Sam Syed: Redefining the Magazine Experience

I first met my good friend Matthias in the summer of 1996. I had just quit my excellent job as Art Editor of Hi-Fi Choice Magazine (doesn't sound like much but we always had about ten grand's worth of cutting edge audio equipment lying around, so if you liked music it had its perks) and was looking for a regular freelance gig to finance my partying lifestyle. I ended up at a company called Haymarket, pretty big by English standards, doing a stint on a newish magazine called F1-Racing. (For those of you who don't know, F-1 is Formula-1, the Rolls Royce of racing leagues.)

Matthias was the editor of the German edition. We didn't work together very directly but, by chance, we both lived near each other in North East London, pretty much on the opposite side of town. The tube journey was about two hours, but luckily for me, Matthias often drove in and out. He offered me a ride home one night, and we became good friends, chatting our way through the long journey home. As angst-ridden, alienated, music obsessed slackers, it turned out that we had plenty to talk about.

Matthias was fond of telling me how books are "high tech", but, of course, growing up in the counter-culture of Berlin when that crazy-artsy town was sliced in half by the iron curtain, he would choose to be counterintuitive. And, considering that books work on "ambient" energy, are cheap to manufacture (and recyclable), have an intuitive interface, non-volatile memory, handy size and no software conflict problems, he had a point: these characteristics are the holy grail of computer designers and engineers.

At about the same time, the company that owned Hi-Fi Choice launched another magazine. It was called CD-ROM Magazine, a name with all the attractiveness and cachet of...well...an electronic component. I, like many other people, was familiar with CD-ROMS. You could find them stuck to the covers of many magazines, promising access to miraculous but somehow also free software. When you popped them in your drive they would fire up with interminable slowness, offering you choices via ugly icon and button interfaces that often simply did not work. The buzzword at the time was multimedia. That meant they had both audio and visual capabilities, if you happened to be long-lived enough to survive the start-up times. After offering a tantalizing glimpse of a science fiction like future, they went the way of the dodo. And so did CD-ROM Magazine.

A few years later, I found myself in New York, still working on good old-fashioned paper. The company I worked for, Dennis Publishing, was the same one that had started CD-ROM Magazine. The NYC division part-owned a small company, Dennis Interactive, an outfit headed up by a grizzled but shockingly smart Australian called David Cherry. Cherry's previous business was a music "magazine". It was called Blender and, surprise surprise, was a multimedia magazine on a CD-ROM. The technology had moved on to a great degree. Dennis Interactive was a state of the art "new media" company staffed by talented kids who kept turning out top-class work. But that was just after the big internet collapse at the end of the nineties. Even though their products were great, they did not survive, and so Blender (and DI) also disappeared.

Some time in late spring last year, I was invited by my Publisher, Gregg Hano, to a presentation by a company called Zinio. I had no idea what it would be about and neither did he, but since the meeting had been arranged by Terry Snow (our CEO) we were curious about it.

They presented their idea: a technology that could make digital magazines, a digital newsstand to sell them on, and their own digital magazine, VIV. And let me just quickly explain something: VIV is not like the "flat" online pdf versions that pretty much every magazine has. It's much more functional and interactive than that. At the time ,we called it an "enhanced digital magazine".

Now digital magazines were not new and they simply had not made much of a dent in the market, and since VIV was aimed at middle-aged women, kind of the opposite of Popular Science, we left the meeting a little wiser, but still scratching our heads. So, what's that to us? Well, the meeting came with an offer, to help us produce some digital work along the lines of VIV and see how we liked it.

I decided to take up the offer and spent the next few months toiling away at home trying to make a digital version of our Popular Science. It was a long, difficult process but by the end of it, I emerged a believer. The technology was clunky, difficult to use and time-consuming to put together, but it offered access to some extraordinary abilities, and, as a creative, I saw potential access to whole new world of enjoyment. I have not looked back since.

But creative concerns don't necessarily make a business, and even a small amount of research will reveal that digital magazines have had very limited appeal. There are a host of reasons why, but it is still a grim reality. Despite this, they are very appealing to magazine publishers for one reason: no paper costs, no postage costs.

So, this year, Mark Jannot and Gregg Hano, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, decided to put together an ambitious programme of four standalone digital products. For the programme to work we would need both consumer acceptance and advertiser buy-in, both of which have eluded many other digital magazine publishers around today. They left my colleague Mike Haney and I to solve that thorny problem.

After working in the medium for a short while, my conclusion is that with the exception of VIV, which has gone from strength to strength, most digital magazines out there are too "magazine-like". They look like paper magazines which embed video instead of running photos.

For consumers and advertisers, the question is, what's so different about them? In some ways they are less than paper magazines, which have all Matthias's "high tech" characteristics. They are, in fact, like paper magazines weighed down by a reliance on computers.

So, what's needed is something that truly raises the bar. Our approach is to deliver deeply interactive pages with full-screen graphics, animations and videos, redefining the experience of consuming a digital publication onscreen.

That's what we are aiming for. I leave it to you to judge.

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