Now What?

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

Magazines ask the hard questions about what they're doing online and look for the best technologies and approaches to get them there.

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF MAGAZINES MOVING TO the Web, it was hard to get any consensus for why print magazines were making the jump into unproven interactive media. Some magazine executives thought the Net would be a great forum for brand-building, others considered new media an opportunity to develop a community, still others thought only of dollar signs. Aside from a handful of prominent holdouts, most agreed that setting up a working operation was the important part in the short run, and long-term issues would get sorted out afterward. Success was measured in "eyeballs" and "pageviews," amorphous terms that were just as often measured qualitatively as quantitatively.

The past year of dot-com and advertising carnage has made the magazine-Web-site environment less experimental and more hardheaded. Just as some print magazines are disappearing, merging or folding supplements back into the main publication, the online iterations of magazines are responding to changes with belt-tightening moves that might have made sense even before the bubble burst.

Scott Alexander, senior online editor for Yahoo Internet Life, has seen it all. "I've been working on the site for five years," he says. "I rode it from the modest beginnings, through the sky-high insanity, and back down to reality again." During the ride up, "It seemed like everything went crazy. There was so much attention to pumping up Web sites of magazines and turning them into profit centers, instead of viewing the magazine's Web site as its own separate business."

Now, Alexander, says, "We realize we can't give everybody every piece of material about everything. We have reconfigured ourselves not as a comprehensive place to learn everything about the Net and review every site possible. We're on the Web to service our subscribers, to create buzz for the magazine, and stimulate interest. There's no mandate to put everything up from the magazine on the Web, which there was at one point. Our emphasis now is on daily original content that complements what's in our monthly magazine. We do seven daily features."

Seven daily features? Isn't that ambitious? Isn't daily original content the sort of expensive undertaking that makes the road to profitability for magazine Web sites go on forever? Not if your magazine Web site is part of a larger network. Notes Alexander, "We're able to pull it off on relatively modest budget, we have only 1-1/2 pure editorial people devoted to the site, because we have access to broader Ziff Davis technical and design support. If yil.com was a standalone site, we'd need to get more people who can do more things, like someone who could function both as an art director and as a producer. We might need five people to build the site that way."

KEEP IT SMALL, KEEP IT FOCUSED

Another magazine site that has seen success, if awards are an indication of success in today's environment, is The Antlantic.com. Wen Stephenson, now managing editor for Frontline's Web edition, was editorial director of The Atlantic Online for five years. Says Stephenson, "Unlike many magazines, The Atlantic never pumped a huge amount of money into its Web site. Some spent millions, I know, but we never had a staff of more than eight, including one marketing person. And one of those people was not even 100percent-time devoted to running the online business. When I look back, I think we got one thing right: By focusing on the product, and by that I mean editorial and design, we created a great site, and we were rewarded with traffic and critical acclaim."

But Stephenson acknowledges, "When I look back, I have to say that not enough resources were devoted to the business side of the operation. We never had anyone, full-time, selling ads for the site. We signed on with several ad sales networks, but we never made that enough of a priority internally. The recent changes at TheAtlanti.com [the onlineonly staff has been cut] was a result of all the usual things. The downturn in the Net economy meant that our revenue dried up. Right now, the only real revenue on the Site is sales of subscriptions to the print magazine. When I was there, The Atlantic was acquiring as many as if not more paying subscribers via the Web site as it was getting from direct mail. That's pretty impressive. And now the site is shifting away from original Web content to selling subscriptions. They're able to do that with a far smaller staff. The economic realities mean that the site is forced to focused on one core mission: Build the magazine's audience."

WHICH TOOLS WILL LET YOUR SITE THRIVE?

The managers of every worthy online extension of a print magazine continue to wrestle with the question of what their core mission is. As they hammer out a consensus, they need to determine what tools they need to meet that mission. In this issue of FOLIOMAG.COM, we explore what technologies and approaches might work best and are worth investing in at a time when budgets are tightening. In "XML Inches Toward the Mainstream," Greg Lindsay cuts through the eXtensible Markup Language buzzterm and shows why moving your site to a standard tagging system, not just one limited to today's World Wide Web, could be the right way for your magazine to encode its data once and not have to reformat everything in your archives just because a new presentation platform shows up. In "Wireless For Less," Caroline Jenkins considers one of those new presentation platforms, wireless devices, and examines what publishers and advertisers want your readers to see on these tiny screens. In "Unleashing the Power of Word-of-Mouth," Jill ian S. Ambroz shows how the year's biggest online disruption--the music-file-sharing service Napster--is part of a larger group of peer-to-peer and community services that can make your magazine's Web site more lively, more inviting, more important to your readers. This is only the beginning, of course. Tougher economic times force editors and publishers to be more inventive and creative if they want to succeed.