publication with a daily output schedule finds better propulsion across the web’s pipes than a publication with a monthly or even weekly publishing schedule ever will. Therefore, the nature and pacing of newspaper content is better suited for web publishing than is magazine content. The same is true of audience reach. Newspapers deliver relevant information to the broadest audience (it’s news of import to everyone!), which the web has been engineered to do perfectly. It is natural then that the majority of news content sheds its paper trappings and shifts to the web.
But speed and reach are not the only barriers to magazines’ successful move to digital.
No! Who can forget the inimitable experience of magazines — the glossy luxury that is flipping idly through W or Wired and realizing the publication’s weight and texture in your hands. Magazines still convey much of their tone with the heft and polish of their pages. The same is not true with newspapers. I’ve always disdained, for instance, the newsprint ink that smudges on my fingers while paging through a newspaper. And this is to say nothing of the number of times I’ve nearly knocked someone out by trying to flip the giant pages. The web news experience is in every way an improvement over the grimy, cumbersome newsprint experience. With magazines, however, the interaction with the physical product is an important tradition of the content consumption. That makes the digital transition a downgrade for magazines.
I’m not usually so bearish on the inappropriateness and unnatural fit of the web for content, but magazines are a special case. The web is a natural habitat for the ‘need-to-know-now’ content of newspapers, but not so with the glossies as they’ve been ported to the web now. There’s much to say about what could be done to bring these traditions online, make them just as stunning, and monetize them well, perhaps later.
*I’m speaking of magazines here in the traditional sense - Vogue and Architectural Digest for instance which deliver primarily visual, photographic, experiential products. Lots of pubs like BusinessWeek are just the business section of the newspaper stuffed into a weekly magazine mailer, and these publications obviously find value on the web with their newsy/analytical/text-based content.
