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I’ve recently come across a number of projects that are called magazines, and yet don’t seem like what we normally think of as magazines. For example:

• Pop-Up Magazine: “the world’s first live magazine, created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience. Nothing will arrive in your mailbox; no content will go online. An issue exists for one night, in one place.” It’s a 75-minute program, organized like a magazine with short pieces up front and a “feature well.” Its contents include photos, writing, live interviews and more on a variety of topics. It’s had three issues so far, most recently on April 16, and has hosted an impressive line-up of participants.
• Rotary Magazine (info here; view it here). Its creators bought 200 random slides from eBay and edited them into an organized experience, including themed sections and typography. They showed the magazine in an “old audio visual shop” in Bath, England, for a week, and it also is available online. The editors note that many people could view the magazine at once at their own preferred pace, and that the lack of paper made the magazine more sustainable.
• 48 Hour Magazine. Though it will result in a print product likely resembling a standard magazine in some ways, this project is not following a traditional magazine production process. Instead, after announcing a theme, writers, photographers and others worldwide will collaborate on a magazine that will be edited, designed, printed and shipped within 48 hours: “No long commitments. No pitches. No grinding editing process. You make good stuff fast; we publish it with other good stuff.” The leaders of the project say that though they “don’t have a ratio in mind…people from outside the industry are essential to the vision.”

So, do we count these projects as “magazines”? Let’s note the qualities they’re keeping, deleting, and adding to the magazine concept.

Keeping:

• Selectively edited content
• An organizing concept or theme (i.e., a “content proposition”)
• Specific sense of audience
• Visual and text content

(Is this section enough to define “a magazine”?)

Deleting:

• Print format (except for 48 Hour Magazine)

Adding:

• Spontaneity and the opportunity for surprise
• Audience participation (reacting live to Pop-Up, controlling pace of Rotary, contributing content to 48 Hour Magazine)
• Fast turnaround and immediate relevance, rather than delayed information and experience

What can traditional magazines learn from these new projects? (Admittedly, 48 Hour Magazine hasn’t happened yet – we’ll see it in about a week – but the concept is instructive.)

First, these projects are not static. They break boundaries. They experiment. They can surprise us. How often does a magazine today really surprise anyone? I pretty much know what to expect from each magazine that comes in the mail – which is comforting in its way, and which keeps its identity consistent for advertisers, but is also a bit dull. Maybe some of the new digital experiments have been intriguing or exciting, but I haven’t found much that I’d call surprising just yet.

Second, these projects engage the audience in significant ways. If you attend Pop-Up Magazine, you’re buying a ticket* and committing to an evening with its performers and fellow attendees. You cannot access its content online later. If you participate in the 48 Hour Magazine project, you’re going to want to see its print edition. These are powerful methods of getting people to embrace your project. Yet most magazines demand little of us beyond our subscription payment. Even their uses of reader-generated content and ideas have been pretty minimal so far.

Finally, these experiences offer immediate satisfaction. True, not all magazine projects should be completed within 48 hours. There’s still a demand and need for carefully researched and produced journalism that takes months. However, is there really any reason today for magazines to stick to a rigid publication schedule? Why not feed content all the time to your readers, especially in digital formats? Today’s on-demand publication tools, such as those 48 Hour Magazine will probably use, could even create occasional special print issues as bonuses for subscribers. Certainly many magazine Web sites have embraced blogs and online-only exclusives, but bigger stories could be available more frequently than just once a month. I’m sure that would disrupt the standard schedules that magazine staffs use, but increasing readers’ sense of constant engagement with the magazine might be worth it, not to mention the more vibrant conversations about the magazine that would go on all the time.

I think it’s time for traditional magazines to learn from these projects that are on the boundary of our current understanding of a magazine. It’s time to consider all the new ways the essential qualities of “a magazine” can be expressed.

Edited to add: this post was inspired by this one by Elisabeth Soep at BoingBoing on Pop-Up Magazine; I couldn’t help but think about her challenging question, “What can print mags steal back?”

* I previously posted that the Pop-Up Magazine tickets were “costly” – turns out, they are quite affordable, so much so that even this lowly professor might be able to attend. An amazing value, considering the participants they feature. The notion of buying a ticket and “buying into” the magazine’s content, however, is relevant regardless of expense.

Will magazines' fancy paper tricks come back to bite them in the end? Photo by Flickr user epSos.de.

I recently read this magazine “print gimmicks” story from Folio:

“In this era, when everyone’s excited about new media, we need to do everything we can to make older media as exciting as possible,” says Granger, Esquire’s editor-in-chief. The magazine’s latest print gimmick was its May 2009 issue where it featured a mix-n-match cover. The facial features of President Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake became interchangeable thanks to a tri-perforated cover.

The article also mentions 3-D covers from The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, pop-ups and bar codes in Hearst magazines, and innovative advertising inserts that try to catch readers’ attention. It describes the additional time it takes to plan and create these print “gimmicks,” as well as the additional cost for special inks, papers, and printing and folding techniques.

While it’s clever to come up with new ways to play with paper, I think these gimmicks are a misuse of magazines’ time and resources. You might gather a few more readers who pick up the magazine to play with its mix-and-match cover, or a few nerdy types (um, like me) who want to see how those barcodes work. (Hint: I never got around to doing anything with them.)

Ultimately, these gimmicks distract from what makes magazines special: the unique topic and voice of editorial content in the magazine, and the community that readers feel around that content.

I don’t think readers who might buy the magazine for these “gimmicks” are the long-term readers and subscribers magazines really need. Those aren’t the readers who identify with the magazine’s content in a deep and substantial way, who find a part of their own identity in the work of the writers, editors, photographers and artists in a magazine’s pages. Moreover, long-term readers of a magazine aren’t getting much added value with these techniques; if anything, they could be perceived as an unnecessary distraction.

My feeling is that if a magazine wants to secure a steady readership for its print edition – and for its brand, wherever it ultimately goes, online or off – it must invest in quality content, not meaningless and superficial tricks with paper that don’t connect with readers on a deeper level. The magazines that make that investment are the ones I want to keep reading and the ones that earn my loyalty.

I have a new post up at MediaShift covering some of the new opportunities in on-demand magazine publishing. Here’s a favorite selection from the piece:

“I don’t think that computers and the Internet make real people’s need for real physical media go away,” said Powazek of MagCloud. “There’s content that deserves to be archived in print and some that doesn’t. For moment to moment updates about news, the web does that really well, but longer-lasting community-based niche content will still have a home in print. I hope that some magazines that have fallen on hard times will find their way to MagCloud and publish their whole back catalog there.”

So which magazines deserve to stay in print? As environmental resources become more precious and distribution channels multiply, we’ll have to determine what content deserves print status.

I also see a lot of potential in these on-demand services for student publications. Though that wasn’t a focus of this piece, it would be hugely convenient for journalism educators to use on-demand publishing to create student magazines or other collections of student work. Students could be provided copies and then order additional copies themselves to distribute to friends and family, while readers elsewhere in the world could even become fans. This seems like a cost-effective and innovative way to create student projects.

My students won’t pay for the New York Times.

When it implements its metered system in 2011, the New York Times is probably going to lose some of its most needed readers – young people who are slowly building an appetite for news.

I hope I’m wrong, and if I am, maybe some of my students or other young people will comment here and set me straight. But I think that today’s youth are so accustomed to free content, news and otherwise, that it will be difficult to change their ways and begin asking them to pay for news.

Photo by Flickr user striatic.

My students are not interested in paying for news, or for the entertainment they value: music or movies or TV shows. They’re used to getting all of these for free, either legally from sites like Hulu or through less ethical channels. I’ve asked them semester after semester about these issues, and they just aren’t willing to pay for any of it. They have always read news for free online, and asking them to pay is going to be a difficult demand.

It seems to me that a good starting point for getting young people to pay for news is to work with formats they have always paid for. For example, my students with iPhones are used to paying for apps. They don’t pay much for them, of course, but they do shell out a few dollars here and there. This is a media format that has always cost them money – not a new imposition of charges that will be seen as exactly that, an imposition and an “unfair” change in news organizations’ policies.

Working on young audiences first through these more familiar paid formats might be one strategy to open their minds to the need to pay for news. For example, The Guardian‘s iPhone app is $3.99, and may at some point involve further subscription fees. The McSweeney’s app is $5.99 and requires later renewals to keep new content coming. And yet the New York Times app is free. This seems like a missed opportunity to begin getting young people to pay for news access.

Photo by Flickr user LoveSystems.

I’m not personally opposed to the NYT‘s metering policy; I read the site extensively every day and will certainly end up paying for their content. I believe that if we want good journalism in the future, we have to put our money where it counts. I don’t think news organizations are obligated to provide their product for free, and I’d rather pay a reasonable amount for news than have it become solely reliant on advertising revenue and thereby even more subject to advertisers’ whims.

However, I’ve been socialized into believing that because I grew up in a family where newspapers showed up on the breakfast table daily, because I was required to engage with news throughout my education, and (especially) because I went on to graduate school in journalism and now teach it. I know that not everyone shares these values.

Therefore, I’d argue that beginning to ask younger generations to pay for online news – or at least the current generation of young people that is going to be most startled by this transition – needs to be accompanied by education about the value of journalism to our society. These young people, I fear, will be doubly skeptical of journalism: first because of the general public doubts about the value of the news media, and second because of what they may perceive as a “demand” for their money in return for online news.

Overcoming these doubts will require a great effort of education and positive public outreach on the part of the news organizations that hope to sell news to all their potential customers, young and old.

I’ve been looking lately at some of the “crowdfunding” models for journalism, in which audience members donate money to specific stories whose production they want to support. Here’s my idea for a “news mutual fund” – a concept slightly different from the crowdfunding models I’ve seen so far.

One well-known crowdfunding project for journalism is Spot.Us. This organization provides a platform for public donations to proposed stories in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. Potential donors can read a pitch for the story, follow the reporter’s blog and see other content related to the proposed story.

I’m afraid, though, that it’s a bit optimistic to expect the audience to evaluate, donate to, and follow up on stories at the international, national, state and local levels, as would really be needed to make this model widespread and effective throughout journalism. Not only is it a financial commitment, but it’s also a time commitment that goes beyond what most people will consider for news. I doubt most people will make this investment in news, especially given current levels of public appreciation for journalism.

It seems to me that if this model is to succeed, it needs to look at another model of investments that has been very successful: the mutual fund. As I see it, today’s crowdfunding possibilities – limited as they are – are like individual stock investments, with a “socially responsible investing” angle. A donor chooses to donate to X story because he or she feels that it has long-term value for a personal information “portfolio” and for a community.

But just like investing in individual stocks, picking those stories is a lot of work. People like mutual funds for their financial investments because they eliminate that detailed effort. In a mutual fund, a trusted manager with a proven track record is given funds to allocate based on a chosen model of investment. Many different mutual funds exist: some that are more risky, some that are less so, some that invest in particular industries and some that express particular ideological perspectives.

Maybe this is how crowdfunding could be approached – as a news mutual fund, rather than as a stock-picking process. Spot.Us does provide an option to simply donate money and allow the organization to choose where the funds are assigned. But little transparency is provided – as far as I can tell – as to how that selection is made.

In a news mutual fund, a manager would determine where news investors’ money was directed according to defined story selection parameters.

Sound like an editor? Does a news mutual fund sound a bit like buying a newspaper subscription and hoping your money goes to the “right” stories? Sure.

But most of the audience doesn’t know how editors select stories, and they have never had any input into that process. A more open “news mutual fund” process would lead to greater credibility and audience engagement, while eliminating the detail work on the audience’s behalf of doing the story selection work themselves. It would also maintain a degree of audience accountability for the manager, because if stories began to deviate from the investors’ chosen parameters, they could redirect their money to a different news fund.

I’m sure there are weaknesses to this model as well, just as there are in mutual fund investing, so the option to invest in individual stories – some of which could be collaborations among news producers – should still be available.

In a post on MediaShift, Spot.Us founder David Cohn noted that the site was able to fully fund a project that did not yet have a reporter assigned to it, meaning that the site’s managers developed the idea and then, once it was funded, could hire a freelancer to work on it. He says that the logistics of this process are much easier for the site, and also open up the chance to market the story to traditional news organizations that could reimburse Spot.Us its funding in exchange for first publication rights to the story. So here’s a case where Spot.Us could operate like the news mutual fund manager that I’m envisioning here. They control the funds and their allocation, and have already told the audience how this money will be spent. The development of the story, its assignment and its distribution would ideally be equally transparent through updates provided on the site.

The crowdfunding model for journalism is still in its early days, and there will no doubt be lots of experimentation. Testing the public’s willingness to invest in news is a daunting (and somewhat frightening) task, but with a variety of approaches, it might turn out to be an exciting and engaging process for journalists and the audience both.