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New at PBS MediaShift: Zinio’s Content Collections Challenge the “Magazine” Concept

9 May
star wars vintage figure collection

It’s amazing what you find when you search for “collection” on Flickr.

I have a new post up at PBS MediaShift, covering a new development at digital magazine company Zinio. Zinio is now creating Content Collections:

Zinio staff highlight a selection of articles from Zinio’s digital magazine offerings, mixing and matching stories from a wide variety of magazines within each collection. Even little-known and foreign magazines are included in the mixes. Readers can then preview individual articles in the collection and choose to buy the single digital magazine issue where an article appeared, or even buy a digital subscription to that magazine.

The idea of blending content from different magazines into one package (eventually purchasable as a single deal) is interesting, but even more compelling is the idea that individual readers will eventually be able to create their own collections and share them with friends.

“We’ve been working on the concept of choosing what you love and being able to share it,” Mullen said. “We want to make it possible for consumers to do what editors do. We can let consumers build [collections] for us.”

What will the role of the magazine editor be in the future? With editors at Ladies’ Home Journal now editing user-generated content, and readers soon generating their own collections of content, we’re clearly seeing some major changes in editors’ tasks and roles.

Read more about Zinio’s new innovation at MediaShift.

Recipe for Dullness: Food in (Most) Magazines

26 Apr

Recipe 4 Love

Eh, not so much.

I just finished reading a recent magazine. It featured a significant food section, with decadent recipes and attractive food photography.

I flipped past those pages in record time to get to something more interesting.

Why? These recipes had no story.

Most of my recipes today come from blogs and from cookbooks written by those bloggers that I’ve purchased. Admittedly, since adopting a plant-based diet, I’ve found that most magazines’ recipes don’t work for me — but I’m still intrigued by unique concoctions and, more importantly, the stories of chefs and home cooks who have developed fun food. I will loiter on even the meatiest magazine recipe when something more is provided — something that helps me see the human experience of the food that is being shared with me in the magazine’s pages. After all, we love sharing food with each other as a social occasion and as an opportunity to bond. Sitting down with a magazine and reading about food within it ought to be a chance to get to know the people behind the recipes, to hear their voices and stories.

Food bloggers offer the stories of their recipes all the time, which is part of what makes them so popular — so much so that publishers go to them in order to capitalize on their existing audiences and brands. (Food bloggers even have their own conference!)

Sharing recipes online with friends is now another way we bond through food. Finding a friend’s post of a recipe with the comment “Here’s what we made for dinner!” opens up conversations and new possibilities. In 2011, 49 percent of adults in one study said they’d learned about food and recipes from social media. I certainly have, and when I do, I get to thank my friends for leading me to great new tastes. Magazines can’t offer that direct social interaction, but they can do it through good storytelling around food and recipes.

Even the most beautifully photographed recipe in a magazine can’t build a sense of emotional connection with another human, if the story of the recipe is missing. Without a story, the recipe is a commodity, interchangeable with any other.

And, alas, the same is true for some other categories of magazine content these days.

New at PBS MediaShift: Magazines on Pinterest

9 Apr

I have a new post at PBS MediaShift this morning, examining some creative ways magazines are using Pinterest. I tried to go beyond the standard boards that it seems every major magazine has created on the site to find some different strategies, particularly those used by different types of magazines that you might not expect to see on Pinterest — in other words, not lifestyle magazines, and not women’s magazines.

I included activist magazines (an interest of mine for some time, which I’ve also covered for MediaShift and researched (PDF)] and B2B magazines (also previously covered on MediaShift).

I hope there are some useful ideas for all magazines among these diverse uses of Pinterest.

Here’s what my browser windows looked like while researching this story:

It was real punishment, I tell you.

Anyway, I found some fun and different approaches, including some involving convenience store bathrooms and cannabis (not in the same magazine). Read the full story at PBS MediaShift.

Photo mashup by me, using magazine cover photo by Font Shop on Flickr.

Getting Students into Digital Magazines

11 Mar

I was honored to be asked to present some thoughts on preparing students for working on digital magazines at this weekend’s Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Southeast Colloquium at Virginia Tech.

I was on a panel with two other terrific magazine researchers and professors, Erin Coyle of Louisiana State (who also organized the panel – thanks, Erin!) and Yanick Rice Lamb of Howard University. I enjoyed hearing about Erin’s research on trends in magazine course syllabi and about Yanick’s study on uses of digital technology by major women’s magazines.

Here are my slides from my presentation. I think they’re self-explanatory, but if you have questions, let me know in the Comments!

New at PBS MediaShift: Esquire’s Story Trailer

26 Feb

My story about Esquire’s creative new approach to marketing a major story – a video trailer – is now up at PBS MediaShift.

Though a few other folks have covered this story, I was able to get a little more behind-the-scenes info from the Esquire and Hearst Digital Media crew that put the trailer together. I also tried to give a bit more context for the development of trailers for magazine stories as perhaps the next step from book promotions using video.

Is this a promising new step in magazine marketing, or just a one-time success? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Photo mashup by me using film image by Travis Homung on Flickr.

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