Recently, I was asked to help in finding IT related magazines that are published only on the internet… in Serbia. I concentrated on finding PDF magazine, thinking they are closest to printed issues, and, to my surprise, I found more than one. That one being GNUzilla for which I sometime write. And that got me thinking: why should someone choose to publish PDF issue, or run a standard Web magazine, or use blog as a platform for new age type of magazine?
For me PDF magazines are like print, only digital. They have a few benefits over print issues: low cost (you don’t actually print anything), cheap distribution (put it on your site, e-mail to subscribers etc.), and it can incorporate clickable links. URLs look cool on printed pages but you can’t click on them, while clicking on them in PDF magazines takes you to the web site. From the editorial point of view - creating a PDF magazine is fairly similar to creating one that is going to be printed. End result is practically the same and probably the most PDF magazines would get pritned if only their publishers have enough money. Since money is the key issue here, PDF magazines often start young, inexperienced people and their PDF issues mostly look like print magazine wannabees. They don’t use much of the digital potential just wait (in vein) for enough money to get printed eventually.
That might change - Adobe made it possible to easily combine PDF and Flash technologies to create what is called rich user experience. Basically, PDF document with flash animations, different multimedia, interactive and personalized elements. Although they think mostly about business rich media documents (ie. digital invoices), it can be used to create anything. Imagine a PDF newspaper with an image that turns into video when clicked on. That’s only one (lame) possible use of new age PDF. I think that many artistic magazines will benefit from new possibilities and take advante of Flex technology to create magazines that would otherwise be hard to publish. But PDF has one big flaw that will make it as obsolete (in publishing terms) as print is becoming these days - readers can’t leave their comments, discuss on different topics with other readers etc.
Web magazines allow that - comments, discussions. And they offer structure old school editors need. Once set up, web magazines rarely change it. That is a difficult task, no one wants to deal with it, but in the ever changing world of information, internet and reader’s/visitor’s expectations, at annual makeovers are a must! That said, web magazine do have some nice features that makes them a good choice for online publishing: you decide what is that structure, which articles and topics will be highlighted.
Looking in relation to PDF and blog magazines, web magazines are somewhere in the middle. “Invented” before blog became mainstream, still occupy a lot of space and probably won’t disappear, but they are not what the online generation needs. Because web magazines offer a feel similar to offline (and PDF) magazines they are great companions for such issues. Web magazine can follow the structure of offline issue and complement it with additional articles, information that couldn’t fit in the print etc. And that makes them a great tool to drive offline readers to the internet, especially in countries like Serbia where most internet users don’t actually use it?!
What most web magazine lack, blogs have - latest information on top (mostly no structure and editors don’t choose what’s on top), no need for structure (tags rule, use them!), faster informations… Since it is completely new way of publishing, blog magazines are usually started by small teams which then work faster, are more flexible and don’t resemble tradicional magazine organization. These new people create what new readers want and these new readers don’t care about formal language, strictly objective positions and other issues traditional journalists/magazines deal with everyday.
Readers of today want to have the latest information now. Don’t want to spend much time reading the article, don’t want to wait for the print issue to come by post (if subscribed) or go to the news stand to buy it. They don’t care if it was written buy “proper” journalist or a blogger and don’t need some editor to tell them which of the articles published are more important than others. They want to be able to find similar content easily (hence - use tags!).
And that’s just readers of today. What about tomorrow? Hard to say. That’s why blog magazines are the future. They can change easily, implement new stuff in a couple of clicks… All because of the way blog magazines are created and ran, something that Roy Greenslade recognized in his post about journalists and bloggers:
I have tended to predict that future news organisations will consist of a small hub of “professional journalists” at the centre with bloggers (aka amateur journalists/citizen journalists) on the periphery. In other words, us pros will still run the show.
I’m altogether less certain about that model now. First, I wonder whether us pros are as valuable as we think. Second, and more fundamentally, I wonder whether a “news organisation” is as perfect a model as we might think.
Leaving you with that to think about, hoping my thoughts are enough to start interesting discussions and pointing that I am probably as much wrong as I am right.
