Making magazines distinctive from online
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 27 November 2007 at 18:24
Tags: Magazines, Wired, pr
The US edition of PR Week has an interview with Wired business editor Jason Tanz, who has some advice for magazines looking cope with the disruption caused by the Internet:
I think we have a philosophy that, the Internet can do a lot of things really great, so focus your magazine on the things the Internet can’t do really great—write long stories, print it on nice paper, have beautiful layouts. I think that a lot of other magazines are trying to make stories shorter and become adaptable to the web, and essentially make the magazine product something that dovetails quite nicely immediately into the web format. So why buy the magazine? Even though we do put all the content of our magazine online for free, people still do find a different experience in coming home and opening it up and spending time with it. I’m very proud to be working at a place that believes in that kind of flight to quality.
The whole interview is well worth a read. Tanz also explains how Wired handles the print and online newsrooms, the growing workload of journalists who are also blogging, and discusses his boss Chris Anderson’s recent controversial decision to blacklist the e-mail address of PRs who send unwelcome press releases.
