Will We Learn to Love Digital Magazines?

Newsprint, it’s generally agreed, is nearly obsolete: within five years or so, most newspapers will be digital-first, if not digital-only. Does the same apply to magazines?

Louise Chunn, editor of ‘Psychologies’ magazine, and James Bilefield, president of Conde Nast International Digital (publishers of Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ), joined Anne Karpf, journalist and Reader in Professional Writing and Cultural Inquiry in FSSH, to discuss it.

Chunn thought a move to digital, especially in a recession, was inevitable but her publication, being word-based, would benefit less from it than fashion magazines. Money was also an issue: an app costs £35,000 to develop and needs to increase profits.

Karpf wondered if we should rue the loss of a physical product with which women, especially, have an intimate relationship. Chunn thought that not only did readers read digital magazines differently but that writers also wrote differently for them, taking less care because they mistakenly saw digital content as less permanent. Bilefield was more optimistic, urging us to see digital and print as just two of a variety of ways in which brands communicate with their readers – Twitter, Facebook and live events being others.

The discussion ranged over convergence (will digital TV and radio, magazines and books, all look and feel the same?), ‘branded content’ (advertising masquerading as editorial) and, crucially, the now ubiquitous ‘data mining’, through which companies use information they’ve gleaned about their readers to sell them other products.

According to Bilefield, print magazines (unlike print newspapers) will survive, albeit only as one aspect of a ‘multi-platform’ future. About one thing both speakers were agreed: the journalists of the future will need to be multi-skilled and digitally confident.

A podcast of the event can be accessed here: https://rcpt.yousendit.com/1288353918/3280feb8e52de252c0b930369e4dbeea