I talked with four professors who teach magazine-related courses about what they’ve been doing to keep their students’ training up to speed with the professional world. 

Wherefore Tablets?

Dusty tablets are apparently taking up space in at least a few classrooms around the country.

Magazines’ tech innovation has been a major motivator for new course requirements and content. One of the changes is a move away from tablet publishing — which was introduced within only the last six or seven years.

Ed Madison, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, was among the first instructors to guide students through the creation of an all-digital magazine, then using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Now, though, his students are exploring other publishing models.

“Adobe is making some shifts in how they offer that software, and there are some other opportunities out there that are platform or device agnostic,” Madison says. “HTML5 allows for some of that interactivity without having to have it on a touchscreen device.”

Inman’s students are at work now on Urban Plains.

At the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Drake University, students of assistant professor Jeff Inman have also stopped publishing their tablet magazine and instead focused on their Urban Plains website, after taking a hard look at the numbers.

“It was no longer an area where we saw the industry taking an interest. Most [magazines] are pulling back on that,” Inman says.

His students’ audience was on the web, too, not on tablets.

“We were getting infinitely more page views and impressions [from] our website, and we had longer engagement on the website and a much lower bounce rate than we did on our tablet [edition],” Inman says. “Our biggest tablet got maybe 2,000 or 3,000 downloads. Our last website had about 90,000 views in six weeks.”

Going back to publishing a student-created print magazine wasn’t appealing from an audience or teaching standpoint, either.

“We flirted with the idea of trying to do print again. When it came down to it, it seemed antithetical to what we were trying to accomplish. It just got in the way, plus it costs so much more money than running the website,” Inman says.

The thousands of dollars that might have been spent on printing were instead put toward supporting students’ travel for reporting more in-depth stories.

In addition to device-agnostic web publishing, social media have become an increasingly important part of magazine students’ experiences.

“In recent years we began to emphasize social media more (as something new magazine staff members must be able to contribute to),” says Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, associate professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago, in an email interview.

Madison’s students are working on using social media for more than distribution, too.

“We’re experimenting with audience engagement at the conception of the story,” he says. “Instead of, ‘OK, we’ve assembled this article or issue, and here it is, world,’ we’re saying, ‘Hey, engage with us while we’re in the process of ideation. Which story should we pursue? Engage with us through with social media as we’re crafting a story.’”

Conversations about social media include more than skills for using them. Students need to discuss what social media mean for the future of magazines and journalism more broadly.

“When I ask students what they’re reading, they’re not reading that many magazines … They’re getting their content on social,” says Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor of magazine journalism in the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. “We talk a lot about how you can create the things that make a magazine a magazine — voice, editorial perspective, all that stuff. How does that exist in a world controlled by social media? They’re really wrestling with these questions, too.”

At Drake, Inman’s students are also now required to study video production.

“They have to know how to shoot and edit … but they also have to know how to be in front of the camera, with an emphasis on the how-to presentation or on walking and talking — the main formats our people are getting into,” Inman says.

Students who come into magazine courses today and mainly consider themselves writers are likely to find themselves stretched to explore other media.

Not Just a Magazine Writer

Technology and business are intertwined throughout journalism, and students aspiring to magazine careers are also having to learn more about the realities of the industry — how it makes money, and how professionals need to be true team players.

In addition to Drake’s new video class requirement for magazine majors, students are also required to take a mandatory class in digital media strategy and a one-credit class called “Business for Journalists.” Inman says the latter focuses on basic business concepts that journalism students might not otherwise encounter in college.

“For the first two or three years, maybe they’ll be making coffee, but after that, they’ll be looking at spreadsheets and managing budgets,” Inman says. “We’re addressing that need and making them not scared of it.”

Gallagher also emphasizes business discussions in her courses. She says her students today are more “savvy” about the business challenges facing the industry than when she joined the Syracuse faculty in 2010. She’s using a new assignment that requires students to do an audit of a magazine brand that includes an in-depth look at its digital and social media presence; a SWOT analysis; and recommendations for how the magazine can increase audience, revenue and traffic.

“When they go to work, I hope they’ll have good ideas for their own editors because they’ll be thinking about the business of editorial,” she says. “I tell them the worst thing that can happen is to be left out of the conversation.”

Students need to know how to have conversations about all of the aspects of magazine production, too, not just business issues. Requiring students to collaborate more deeply and broadly on class projects is another growing emphasis among these instructors.

At Drake, a merged journalism capstone course now requires students from across all media types to work together to create content for the student website.

“It’s fun to see traditional print kids running cameras at an event or video kids getting thrown into social media, thinking about the differences between social video and video for a news station,” Inman says. “Finding that crossover moment is exciting. Hopefully, as we get more people through our changed curriculum, we’ll find more of those moments.”

Madison wants his students to learn from magazine projects how to work with others’ different media expertise.

“We had some students whose expertise would be photojournalism, another in design, another in writing. But when they came into this class, the expectation is not that they’re going to leave skilled in all these areas, but that they’re going to know how to engage,” he says. “How do you talk with a designer? What’s the language you need to share to be able to create a better story?”

Madison’s current project with his students, which uses multiple media to tell stories about the Pacific Northwest.

Digital Skills for Digital Jobs

Unfortunately, even with updated knowledge and skills, getting a job in the magazine industry can still be a challenge for new journalism grads.

“There are simply fewer positions at many magazines than there were in the past, and several have ceased publication. Internships and jobs are harder to come by,” Bloyd-Peshkin says.

When students do get hired at magazines, they aren’t usually doing print.

“A great majority of our students go to New York, and they work for major publishers, but on the digital side,” Gallagher says. Some of her students have landed at digital-only publishers, like Mashable, Business Insider and BuzzFeed. “It’s no longer the dream to work at a print magazine. The goal has shifted. They want to go where they read.”

Inman has seen similar trends in the hiring of his program’s grads.

“A lot of these pseudo-magazine websites that are in need of content creators are turning to our majors because they know how to tell a good story, and a good story that’s native to digital,” he says.

Yet students headed to these digitally focused jobs may be stunned when they arrive by what Inman calls “the volume problem”: the speed and quantity of digital work new hires are expected to produce — five or more stories each day. That volume is tough, if not impossible, to simulate in slower-paced college courses.

“Doing this website allows us the opportunity to up the volume, in theory. We have an expectation of a healthy amount of content to get them used to this faster pace of posting daily and promoting daily — but I still can’t get to that five stories a day,” Inman says.

One way Gallagher has addressed this problem is an aggregation assignment where students do a class live blog of an event (this year, the Oscars), with a focus on adding context and story to the moment-by-moment coverage. This kind of aggregation might be a typical entry-level task for a new digital staffer. Gallagher made this assignment address multiple skills by using Slack for a virtual editorial meeting and Tumblr to publish the class’s work.

But even as Gallagher and other magazine instructors come up with creative new teaching strategies and work to share key knowledge with their students, some skills will always be important.

“I’m still teaching copy editing,” Gallagher says. “No one needs to worry about that.”

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing and editing, and does research on magazines, social media and political communication.

The post Teaching Magazine Students More than Magazines appeared first on MediaShift.

Video has probably featured more and more in your Facebook feed recently, whether live or recorded. Facebook says there are about 4 billion views of videos on the site each day, and media companies especially have  been experimenting with using new live video options.

Magazines aren’t new to video. They’ve been publishing videos on their websites and video channels for quite a while now. The Magazine Media 360 audience data show growth of about 14 percent in magazine video viewers from 2014 to 2015. Video has been a successful way for many magazines to increase their audiences. But the challenge du jour is maximizing the unique opportunities of Facebook video, including its new live and 360-degree capabilities.

National Geographic

National Geographic is among the magazine publishers that have been especially successful with Facebook video. While lots of their videos have received hundreds of thousands of views, some have been watched many millions of times.

Rajiv Mody, vice president of social media for National Geographic Partners, says video plays to the organization’s strengths.

“Video has been a great format for us. When you think about National Geographic, we really push the envelope when it comes to visual storytelling,” Mody says.

The organization started focusing more intently on video last October, Mody said. The most successful videos have focused on topics you’d associate with National Geographic, too — like animals, space and the environment.

One of the top-performing videos focuses on Manitoba’s Narcisse Snake Dens, home to the largest gathering of snakes in the world. Mody says while the video topic is intriguing, the headline for the post was critical to its success, too: “If You’re Scared of Snakes, Don’t Watch This.”

“It was very enticing. Everybody wants to watch it immediately,” Mody says. “We find that being smart about how you frame the content, and writing engaging headlines — those are enormously important.”

Click the image to watch the video.

With 17 million views (and counting), the snake video also connects clearly to National Geographic’s usual topics and audience.

“These are things that remain true to who we are, and that remain true to the community that’s on our Facebook page itself. We’re focused on areas they are engaged with and interact with,” Mody says.

While trying to focus on its audience’s interests, National Geographic has also successfully brought its audience new video forms. Several 360-degree videos are top performers with millions of views. The 360-degree videos, Mody says, have especially brought “tremendous exposure.”

Click the image to watch the video.

The next area for experimentation, Mody says, will be live video. National Geographic has tried out livestreaming on Periscope, but not yet on Facebook.

“Our explorers are out in the field, and we’ve done work with live video there,” Mody says. “[We have] amazing reach all over the globe, and what live video could really do to help bring that presence to people — that’s directionally where we’re going.”

Hearst Magazines

Like National Geographic, Hearst magazines have also dedicated more energy to video in the last year.

“We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting,” says Brian Madden, vice president of audience for Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “We’ve seen video views on Facebook explode, with about 200 million total views across all of our brands. This time last year, we probably had 20 to 25 million video views. It’s been a huge change.”

Some of the videos posted by Hearst magazine are unique to Facebook, but the organization has a dedicated video team that works with editorial staff to tailor content and style for a variety of video platforms, Madden says. For example, a beauty video might appear as a time-lapse version for Facebook, with a longer version on YouTube and a vertically oriented version on Snapchat.

“We’re creating so many videos that keeping track of what’s working and what’s not, and iterating and trying new things, has been challenging, but it’s a great opportunity,” Madden says.

Click the image to watch the video.

Hearst has already been trying out live video on Facebook. Madden explains that the Facebook audience is much more engaged with the live video than with recorded videos. Maybe two to five percent of the viewers will like, comment on, or share a recorded video, Madden says, but 10 to 15 percent do so for a live video. (It’s not just Hearst; Facebook says viewers comment over 10 times more often on live video than on recorded video.)

“It’s taking Facebook to another level. We can connect to our audience in a much deeper way,” he says. “People are connected in the moment with our brand, something I think Facebook is very capable of creating.”

Click the image to watch video.

While food, beauty, celebrities, and other lifestyle topics have all performed well for Hearst, not just any idea works for live video. Live videos, Madden says, should be based on “what creates a moment. … What’s something you’d want to be live? How do you create something that people will feel it’s important to see live, versus something they can watch in a recording?”

Creating those compelling moments with magazines’ content and brands is a new challenge for editorial staff.

“Our editors are so passionate about their brands and about their audiences that being able to interact with them at that moment and level is an exciting thing for them. They’ve embraced it,” Madden says.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post How NatGeo, Hearst Created Moments With Facebook Video appeared first on MediaShift.

The Pew Research Center released a report in January on crowdfunded journalism at Kickstarter, detailing how donations have powered a wide array of journalistic projects in different media. The report’s authors analyzed 658 journalism projects that reached or exceeded their funding targets from 2009 to 2015.

Although website projects brought in the most cash on Kickstarter (29 percent of the journalism category’s total contributions), magazine projects were the most prolific, accounting for 20 percent of all funded journalism projects.

Many people are pessimistic about print media, and yet the creators of these magazine projects rallied donors to raise just over $1 million. Somehow, crowdfunding and magazines seem to be a great match. I talked with two successful magazine founders and Kickstarter about what makes this combination work.

Power of the Personal Network

If your friends crowdfunded projects, apparently you should, too. Both magazine creators I interviewed were inspired and informed by watching friends crowdfund projects.

“We never really doubted we were going to try to do crowdfunding. It was just how would we get the campaign together, what would be the right target amount. It was reassuring to see a combination of projects we’d really admired doing good things on Kickstarter, and to see our friends with successful Kickstarter campaigns,” said Evan Walker-Wells, a co-founder of Scalawag, a magazine about Southern politics and culture.

Scalawag Kickstarter video from Scalawag on Vimeo.

Scalawag’s Kickstarter effort ended in April 2015 after raising over $31,000 from 374 backers, far exceeding its initial goal of $20,000. The magazine just released its fourth issue.

Similarly, George Quraishi, co-founder and editor of Howler Magazine, had watched a friend’s magazine succeed on Kickstarter, and decided to try it for a new soccer magazine concept.

“We didn’t really have any expectations, more like hopes,” Quraishi said. Howler, which has now published nine issues, raised $69,001 from 1,441 backers in its 2012 campaign — also going beyond its target of $50,000.

While Scalawag and Howler both raised tens of thousands of dollars, most magazine projects on Kickstarter are smaller in scale. The Pew report shows that the median amount raised by magazine projects was about $3,500, contributed by a median of 55 backers. But even that sum can be enough to launch a new magazine.

Team Efforts Find Success

In addition to having successful role models for their crowdfunding efforts, Walker-Wells and Quraishi both had another trait in common with the other Kickstarter-funded magazine projects: the support of a group. According to Pew, 29 percent of the magazine projects were proposed by groups of individuals. Involving a group means drawing on everyone’s social connections to publicize the project.

The Scalawag team was “six of us, all in our 20s … We didn’t have access to massive capital. We were trying to do a print magazine, with online publishing as well. We don’t have incredibly long credit histories or a business model that is dying for massive angel investors,” Walker-Wells said.

But six people’s contacts can build a powerful network.

“We did some old-school things and contacted news outlets around the South, and that was much less successful than the emails we wrote to our friends,” he said. “It was really word of mouth, spreading it beyond networks we knew.”

Howler’s fall/winter 2015 issue.

Howler’s co-founders had previously worked at magazines. Having friends involved in the industry may have helped a bit, too.

“We could spread the word among people of interest. We didn’t ask people to write about [Howler], but just from knowing them, we got a couple of pieces of publicity out of that,” Quraishi said. “After the first issue, we got a nice writeup in New York [Magazine], the New York Times, the Guardian, The Economist … and Sports Illustrated did something in their year-end issue. To an extent, our previous professional experience contributed to that.”

Passion for the Project

Getting donors to contribute to a magazine project also means the magazine has to connect with them on a deeper level. Magazines on narrowly defined topics seem like great candidates for crowdfunding because they are created by people who are part of a specific community and who share their passions, needs and interests.

For Howler, that meant providing a new perspective on soccer that wasn’t available in other American sports media — which must have appealed to serious fans, since the magazine today has nearly 3,000 subscribers.

“We were offering soccer fans something that I don’t think anyone else had offered them,” Quraishi said. “Even if you were a subscriber to an English soccer magazine, you were receiving an English soccer experience. It’s our larger mission to contextualize that for an American audience.”

Walker-Wells found a motivated audience that wanted a deeper perspective on another topic: life in the American South. Scalawag’s subscribers have doubled in less than a year, with about 600 now signed up for four issues each year.

“We had issues with the way the South was often ridiculed in national media, and a sense that there wasn’t a place for folks in the South to talk about the important work happening here,” he said.

Participating as a backer for crowdfunded projects, is “like a statement of your values, about you joining a community,” Walker-Wells said. Magazines offer that community in ways other media don’t. “It’s easy to feel disconnected when you’re scrolling through your feed on Facebook.”

Being able to define and reach a specific community is a strength of magazine projects when it comes to crowdfunding, says Maris Kreizman, Kickstarter’s publishing and journalism outreach lead. And there are more magazine projects than those categorized as “journalism” and analyzed in the Pew report. Kreizman points out that many other magazine-style projects are included in Kickstarter’s “publishing” category as “periodicals.” Forty percent of those projects met their crowdfunding goals, she says.

“There are plenty of niche publications that do really well on Kickstarter because there’s a direct line to the community they are targeting. … That’s the magic and power of the Internet, being able to find people who have interests [that] align,” Kreizman said. “[The group] may be very small, but you can find them because they’re online. For every Kickstarter creator, we hope that they already have a solid community behind them. The magazines that do the best will have a small community, at least.”

Clarity about writers’ compensation is another common thread among recently funded projects.

“In the past year or so, another trend I’ve been seeing is that successful projects have a real transparency around paying writers,” Kreizman said. “We’re beginning to appreciate that writing for exposure is not enough.”

Scalawag’s first three issues.

Tangible, Defined Product

Crowdfunded magazine projects usually have another advantage, from the potential donor’s perspective: There’s a tangible reward for contributing.

“Single issues are rewards, as well as subscriptions. There’s something very clear and concise that a backer will be getting,” Kreizman said. “Of course, they also offer tote bags and other merch-y kinds of things. … In terms of forms of journalism, magazines are one that people are accustomed to paying for, as opposed to a website.”

Quraishi points out that those tangible magazines have an appeal beyond the information and entertainment they offer.

“These objects say something about who they are. They like to have them displayed on their bookshelves. You can be a soccer fan, you can wear a jersey or scarf for your favorite team, but there’s not a lot of stuff that a discerning person would want to have around your house,” he said. “For people who care about design, who want really nice things, we want to give them something that really feels worth it, a physical product and a tangible experience that says, ‘I’m a thinking soccer fan.’”

While magazine projects may be natural fits for crowdfunding, it’s worth noting that journalism as a whole generally interests potential donors much less than other kinds of projects. In fact, journalism ranks next to last for project success rate among all Kickstarter categories, with only 22 percent succeeding, according to the Pew report.

Crowdfunding isn’t yet poised to save journalism more broadly, but as the Pew report demonstrates, it’s a growing source of support — and magazines might especially benefit from that trend.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post How Magazines Hit the Crowdfunding Jackpot on Kickstarter appeared first on MediaShift.

Finally, it’s spring break — and what else does a journalism professor do on vacation but play around with data?

This report is released by MPA, the Association of Magazine Media. Its full name is “The Magazine Media 360° Brand Audience Report.” It summarizes in a 5-page document (here’s February’s PDF) the current and year-over-year audience data for about 145 magazines, across all platforms, including print/digital editions, web, mobile and video, and also provides a total “360° metric” for all of those combined. This 360° metric is more “comprehensive and accurate,” the MPA says, because it pulls together all the places consumers encounter magazine brands, as opposed to just counting print readers.

Obviously, advertisers will be interested in these numbers — but as a data geek with a little too much time on her hands during spring break, I was curious, too. Here are my three main takeaways from this month’s report, after spending far too much time in Excel and playing with data visualization tools.

1. The news for magazines isn’t generally great.
The MPA’s press release with these data is optimistic, of course, but some quick Excel sorting reveals a few discouraging realities. Since February 2014,

• 45 percent of these magazines have lost readers for their print/digital editions;
• 44 percent have lost web readers; and
• 58 percent now have fewer video viewers.

It’s important to note that not every magazine had the data necessary for each one of those year-over-year comparisons, so this is just what we can tell from what’s available.

The chart below shows how the magazines’ print/digital editions have lost or gained audience over the last year (in blue), and how they have also lost or gained total audience across all platforms (what the MPA calls the 360° audience, in green).

While some magazines have made up for print/digital reader losses with significant growth on other platforms (for example, Playboy), others have lost audience on all platforms (such as Road & Track) or have gained everywhere (such as Wired, one of the aforementioned outliers). Some of these magazines might make great case studies for success — or cautionary tales.

A brighter spot for many magazines was mobile audiences, with 93 percent of the magazines’ website showing growth in visitors using mobile devices. That’s a pattern across all media, of course, not just magazines, and the popularity of somewhat larger phones is probably helping.

2. The industry totals look different from individual magazines.
It makes sense that the MPA, as an industry organization, would be most interested in the performance of the entire industry, and in promoting its members’ success in increasing their audiences. However, it seems a little more realistic to me to look at how individual magazines are performing: Are individual titles managing to build their audiences, and how are they losing or gaining ground on different platforms?

It’s easy to calculate the average percent change across all of the 142 magazines included in the MPA report, but with some obvious outliers (like Allrecipes’ 32,000 percent increase in its video viewers), averages don’t work so well. Instead, medians are shown in the table below for comparison with the MPA’s totals.

The data aren’t so different for the change in audiences for magazines’ print/digital editions, website or mobile platforms. However, the median percent change for these 142 titles’ video audiences is about 36 percent lower than the MPA’s across-the-board total — and into the negative, and the “360°” audience across all platforms grew about 5 percent less than the MPA states when considered this way.

This analysis isn’t to say that the MPA is deliberately misleading, but rather that a different way of looking at the data yields a different conclusion, especially about how magazines are doing with their video efforts. Only 45 magazines were able to report year-over-year data specific to video, so future months will probably establish a more reliable trend.

3. Magazines working with Next Issue Media are doing a little better.
As D. B. Hebbard recently reported at Talking New Media, Next Issue Media — the all-you-can-read app that’s a joint venture of six major publishers — seems to have significantly boosted the digital single-copy sales of Hearst’s top seven magazines. Those sales almost tripled, in part because the Alliance for Audited Media reports Next Issue readers as “sales.”

Median Percent Change in Audience Size, Feb. 2014 to Feb. 2015

Separating out the current Magazine Media 360 data by those magazines available or not through Next Issue reveals that the Next Issue participants saw a total audience growth of about 9 percent year-over-year, as shown in the chart above. Magazines in the report that are not participating in Next Issue still increased their audiences by about 5 percent.

The magazines not participating saw solid mobile audience gains, though, so perhaps they have turned their attention to improving their mobile presences outside of a dedicated magazine-reading app.

About the Data and Analysis
The MPA distributes these data as a PDF on its website and with a press release. The emailed press release states that recipients may “feel free to promote and utilize the data in any way.” I ran the PDF through Cometdocs to convert it to an Excel spreadsheet. I reduced the dataset to the year-over-year percent change figures, added a column for the magazines’ publishers, and added a column for whether or not the magazine is available through Next Issue Media (determined through its website’s catalog search; current as of March 24, 2015). I deleted Fortune and Money because, as the MPA says in a footnote in their original PDF, web and mobile data were not available for them due to a now-ended joint venture with CNN. I then uploaded the file to Silk, a free service, which produced the visualizations seen here (with the exception of the two small graphs, which I created with Chartbuilder).

Please let me know if there are errors in the data, or if you see additional significant items that I have missed; I’m sure that there are many other potential trends and stories buried in this intriguing dataset.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing and editing, and does research on magazines, social media and political communication.

The post Visualizing the Discouraging Realities, Mobile Growth at Digital Mags appeared first on MediaShift.

Some magazine industry observers have recently said that the “all-you-can-read” or “Netflix for magazines” subscription model is doomed. They cite the lack of appeal of digital magazines, the missing sensory pleasure of print, and the superiority of reading individual online articles over magazine issues.

Despite these doubts, the companies offering this subscription approach have soldiered on and have seen some success. For example, Next Issue — a joint venture among six major publishers — has raised $50 million through investment firm KKR.

Two smaller companies, Magzter and Readly, have recently started offering the “all-you-can-read” subscription option to U.S. readers. They hope not just to avoid doom, but to thrive. They’re counting on simple downloads, niche and international appeal, and the residual strength of print culture.

So why do they think they’ll endure and succeed? I talked with Magzter and Readly to see what fuels their optimism.

Keeping It Simple

Two major U.S. digital magazine distributors, Next Issue and Zinio, have offered access to mainstream magazines for some time. As a joint venture among six major magazine publishers, Next Issue offers over 140 magazines, including some of the best-known American magazines, and sells an all-you-can-read subscription for $9.99 per month. Zinio says it offers over 5,000 magazines to users, including many major U.S. publications; it sells the “Z-Pass,” which offers up to six magazines for $5 per month.

But Magzter and Readly provide something different. While Magzter sells some well-known magazines by the individual issue or as freestanding subscriptions, one of its new subscription options, Magzter Gold, offers unlimited access to about 2,000 magazines for $9.99 per month. Readly, on the other hand, launched from its start with only a $9.99 monthly subscription that provides “buffet” access to about 13,000 magazines; the service doesn’t offer any individual magazine issue or subscription sales.

But as in buffet-style restaurants, the offerings from both services are simply prepared. Magzter and Readly both provide relatively fast downloads of magazine issues that have sparse digital enhancements. Most of these replica editions look pretty much like PDFs.

Magzter’s Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan and Girish Ramdas

“Even if we create more interactive magazines, the download speed gets reduced, and the experience is not that great,” says Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan, co-founder and president of Magzter. Girish Ramdas, his fellow co-founder and Magzter’s CEO, adds, “When people want to read certain content, it should be available, and should be quick to download and quick to read.”

Still, Radhakrishnan says Magzter plans to launch more interactive issues for 300 to 400 titles in the near future.

Readly focuses on distributing what Blake Pollard, Readly’s vice president for content in North America, calls the “lowest common denominator” of digital magazine publishing formats: the PDF.

“If I’d gone out to publishers and said, ‘I need you to create a special file for me,’ it would have made it much more challenging,” Pollard says. “We wanted a consistent user experience. We’re not going to reinvent the magazine here, and we can’t ask the publisher to reinvent the magazine for our platform.”

Blake Pollard of Readly

Admittedly, reading a digital replica of a magazine can sometimes be less than pleasurable. While the fairly speedy downloads of Magzter and Readly’s replica editions are refreshing after the long waits required for other digital magazines, text often feels like it’s in 6-point type when viewed on a full magazine page on an iPad Air 2. Zooming in to read, and then dragging the page around to view other parts of a story, is distracting and diminishes page designers’ noble efforts. But maybe the low cost and convenience outweigh those concerns for other users.

Focusing on Niche Content

While Magzter and Readly don’t offer access to every popular magazine, they seem to hope that readers will find their wide-ranging, sometimes quirky selections intriguing. In fact, this niche approach might appeal to the reader who has either extremely diverse interests or intensely deep interest in a single area. If you want to read a wide variety of magazines — or just every magazine on one topic — an unlimited subscription plan might be more cost-effective.

“Next Issue is owned by the big publishers, and they’re putting up their big brands,” Pollard says. “We’re trying to find niche audiences, people who are passionate about things.”

To help readers find interesting content, both Readly and Magzter are developing stronger search and personalization tools. Ramdas noted that when a magazine app competes against every other app on a mobile device, users need to find what they want quickly.

“One of the things we see in the magazine business is — especially with the iPad or other smart device — the consumer has less time on their hands to spend on these things. Magazines aren’t competing against other magazines, but against other apps,” Ramdas says. “The consumer doesn’t want to spend time on 20 apps per day. You want to read all you can in one place.”

Magzter on the iPad.

Both Magzter and Readly promise new personalization features soon. Pollard says Readly’s tools will be similar to those offered by Netflix and other services that customize recommendations for users. Readly also offers a search function that works across all of its magazines’ content, not just their titles, to help readers find stories in any available magazine.

“Along with trying to target more niche audiences, we have tried to go away from being a reading app to make it more of a utility, using trusted content that’s in magazines,” Pollard says.

According to Pollard, Readly is less about the experience of the magazine as a medium and more about making magazines’ unique content accessible to satisfy users’ personal interests.

“I don’t know if there are as many people out there with the mindset that they just really love magazines. [The magazines] have to be tailored to their interests,” Pollard says. “Magazines are a way to fulfill that passion and learn more about it. A lot of that content can’t really be found out there on the web. A lot of it is still controlled by these magazine brands, and they don’t put a lot of it out there. It’s still centered around their magazine.”

One niche that is especially key to these services is international content. (I previously covered this aspect of Magzter’s business in more depth.) Readly offers content from 49 countries. Both services provide users access to international content from around the world and in many languages.

“The U.S. itself is a diaspora-filled country, with people from all over the world,” says Ramdas. “They want to find that content somewhere.”

Readly on the iPad.

Pollard says Readly is considering similar audiences: “The affluent Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. is massive, and they don’t have a lot of access to their local content. We will market to them.”

At both Magzter and Readly, publishers receive a share of readers’ subscription fees based on engagement, including the number of pages read in their magazines each month. Pollard says Readly’s formula is based on where readers live, how many pages they look at and how much time they spend on each page. Both services promote other ways publishers can make additional money, however. Larger audiences on any platform mean more advertising revenue, and readers’ data are valuable to publishers.

Drawing on Print Culture

Both Magzter and Readly are rooted in countries where print culture and magazine publishing are perhaps more robust than they are in the U.S., though they also face change. Magzter’s founders are from India, and Readly is based in Sweden, where Spotify’s success inspired its development. While Sweden has seen some decline in magazine readership, India’s print media industry is expected to continue to grow, according to a recent forecast, even while other media industries also increase their revenue within the country.

Print-oriented readers might find digital replicas more acceptable, and this business model might appeal to publishers in these companies’ home countries and other regions of the world where readers are just starting to drift away from print media.

“There aren’t as many subscriptions to magazines in those markets, and a lot of their circulation is single-copy sales,” Pollard explains. “Readly solves a problem in Sweden for a lot of publishers. … There’s definitely a different mentality. In the U.S., we were out ahead of things a little bit, and our titles are more subscription based instead of single copy. But print has fallen off, and what happened three to four years ago in the U.S. is just now starting to happen in the U.K. and Europe.”

Both of these companies are betting that there is a profitable global future for the read-all-you-can model of magazine consumption.

“It’s only a question of time as more consumers start liking this model,” Ramdas says.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing and editing, and does research on magazines, social media and political communication.

The post ‘Netflix for Magazines’ Services Explain Why They’re Not Doomed appeared first on MediaShift.

I recently talked with faculty at four institutions who are creating “maker spaces” or “hacker spaces” that provide room for this innovation. Their examples show that maker spaces can be created in settings big and small with a range of levels of investment. All of these efforts show students the importance of thinking innovatively not only about journalism and media, but also about the larger purposes of their education.

The faculty members I interviewed by phone are:

• Dana Coester, assistant professor in the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University and acting creative director of the Media Innovation Center;
• Jeremy Littau, assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University;
• Matt Waite, professor of practice in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska; and
• Tom Haymes, director of college educational technology services and professor of government at Houston Community College Northwest (whose presentation on “idea spaces” at the New Media Consortium conference last month inspired this story).

From left to right: Littau, Coester, Waite and Haymes.

Crafting a Maker Space

Whether you have millions of dollars for a new building or just have an available classroom, there’s probably a way to create a useful maker space.

Coester and Haymes are both involved in the design and construction of dedicated maker spaces in new buildings at their respective institutions.

Coester is currently acting creative director of the new 10,000-square-foot Media Innovation Center at WVU, which will open next year. (She recently wrote about this project for EducationShift.) After visiting many creative workspaces around the country, including Facebook and Google offices, the WVU team designed a variety of spaces in the new building to support many different kinds of media and technology projects. There will be a maker space, a hacker space (“device lab”), an “incubator” communal area for collaboration, a digital storytelling lab, and a multimedia/augmented reality studio.

Haymes is involved in the design of the West Houston Institute, scheduled to open in summer 2016, that will include collaborative workspaces for faculty, students and community members, along with active learning classrooms, a media commons with support for media production and a learning commons area for research and technology work.

“The campus is designed around those spaces. They’re not just an add-on, not stuck in a building in East Siberia,” Haymes said.

The layout of the new Media Innovation Center at West Virginia University.

Waite and Littau, however, have both creatively co-opted existing facilities at their institutions to create maker spaces.

While Waite’s university is now planning a 17,000-square-foot maker space at its Nebraska Innovation Campus, Waite was already ahead of the curve. In fall 2011, he created his own maker space to support his interest in drone journalism, but also for use by all journalism students. Waite repurposed part of a rarely used still photography studio as a maker space. The room had become “the garbage disposal of the building,” filled with spare furniture and junk, Waite said, but he’s now outfitted it with large workbenches and storage space for tools and parts. He and another faculty member offer “maker hours” on Friday afternoons for all interested students.

Even a humble computer lab can become a maker space for diverse projects, if approached creatively. Wanting to offer students time and space to experiment with new skills, Littau claimed a computer lab for use as a maker space during two pilot “maker hours” sessions in spring 2014. While it’s used by the student newspaper and for some class meetings, Friday afternoons now see the room reimagined as a collaborative maker space. Like Waite, Littau hosts these sessions and offers support to any students who want to pursue a new skill.

“It’s an ‘unclass’ kind of format. If you want to expand your skills outside of the classroom and learn something new in journalism, you don’t have classes on Friday, and you want to come learn and get the most of your education, we’ll be here,” Littau said.

Student and Community Involvement

This variety of approaches shows that a maker space is as much about participants’ attitudes as it is about the physical setting. Cool stuff can be created in a large dedicated lab with a lot of special equipment or in a basic but innovatively used room.

Getting students involved in these kinds of open-ended maker spaces is a different challenge. Students can be very focused on their coursework and grades and aren’t always open to pursuing “more work” on their own time outside of scheduled classes. Yet less structured projects that reflect students’ own passions offer great opportunities to experiment with new technologies, solve problems creatively and collaborate with students and faculty from different fields. Students also learn how to teach themselves new skills.

“This is about trying to make sure that our students aren’t just taking my classes in multimedia journalism, but they’re also getting practice outside of it,” Littau said. “It’s about making sure our students are trained well for the world they’re going to enter. We have to retrain their mindsets. They’re not going to get it all in the classroom — they have to be self-teachers.”

While this sounds like a terrific opportunity for students and faculty to learn together, both Littau and Waite have observed some reluctance among journalism students to try out these new skills. When students have been focused on producing text for most of their academic careers, it can be difficult to leave that comfort zone.

“Students are frightened, really. I hate to say that, but they’re kind of frightened of ignorance: ‘I don’t know how to do that — therefore, it’s not for me, so I’m just not going to go, I’m not going to find out,’” Waite said. “You have really creative people who don’t know how creative they can be. These are people who have been told for their formative years that they are good writers, and that frames the dimensions of what they can do. [The maker space] takes it in a different direction.”

While larger academic programs offer dedicated technology classes to stretch students’ creativity, Littau — whose department has just six full-time faculty — emphasized the utility of maker spaces and maker hours for smaller programs.

“You can teach each other without having a formal class. The professor can say, ‘Here are some things you can also learn about,’ and let the students take ownership of their education,” he said. “And some things the students want to learn, I won’t know anything about, so I’ll learn with them.”

Google Glass: one of the experimental items in Waite’s maker space.

When students have a chance to make something new, they usually rise to the challenge, sometimes in unexpected ways. Waite says he will “haze” students on their first visit to maker hours and require them to work on something physical, which he then documents with a photo on his website. This has had what he calls a “delightful,” unexpected result.

“The majority of the people who have come [to maker hours] and hung out have been women. I usually will try to make them solder something,” he said. “They are absolutely blown away that they are soldering something. I have heard them say things like, ‘My dad would never let me do this. He was afraid I’d burn myself.’ I get a lot of students like that, who never thought they could do this. That’s the first burden, showing a student what’s possible.”

The Houston and WVU maker spaces will extend those possibilities to community members as well.

“We’re a rural state, and we do a lot of work on digital-divide and access issues, and digital literacy,” Coester said. “We’ll make these tools and spaces available to community members and entrepreneurs in the state. We’re incubating faculty and student work, but also community work, and are trying to feed this entrepreneurship.”

Faculty and Administrative Issues

Getting students and community members involved is one challenge. Convincing other faculty and higher education administrators of the value of these spaces can be another. While “maker culture” has become more mainstream, it can still be difficult to explain the need for this approach and complementary physical spaces to colleagues and leaders.

“One of the challenges we have is convincing people what (the maker space) is for. They want to know what kind of curriculum’s going to be taught in it. It’s an alien concept for administrators to wrap their heads around,” Haymes said. He is helping to develop a promotional video explaining the new Houston facilities. “Messaging is very important. You have to figure out a short, sweet way of explaining things with all technologies, but this one’s particularly a jump.”

The future West Houston Institute of Houston Community College with its Maker Space on the left side

Coester’s program recently went through a rebranding that highlighted both its innovations and the increasing variety of projects that it might include as a “college of media.” That new vision provides some structural support for a “maker” approach to teaching.

“We are rewarded for doing work that’s interdisciplinary. You have to have the whole structure that facilitates that … I know those things aren’t necessarily in place everywhere. We’ve been incredibly lucky,” Coester said. “You have to be able to take those risks. That takes a certain level of trust, and knowing that everybody’s all in.”

Implementing maker spaces in journalism and media programs, and then facilitating interdisciplinary exploration and collaboration within them, reflects a new model of education that requires adaptation by everyone involved.

Haymes describes this shift from an “industrial” model of education, in which student knowledge was the “product,” to a new model in which skills and higher-level thinking are key — and that generates more meaningful learning.

“If you check off all your classes, and you get a piece of paper that says you have a bachelor’s degree, that’s not a very effective model to teach people skills. The incentive is to check off boxes,” he said. “But if students don’t have a box to check off, and they have something they want to build, they will learn what’s necessary to build that thing. They’re going to learn programming, physics, logical thinking, in order to build what they want to build. It means something to them.”

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing and editing, and does research on magazines, social media and political communication.

The post The Nuts and Bolts of Maker Spaces in Journalism Schools appeared first on MediaShift.

Though it’s tempting to focus on the future of Time Inc., a brief tour into its past lends perspective on this latest move. It turns out that Time Inc. has a long history of ownership drama. Its plot line is characterized by repeated expansion into new areas and technologies, and then the spinning off of subsidiaries to renew focus on the company’s core businesses — time and again.

Below is a timeline of Time Inc. that helps put it all into perspective. Click on bubbles on the timeline to learn more about points in the company’s history.

Sources for this timeline are here.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post Time Inc. Timeline: A Look at the Magazine Company’s Moves Over the Past Century appeared first on MediaShift.

Magazines have made major strides in integrating multimedia production into their existing production processes. Digital projects that used to be tacked on to print content are now, in many cases, seamlessly developed at the same time.

Even better, some magazines are looking at analytics data to better understand how their audiences are using their content, whether it’s on the web or in an app. That more sophisticated information is helping some magazines use their resources more effectively and serve audiences’ needs. And, of course, advertisers also love these analytics as proof of readers’ engagement, though the measures aren’t yet perfected. Could more skillful use of analytics be the key to the long-term success of digital magazine publishing?

Using Resources Well

Reader’s Digest uses analytics to refine their digital products. Surprisingly, sometimes that means scaling back digital efforts, not expanding them.

Like other publications, Reader’s Digest considers which stories would be best brought to life in multimedia formats, and which shouldn’t.

“Some stories we like to leave up to the reader’s imagination, because we feel like video wouldn’t complement the story, and the reader could come up with more vivid images on their own,” said Kerrie Keegan, managing director of content operations for Reader’s Digest, in a phone interview.

But another important step informs the multimedia decision making: Reader’s Digest also collects and considers analytics data.

“Data helps us redefine strategy on a daily basis. With immediate access to analytics results, we can change our approach up to the minute we release our content on our platforms,” Keegan said.

Available for the Reader’s Digest website and apps, these analytics offer editors insights into readers’ interaction at a “micro level,” as Keegan says. For example, it’s possible for editors to see when, on average, viewers stop watching a particular video. There are also interactive surveys built into the Reader’s Digest apps to gather reader feedback on the fly.

“We’re constantly forming the content to the analytical feedback. That can determine not only what extra digital components a story gets, but also how long a story is, the headline of a story, who our target audience is,” Keegan said. “It not only develops the extras, but also helps us determine the content itself.”

Reader’s Digest often creates videos for its Everyday Heroes stories. Keegan says these videos are a good investment, in part because they will be “just as relevant 25 years from now.”

Although it might be tempting to throw the full array of digital enhancements into every publishing platform and see what sticks, analytics data have helped Keegan and her team refine Reader’s Digest’s approach to each of the eight (and soon to be 10) platforms where it’s distributed.

“We watch numbers on each of these platforms and determine what platforms can have a rich workflow and rich experience, and where we want to enhance the content with video. We also have replica editions where people are happy with just a flipbook,” Keegan said. “We make decisions on a per-platform basis [by considering] the return on investment of any of these.”

That in-depth knowledge has led to not only enhancements, but also to simplification of Reader’s Digest’s digital products.

“It’s important to not only look at where you should be enhancing, but also [from] which platforms you should be pulling back a little bit,” Keegan said.

She explained that her team removed some animations and interactivity from the magazine’s mobile phone and Kindle Fire editions, though those features remain available in the iPad edition.

“We have been evaluating that, through our reviews and survey feedback, and people aren’t actually missing them that on that platform,” Keegan said. “It’s important to see the use of time, money and resources, and see where you can cut back without threatening the product.”

Analytics for Everyone

Mike Haney of Mag+

Not all magazines have access to this level of data from their websites and apps, of course. Digital publishing company Mag+, among others, has included analytics in its publishing tools. But Mike Haney, Mag+’s co-founder and chief creative officer, says that the industry has some work to do to make these analytics universally valuable.

“All of the different platforms — not even just production platforms like Mag+, Zinio, Adobe DPS, but also Apple versus Google versus Amazon versus Next Issue — all of those have a different set of analytics and metrics that can be obtained. Those really differ widely. It’s one of the core challenges for anybody trying to publish in this space and across those markets,” said Haney in a phone interview.

For its part, Mag+ decided to use partner companies to handle analytics, including Flurry and Localytics, as well as Omniture, which is already in use for web analytics at some publishing companies.

“We always felt for the digital magazine industry, for these analytics to be used for monetization, it would be important to remain independent of that and to turn that capture over to a third party,” Haney said. “We’d hope that the magazine industry would agree that this provider, or this set of providers, is an approved provider. When this one tells us it’s a pageview, that’s a pageview. We feel it’s easier to get to that kind of standardization when it’s third party than [based in a specific] platform.”

Through a combination of these providers’ services and the basic details offered by app stores (like Apple’s or Google’s), publishers and editorial staff can glean a lot of information that can be used to refine their work. For magazine apps, here are some of the possibilities Haney listed, which vary depending on the chosen platform and analytics provider:

• Number of app purchasers
• How many active users of the app
• New and returning users
• Time of day of use of the app
• Length of sessions of app usage
• Session length for subscribers and non-subscribers
• Time spent per issue
• Time spent on an article
• Scrolling activity within an article
• Clicks on links in ads and in editorial content
• Clicks on videos and other interactive features

And, of course, these data points can be combined and filtered in many ways to get deeper insights into readers’ behavior.

Haney says he “evangelizes” for the use of these data by magazine editors as they make decisions about what content to produce. It’s possible to tell which investments in multimedia and stories have paid off in audience engagement and which haven’t.

“People still ask the question, ‘What kind of interactivity is good?’ You’ve got a quantitative measure right in front of you in the [analytics] dashboard,” Haney said. “It’s extremely useful for editors, and designers as well, to understand how people are using these things they’re creating. … Are they reading those 3,000 words? Those don’t have to be uninformed arguments. We have these kinds of data.”

Getting those data could seem daunting, if editors fear data might reveal their work is unseen and unloved. Yet Haney says that many editors are happy to receive more insights.

“They don’t know any more than anyone else what they’re doing in the tablet space. They know they’re doing their best trying to put together an issue with enhanced design that they think will look good, and they’re putting a ton of work into it — they haven’t hired additional people to do this,” he said. “Instead of seeing data as passing a judgment on their intuition or what they think, they’re seeing data as a way to validate all the hard work they’re putting into it, and to refine what they’re doing.”

A sample Localytics dashboard displayed on the Mag+ website.

While analytics can provide a lot of insights for editorial staff, their use in attracting advertisers remains a challenge. The key analytics issue for the magazine industry is creating a unified understanding of what different analytics mean.

“The challenges aren’t really technical at this point. The challenges are what I call infrastructure,” Haney said. “In print, we all know what rate base is, what CPMs are going to be, what metrics we pay attention to. We don’t have the same infrastructure for monetizing digital. From an advertising point of view, does rate base matter, or is it interaction, engagement, time in app?”

Wider adoption of analytics by editorial staffs — and an industry-wide standardization of analytics — seem like valuable steps toward making digital magazine publishing less of a guessing game for everyone involved.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post How Magazines Use Analytics to Refine Digital Initiatives appeared first on MediaShift.

For many magazines, creating multimedia to complement their print editions used to be an awkward addition to their long-refined print publication process.

But today, many magazines have at last redesigned their workflows to smoothly incorporate multimedia development. Multimedia for the web or tablet editions is no longer an inconvenient afterthought, but has become an integral part of the editorial process.

The Family Handyman and Forbes Media both offer examples of how this workflow plays out at very different publications. (And in a follow-up story, I’ll explore how magazines are using analytics to refine their choices about which multimedia projects are worth their time and resources.)

No Longer Lame

The Family Handyman has adjusted its print and multimedia production strategies in what editor in chief Ken Collier calls an “evolution.”

“In the early days, we did probably what most publishers did,” Collier said in a phone interview. “We started with the magazine article, and then it was like, what can we tack on. It was pretty lame.”

Collier says the magazine’s production process has changed substantially so that there is now a “double plan” for every article.

Collier himself stars in some of The Family Handyman’s videos.

“It happens very early in the process of the story. We want to generate the right kind of photos, videos, additional text, or whatever it is we need to be delivering for the tablet. We make sure it’s happening right alongside the content for print,” Collier said.

Most of the multimedia Collier’s staff creates is destined for the tablet edition of the magazine, which he says is a “different experience” that’s optimized for the reader just as the print edition is. For the tablet, that means providing interactive features or videos. The magazine’s research suggests that video is the main thing readers want from The Family Handyman’s digital edition.

“We don’t really augment our content for use on the web, in the sense that a lot of publishers do, where there’ll be an article in print and then there will be additional content for that article on the web. We don’t do that,” Collier explained. “I feel like it’s a disservice to the reader of your magazine to force them to go to the web to get A-grade material. If you’re delivering B-grade material on the web, is that really what you want to spend your time doing?”

The magazine’s video production process is straightforward. Collier says that in a day, two staffers can produce “a handful” of videos two to four minutes each, depending on the topic. Although the magazine’s videos are currently produced “on a shoestring,” Collier says, the goal is to create content that can be used in multiple ways, like through other apps or syndication.

“At the moment, we are in investment mode. We feel like we are putting in more resources than the immediate return would suggest is reasonable,” Collier said. “We don’t see the return yet.”

Right now, Collier says, The Family Handyman produces videos on topics “we just know DIYers are interested in, and we don’t need any more research to tell us that … and then we do ones we can do conveniently.”

The “evolved” multimedia production process and the resulting products may be a key to tablet publishing success for The Family Handyman, says Collier.

“The tablet growth is strong, but the numbers are still relatively low,” he said. “If the tablet succeeds at becoming a solid part of our business, then we’ll feel like the videos are a big part of that.”

Creating Natural Collaborations

At Forbes, meetings and collaboration across departments have streamlined print and multimedia production.

In these meetings, “we can pinpoint the ideas that will work well extended into video or an interactive on the website,” Andrea Spiegel, Forbes Media’s senior vice president of product development and video, said in a phone interview. “Sometimes we’re suggesting the idea, sometimes we’re working off of something the magazine team has come up with already.”

This collaboration, Spiegel says, is now “very natural” for the magazine. “It’s an inherent part of how we work,” she said. “Having the right people in the room during that conversation is important. Everyone’s bringing their perspective to it. The editors get excited. The writers get excited because they get to see their stories come to life in a different form.”

One of Forbes’ strengths in this process, Spiegel says, is its repository of data and content that can be used for many different multimedia projects.

“If we’re looking at an infographic, we’re looking at what we can add in terms of interactivity. We’re looking at profiles of billionaires, or our colleges list. We have a lot of data that can add a layer on top of an infographic that’s appeared in the magazine,” Spiegel said.

The magazine’s 10th annual World’s Most Powerful Women List was a good example of that collaboration, Spiegel said. It appeared in the print magazine, but also was enhanced in its digital incarnations with other Forbes material, including a 10-year retrospective infographic, profiles of the women on the list, and related videos.

“We can use materials in many different places. Videos will appear in posts, lists, apps, pages, features,” Spiegel said. “We’re able to use that content in multiple places.”

That multipurpose, deliberate multimedia strategy means that a small investment of time from in-house staff can pay off repeatedly. “We have a small team, not tons of people. We have to be very smart about how we assign our resources,” Spiegel said.

Spiegel points to Forbes’ coverage of Silk Road as another example of successful multimedia planning and production. The coverage included stories, videos and an interactive map with details of key events.

One component of Forbes’ Silk Road interactive.

“That was a story with a lot of pieces. We were able to help tell that story in a more cohesive way, and get the reader in and out of parts that were of interest to them by creating an interactive,” she said. “That was prompted in part by the reporters who were covering that, and a conversation about how do we wrap this all together. An interactive seemed the most exciting.”

Forbes watches for that payoff in audience engagement by monitoring a variety of metrics.

“We’re looking at traffic and social interaction. If we see people enjoying it, sharing it, that’s one measure of success,” Spiegel said.

Ultimately, though, both of these magazines have the greater goal of creating multimedia that engages readers, even when those projects are challenging to execute with limited resources.

“We’re also looking to challenge ourselves. We want to push forward, do something that’s pushed us out of our comfort zones a little bit,” Spiegel said. “We don’t want to get in a rut. We want to think about new ways to engage the audience.”

How do magazines know if their multimedia creativity works? Check out my follow-up story on magazines and analytics.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post How Magazines Are Finally Putting Multimedia Into Their Workflow appeared first on MediaShift.

But when you start digging into that project in more detail, it gets complicated. What qualifies as a magazine? (Yes, that question, again.) Which platforms “count?” And the bigger concern: How do we capture and assess variety, innovation and success in the industry?

I recently talked with three people who have unique answers to those questions: Samir Husni, aka “Mr. Magazine,” of the University of Mississippi; Trish Hagood, president of the media directory MediaFinder; and Mary Berner, president and CEO of the Association of Magazine Media/MPA. Each offered a distinct perspective on magazines’ “success” and a different way to measure the industry’s achievements.

All About Print: Samir Husni

Samir Husni, also known as Mr. Magazine, directs the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism, where he is also a professor. His Launch Monitor blog tracks new print magazines that he identifies on newsstands and obtains from publishers.

Samir Husni

In his constant search for new publications, Husni visits newsstands everywhere he goes — even when he’s on vacation, he said.

“Sometimes I take students with me, and I tell the students to see how many new magazines we can find,” he explained in a phone interview. “They tell me none — and I find 10 or 15. It’s like some photographic memory. I see the newsstand, and I know if anything has moved.”

All his newsstand crawls and the magazines he’s sent by publishers have added to a collection of about 30,000 issues.

While those magazines take up a lot of physical space (Husni rents storage units for his collection), none of Husni’s collection occupies digital space. For Husni, only new print magazines truly matter.

“I don’t consider the entities on the computer or on the iPad as a magazine. They are great, well done — but what I do is watch the videos, look at the interaction. The magazines are like the days we discovered desktop publishing. They’re following automated programs to create them,” Husni said. Many, he says, also lack real readers: “Maybe you and your mom read the magazine you created.”

Husni argues that digital magazines not paired with print publications are worth little, in financial terms.

“They have no monetary value. I don’t know of a single digital-only magazine since the iPad came out that’s making money, that has any source of revenue, if it doesn’t have a print counterpart,” he said.

Even digital replicas of print editions are likely financial losers on their own, Husni says. “They cook the numbers to make you think they’re making money,” he said. “If you enter all the costs of the creation of the print magazine and then have a replica — can the replica survive if you don’t have the print product?”

Husni points out that some formerly digital-only publishers, such as Pitchform (with The Pitchfork Review) and Politico, are now releasing print magazines, taking advantage of the format’s possibilities and the advertising revenue offered by a complementary print product.

“This is why I laugh when people say print is dead. Name one industry that gives as many births on its dying bed as the magazine industry,” Husni said. “If it’s really dying or dead, then I must be living in magazine heaven. I keep getting new magazines day after day.”

Track It All: Trish Hagood

Trish Hagood

MediaFinder is a database of all kinds of periodicals, including magazines, newsletters, journals, catalogs and other products. Its staff tries to capture every new magazine, but — unlike Husni’s collection — the directory is platform-neutral, according to MediaFinder President Trish Hagood. Print and digital formats are included.

“We include both print and online — including also the magazines that have dropped their print edition and gone online only,” Hagood said in a phone interview. “We’re already digitally oriented. We track ‘what is.’ We can’t necessarily predict what’s going to be.”

MediaFinder includes publication information entered directly into its tracking system by publishers themselves. MediaFinder also does its own research on publishers to add new entrants into the market to the directory, Hagood says.

MediaFinder’s quarterly reports on new magazines include information on freshly launched online products. Hagood says that while the fate of online-only publications is uncertain today, it’s still useful to track their existence.

“Most companies can’t afford to do digital-only products because they don’t pay,” Hagood said.

She noted the magazines like Newsweek that have moved from print to digital-only — and then back to print. Keeping tabs on all kinds of formats gives MediaFinder a broad sense of the changes in media, she said.

“How long is print going to last? It doesn’t seem to be going away,” Hagood said. “We’re trying to see what the future will be and where all this is headed.”

Check with Consumers: Mary Berner

Mary Berner, president and CEO of the Association of Magazine Media/MPA, takes a holistic view of magazines, as her organization’s full name implies.

Mary Berner

“Take a step back and look at what business we’re tracking. There isn’t a magazine company that doesn’t define themselves as a magazine media company these days,” she said in a phone interview.

Berner suggests that regardless of the specific platform, looking at magazines’ health and growth can be best tracked by looking at consumer engagement.

“For years, engagement has been measured in two ways: newsstand performance … and advertising,” Berner said. “The business has evolved so far beyond these traditional metrics’ ability to tell the story.”

Just like measuring TV shows’ success today includes more than just counting broadcast audiences, so too should indicators of magazines’ success, Berner says.

“Everyone plays in the entire ecosystem,” she said. “If you’re Condé Nast, you’re in the magazine media business. You’re in the business of print, video, digital, experiential, paid content.”

Print, however, is still the foundation for most magazine brands and for consumers’ relationship to them, despite the opportunities of these other media.

“Ask why celebrities pay for armies of publicists to get on the front page of print magazines,” Berner said. “People understand intuitively that there’s a longevity, a gravitas — it’s a different kind of connection. The experience of reading something in print registers differently in your brain.”

And while plenty of digital-only magazines are out there on the web and in app form, understanding their current strategies and status is challenging.

“How would you measure success [for a digital-only magazine]? It’s consumer engagement, but there’s many ways to measure that. Is it unique visitors, is it traffic, is it subscriptions? It’s the Wild West,” Berner said.

Clearly, there’s more than one way to map new achievements on magazines’ frontier, with print purists, all-inclusive monitors and holistic thinkers each identifying a different method to assess success.

“It’s fascinating. We’re on the road,” Hagood of MediaFinder said. “We just don’t know what it is.”

Correction: This story has been corrected to remove part of a quote that suggested the Huffington Post launched a print magazine. The Huffington Post has launched an iPad magazine, but not one in print.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

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