It Takes a Community, Sometimes

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov, 2001 by Jimmy Guterman

On the Net., the killer app is still person-to-person communication as the desire for e-mingling hasn't vanished. But some magazine sites shouldn't bother with spurring such interaction.

Back in the Age of the Bubble--when magazines had only optimism for what the Internet could do for them and deep pockets to back up that optimism--magazine sites had to be flashy and all-encompassing. Unfortunately, much of the whizbang ideas were not only annoying, but useless. Yet there was one feature that has proved smart and utilitarian, something that came to be known as "community."

The killer app for the Internet always was and always will be some form of person-to-person communication, whether it's instant messaging, e-mail, music-file swapping or something we haven't imagined yet. Far more people bought computers and modems because they wanted e-mail or because they wanted to broadcast their views to the world than because they wanted to peruse Time online. The Internet is a far more interactive medium than traditional print. So it's no surprise that magazines, wanting their pricey Web sites to be more appropriate for the Web medium, developed features that gave readers far more of a voice than they'd expect in the magazine itself.

Few magazines have pulled off this talk-back trick better than Fast Company. Its site (www.fastcompany.com) is stuffed with forums, chances to comment on articles on the same pages as the articles themselves, polls, and sundry other calls to action. There is no way to talk back to the print magazine--unless you're willing to wait months to see if your letter to the editor got published-but you can sound off online, in minutes or seconds, on most of what the magazine offers.

But before publishers rush to emulate the Gruner+Jahr USA Publishing business magazine, they should step back for a moment and ponder what a few years ago would have been considered Web heresy: For certain publishers, maybe community isn't the right place to invest.

It's a tough truth for me to swallow. Seven years ago, when I started working with publishers to develop sites intended to present useful and entertaining material to readers while at the same time encouraging readers to talk to us and among themselves, it was the latter part that so excited me about the Net. I was hoping the Net would be something that now seems naive: a new-medium world less centralized than traditional media.

The early attempts at Web publishing made it seem that readers could take over in interesting ways. The original GNN and Yahoo databases of Web sites were constructed from reader suggestions. There were editors shaping suggestions and deciding whether those suggestions were appropriate and where they fit into a site's taxonomy, but the core material for the sites was being contributed by readers. Perhaps the most amusing early Web-publishing experiment was the Dysfunctional Family Circus, in which readers were requested to append witty and obscene captions to images "borrowed" from Bill Keane's wholesome comic strip. The site is long gone, but a fan has collected a handful of representative entries at www.metronet.com/[sim]intell/ed/dfc/.

The Circus shows how cheaply a publisher could provide an amusing interactive service on the Web--and how easily the line between reader and publisher could be blurred. Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) and its children show the world of Web publishing at its messy best, a bunch of cranky eternal adolescents arguing arcana in ways that can be informative or infuriating.

Yet the transplant of this sort of publishing method to the print magazine world often didn't take. Yes, smart editors elicit information from their readers. But the findings are used to decide what to cover, how to cover it and how to present the findings. Online and print are more than merely two different distribution media: the publishing DNA required is completely different.

Community can be done smartly and cheaply (see sidebar on page 46). But publishers have to be honest with themselves about what they want from their Web sites. And if you're not comfortable with a freewheeling community talking back to the top-down culture at a magazine, don't waste the money going through the motions.

It's clear that some types of magazines are better fits for community than are others. Fast Company always considered itself a cultish community service with its magazine as its hub, so it's no surprise that its community efforts have flourished. For other magazines, Web sites have proved more valuable as ad vehicles or subscription sources. Time's Fortune covers some of the same editorial terrain as G+J's Fast Company, but the Fortune.com site seems interested only in publishing information for current and prospective subscribers. Creating a community is a big part of Fast Company's mission, online and off. Fortune has no such aspirations, and its Web site reflects that.

Similarly, Utne Reader is about assembling information from sundry, unexpected sources, so it's no surprise that www.utne.com has at least five community-related links on its front page every day. Similarly, Reader's Digest, another magazine in large part assembled from outside sources, has a Web site (www.rd.com) that does offer discussion groups, easy ways to e-mail the editors, interactive quizzes and even e-cards.