Yes, I’m blogging about paper. My digital magazine conversion, a conversation with a student yesterday, and this article from Folio – about SPIN’s new print/digital strategy – are making me think more about the dead-tree stuff. What do I miss, even just a little, about paper magazines? What qualities truly can’t be replicated in digital formats (always with the caveat…yet)?

I think that print magazines will become more and more rare, and those that persist on paper will be the few whose content either truly necessitates or successfully capitalizes on the unique qualities of paper that cannot be replicated in digital forms.

To me, those unique qualities include:

• Physical feel of the texture of paper: dependent on the paper stock used by a publication; could (or even should) be distinctive for different types of magazines; adds another layer of sensory experience that can interact pleasantly with content
• Immediacy: no power switch, no downloading, no crashing, no delay; content is immediately available
• “Flippability”: the ease of flipping through pages; currently tedious with digital formats
• Status symbols: the desire to display one’s magazines publicly; the iPad’s Newsstand icon just wouldn’t satisfy if this were a concern
• Collectibility: the ability to create a visible, physical collection of a magazine’s issues, for the sheer pleasure of gathering them; may or may not overlap with their status symbol function, depending on the magazine and the individual
• Visibility: the physical presence of a magazine in a room has an effect (I have been known to finish reading, but not immediately recycle, fitness-related magazines because leaving them around the house reminds me to strive for good health, and because I’m weird like that); physical presence may also be a more obvious reminder to engage with the magazine/brand (e.g., simply to read it, as opposed to having to check with an app for a new issue)
• Shareability: the capacity to easily give someone else the ability to read content; still not fully integrated into many digital magazines
• Contemplation: related to visibility; some content may lend itself better to sustained viewing on paper rather than a backlit or E Ink screen, such as art
• …and others?

A number of these qualities are reflected in Folio’s description of SPIN’s new strategy. Despite the advantages that an all-digital format would so obviously provide a music magazine, SPIN will continue publishing in print, alongside various digital products. However, it will use heavier paper stock (enhancing its physical feel); it will publish less frequently (enhancing its perceived value for status/collectible purposes); and it will aim for a blend of magazine and “coffee table book” (enhancing the status, collectibility, visibility, and contemplation qualities). To me, all of SPIN’s moves make sense as ways to anticipate both the diminishing role of paper and the intensifying need to justify the expense and environmental impact of its use.

Are there other qualities we should add to this list to capture the specific aspects of paper that only it as a medium can provide to a magazine, from the reader perspective?

The parody New Yorker cover produced by the Church of Scientology.

I recently noticed an interesting magazine-related story on the New York Times site regarding the Church of Scientology’s publication and distribution of a new parody magazine. It attempts to counter The New Yorker‘s reporting on the church:

…the church has produced a 51-page glossy magazine and an accompanying three-part DVD that try to discredit The New Yorker, its writers, editors, fact-checkers and sources.

“The New Yorker: What a Load of Balderdash,” reads the cover headline on the publication, Freedom, which is registered as a copyright of the church and bills itself as offering “investigative reporting in the public interest.”…

The church singles out editors, fact-checkers and other New Yorker staff members who worked on the article by name and prints their photos. The church also uses what appears to be a surveillance photograph taken of Mr. Wright while he was conducting an interview at an outdoor cafe in Texas.

This strategy is creepy, ridiculous, and probably ineffective. However, the desire to create a magazine to spread an unusual (to say the least) perspective is intriguing. Why go to the expense and bother? Why not just use the Internet to mount a campaign against The New Yorker?

Maybe it’s that Internet campaigns are just too commonplace these days. Maybe the Scientologists thought the act of handing out paper magazines in front of the Condé Nast offices might garner more media attention. (I find only about 20 articles about the event in Google News Search, however.) I’m beginning to wonder if there is something else about magazines that makes them appeal to people seeking to propagate an unusual and easily modified (or even widely ridiculed) message.

My interest in this issue stems from a study I recently conducted on the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, which unlike Freedom is entirely a digital publication, but is decently designed, and which co-opts many popular culture themes and styles in its content. Though its topic is vile, the medium used to present it is interesting. Why create a digital magazine, instead of continuing to use YouTube videos, message boards and the like to distribute digital terrorist recruitment materials?

I think that in this age of user-generated content, print and digital magazines may find a new role due to their ability to present what I’m calling “stable” narratives of dissent. Their paper form (or, when digital, unitary design) makes their content more difficult to modify and remix.

The benefits of the magazine form are probably valid for all activist or fringe groups. Some groups’ particular goals may intensify the risks of losing message control that accompany digital materials, making the magazine form even more useful. These advantages are added, of course, to magazines’ physical nature, which permits pass-along readership and confers a sense of legitimacy on their topics.

Scientology and Al Qaeda have different goals, to be sure, but the ability to present their own version of reality in the magazine format offers different opportunities from those provided by other lower-cost media. This unique, emerging sociocultural role and potential of magazines in our digital age is something I plan to explore further in my writing and research.

More ideas for me? Comment, please!

The bin of leftover magazines...its days are numbered in the digital age.

I’m contemplating the best angle for a new research project about the world of digital magazine publishing. I’m including here not just the magazines that have released iPad and other mobile apps, but also web-based publishing like that offered by Zinio, Yudu, Texterity, NoLayout, and others.

I’m interested in to what degree these digital magazine publishing opportunities are democratizing magazine publishing. Though I find print-on-demand a fascinating trend as well for magazines whose content and design implies the value of a lasting hard copy, the high cost of purchasing many of these publications means that they will likely be restricted for some time to a more affluent audience. But the opportunity for small publishers to whip up a magazine in PDF format, then post it online, seems to open up a whole realm of possibilities.

No longer are independent publishers relegated to blogs or mere websites; the ability to publish a polished, slick, easily accessible digital magazine is now within reach. Any magazine can be available on the web or even on the iPad using a newsstand app like Zinio, or through HTML5 using a service like NoLayout (though the latter concentrates on fashion and art topics).

So who is taking advantage of this opportunity to present a polished look at their subject matter? I’d like to know the breakdown by size and topic of the independent publishers who are crafting new projects online. I’d also like to know, more specifically, whether and how many activist or politically oriented digital-only magazines there are. An initial exploration of just Zinio’s listings suggests, interestingly, that there are many more ethnic or international magazines that might fit the “activist” label than English-language publications of this variety. As someone interested in how magazines affect or enable various social and political movements and identities, I also want to know whether and how digital magazines are playing a similar role to print magazines’ role in past movements. (I did a study on the role of National Review in mobilizing the conservative movement, though mine is just one of numerous studies in this area.)

I’ve previously explored the role of social media in adding to political/activist print magazines’ engagement of readers in this MediaShift story. The research study I’m anticipating now would likely examine the role of smaller, exclusively online activist publishers in directing, enabling, or mobilizing the causes they’re associated with through this new medium, as well as the reasoning behind their decisions to use digital magazines for this purpose.

If you have thoughts or suggestions along these lines, or suggestions of specific digital magazines I should explore, please leave a comment. I am excited about the opportunity to have some dialogue around this topic before I set out a concrete plan for the project.

A sample magazine shown in the Zinio iPad app.

What moments stand out most in my first few weeks of magazine reading on the iPad?

• Positioning the iPad carefully against a pillow on my stomach while lying down, then carefully moving a fold of shirt out of the way so the pages wouldn’t hit it when I turned them. Yes. Really. Old habits die hard.
• Flying immediately to jump pages, rather than getting lost in a jumble of un-numbered ad pages at the back. In the Zinio app, I tap the blue-outlined link to the continuation of the article, and I’m magically there. Ah.
• Buying digital single copies of magazines I don’t subscribe to, just because I want to see how they look.
• Trying hard to find digital subscription options for all my favorites, with about 60 percent success.
• Being annoyed by digital subscriptions that cost more – sometimes far more, even double – than the discounted faculty print edition subscriptions that have spoiled me. (Economist, I’m looking at you.) Come on – help me be greener, without bankrupting me.
• Wanting to tweet articles from digital replica magazines with no means of doing so easily. If magazines want to replicate the solitary experience of reading print, they’re doing a good job with these digital editions…but I’m used to social reading now, and I miss it when it’s not available.

My transition into digital reading has been an interesting experience, and it’s really just begun! I’m trying to be aware of my physical, psychological and intellectual reactions as I proceed further into the world of digital magazine readership. Have you noticed any side effects or unusual responses in yourself?

• 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 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.

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.

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.

National Geographic maps. Photo by Flickr user retro_traveler.

One of my favorite books to pick up on occasion is a heavy, glossy volume called Magazines that Make History by Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Browsing through it today, an interesting paragraph on National Geographic jumped out at me:

To [Alexander Graham Bell, who became president of the National Geographic Society in 1897], the National Geographic Magazine was a way to build a larger organization that would welcome into Society membership everyone interested in the world, exploration, and discovery. Until then, the privilege of contributing to the grand private expeditions that fascinated the nineteenth-century public or to accounts of unknown peoples, inaccessible places, and stern trials to overcome had been reserved to men of science and men of wealth. Bell understood that, even for the simplest of men, supporting these investigations was a source of pride. So he set out to open the Society’s rosters to all who were willing to contribute $2 a year for a magazine subscription, whether they were scientists or schoolmasters, aristocrats or artisans. Some members of the board of trustees opposed the proposal vigorously, but in the end it carried.

After starting this new program and hiring a new editor in 1899, the society and the magazine’s readership grew nearly tenfold by late 1905, to almost 11,500 members, say Angeletti and Oliva.

By opening the opportunity to contribute to previously inaccessible projects, National Geographic increased its readers’ investment – literal and figurative – in the magazine. Both magazines and newspapers today could experiment with similar models, by having readers contribute financial resources or time to larger projects as well as adding content to digital or print editions.

Newspapers may have a hard time creating projects like this out of fear of losing their purported objectivity. However, one possible reason for declining news readership could be the sense among the audience that their subscriptions provide them with little information that actually can be used to make a difference in their communities.

Civic journalism was (is?) an effort to include the public in the development of news content so it would better suit their communities’ needs. Citizen journalism, the actual production of news by citizens, is a more direct way to incorporate readers’ interests, as is crowdsourcing journalistic projects.

One magazine that has adopted a model similar to that of National Geographic is Good, which donates all subscription proceeds to a charity selected by the subscriber. The subscriber also chooses the price: $10, $20 or $50.

Good‘s rationale [PDF] is that magazines make so little on their subscriptions anyway that it’s worthwhile to make the subscription fee a donation, then sell advertising to pay the bills. Good has now donated over a million dollars to various charities using this method, while also drawing a spendy, attractive audience with a $100,000 household income.

Clearly, something about this model is working, and while Good‘s content is strong and interesting, the magazine is also likely pulling in readers through a sense of shared investment in social justice.

Good Magazine also has events where readers and Web users can gather. Photo by Flickr user chuck_heaton.

So what else can print media do to create a shared participation in a mission, one that makes reading and continued subscription worthwhile? This task goes beyond just making a Web site interactive or encouraging reader submission of content. It’s a feeling of community and purpose that is intangible, but may be crucial to sustaining an active readership.