I’ve been brainstorming with a couple of other faculty members and students about creating an online publishing class at Ohio University. We’ve dabbled at combining the ingenuity and know-how of the online and magazine sequences into a slick iPad magazine on Zinio or even a branded app like Conde Nast has created for Wired or GQ.
After reading what Khoi Vihn, the former Web design director for the New York Times, had to say about iPad magazine apps, however, I realized we need to rethink our strategy. Creating a class that creates a digital publication suitable for the iPad or other tablets is great, but it can’t be the neo-lithic, self-centered publication Vihn describes. It must take advantage of all that mobile devices have to offer, including connection to a vast Web of other information, not just the novel display format.
Vihn’s comments are getting a lot of attention, and with good reason (I found his post initially through Kottke.org). I had a similar issue with magazines when I first got my iPad, but my main criticism was I was unwilling to pay $5 per issue. I was thrilled when I noticed Zinio offered most of its titles for the same rates you’d pay for a mail subscription. I signed up for Esquire at $8 a year.
But what I didn’t address that Vihn does so expertly is how magazines merely reinforce print-centric publishing models:
They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.
If publishers understood how people use tablets, they’d see no one sits down with a tablet the same way they do with a magazine, Vihn says. It’s a Web-enabled device so we want to bounce around a bit. We want to follow outside links. We want to Tweet about the article we just read or share it with our friends on Facebook. “For magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied,” he writes.
As excited as I am about my cheap subscription to Esquire, I have to admit I haven’t seen much beyond the photos of Christina Hendricks in the April issue. I’d much rather spend time with an app like Flipboard that allows me to customize the news I receive and follow what my friends are reading as well. Flipboard, in fact, is an app Vihn mentions as one that potentially represents the future.
If you ask me, the trajectory of content consumption favors apps like these that are more of a window to the world at large than a cul-de-sac of denial. Social media, if it’s not already obvious to everyone, is going to continue to change everything — including publishing. And it’s a no-brainer to me that content consumption is going to be intimately if not inextricably linked with your social graph.
Even as I struggle to keep up with all my social media accounts, I know what Vihn is saying. The power of the Web and Web-enabled devices such as the iPad isn’t in distributing content. It’s in connecting us to each other. Our idea to create a class that teaches online publishing isn’t a bad one. We just need to make sure that it’s not about creating a publication first, and a community second. It should be about delivering news in the ways people want it and the ways that allow them to bond with it and each other.
Maybe that’s what the industry needs – a classroom of students unafraid to take risks.
PhotoCredit: I’m pretty sure Esquire will object to me using this image, but I couldn’t resist. To set the record straight, I subscribe to Esquire for the articles.
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