Case Study: mediaIDEAS—Will magazines survive the shift to online media?

 Note: This study was excerpted from 2008 Webinar with FOLIO Magazine. To view the webinar, click here.

Bob Sacks and David Renard of mediaIDEAS presented “The Definition of a Print and Digital Magazine.”

Sacks said Charles Darwin once commented on magazines.  Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

In order to understand how information is distributed, first it is important to examine the process of reading.  

Reading is the process of mentally interpreting written symbols. The symbols could be letters, words, or pictographs but individually and collectively they give the reader information. They pass along a thought. How do we interpret symbols today? When readers interpret symbols are they reading? There are multiple symbols in the world such as road signs and icons.

These symbols needed to be portable so other people could read and understand them from place-to-place. It is a way to share thoughts.

In fact, the first portable way to store information outside of the brain was the baton. The baton was the start of the reading revolution and it is 25,000 years old. In fact, the Ishango Baton is the World’s oldest known mathematical artifact. The baton passed on information from generation to generation. Since reading is the process of mentally interpretation of symbols, we have been storing information for 25,000 years.

Information distribution has been changed and constantly involving. It didn’t matter if the people communicating used batons, the Gutenberg Press or scrolls. The only thing that mattered was that people could send information and there were multiple types of portable reading devices over the centuries.

The digital platform is getting better and better and it is becoming a dominant way to send information and store it outside of the brain much like scrolls, pictographs and batons were for ancient people.

One of those new digital platforms is perfect for e-magazines. Right now e-magazines are dynamic because the process is constantly evolving. As we move forward we need to ask ourselves if people will read print or will they read be a “screenage” and use technology available in cellular ways and the Internet.

Once the hardware catches up to the software it doesn’t matter what substrate readers use to read.

These six key properties make up 80 percent of all magazines whether in digital or print:

• Magazines are metered: A magazine is divided into defined pages of content that are presented together. In print this is not only bound sheets of paper but also has become more prevalent with the stylepress, pamphlets, lithographs and other objects. The outline of these pages can follow a more traditional model or one of the new models that includes the intuitive horizontal scrolling model.

•  Magazines are edited: The editor selects the articles and images, and online selects the videos and sounds that fill each page as opposed to supplying a stream of aggregated data such as news articles, images and video that is selected automatically by virtual intelligent agents.

•Magazines are designed. This means the included content is arranged to enhance the reading and visual experience.

• Magazines are date stamped meaning an issue is published on a specific date that becomes the indelible time stamp on the publication.

• Magazines are permanent. In a magazine all content for an issue is set by its release date, even though the edited content for an issue can be more than what each reader is presented which, to allow for varying levels of customization. Once it’s created, it is set and can no longer be changed or corrupted apart from minor revisions.

• Lastly magazines are periodic. A magazine is created to have subsequent issues and it may have more than 52 a year or, in the end, only be published once.

• Today publishers are scrambling to find a new media outlets to dictate the future of media. Market predictions include within 15 years there is a 70 percent chance that 30 percent of the media will be purely digital. Within 25 years is it predicted there will be an 80 percent probability that the magazines will be digital. 

• Digital magazines will follow the 80/20 Rule.  Eighty percent of the time, the six key properties will be followed in creating a digital magazine. Provided the magazine follows the key six properties that make up a magazine, it will be denoted as such during the evolution. There will always be some magazines on the fringe of the rules.

• Information distribution has always been changing and is constantly involving.  Digital magazines are just another step in the evolution.

• To date, digital magazines are not the standard, for most publishers today, going with a digital version of the magazine is about hedging your bets to learn the skills for the future since the movement toward digital magazines will soon be the norm. Some magazines are created from the ground up just to be digital magazines sans print. Most magazines will look at several things including feature rich pieces to put in the magazine such as blogs and videos. What magazines should look for now is training for tomorrow so publishers can know how their mediums will change in the future.

• Publishers should use digital magazines today so they can be competitive in the future so the entire organization can move forward when the time is right. Digital magazines will be the dominant force. It is important to note the printed magazine will not dry up and go away, but mediaIDEAS believes digital magazines will be dominant.

• Digital magazines are growing exponentially.