The character of content online: you need to understand why you're going online and then make it a real business

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Annual, 1997 by Cris Beam

How do you define an online magazine--by the medium or the message? Offering an electronic doppelganger of your print title won't draw new readers, but creating an entirely different online product means you lose the benefits of synergy. So, what do you do? Should you hire new writers and develop an independent business plan, or should you modify the print products you already have? While there are clearly more questions than answers, there are a few possible models.

"The first question I ask whenever a company tells me they just went up on the Web is who did it--your marketing group or your editorial group?" says Andrew Anker, president and CEO of Wired's electronic offspring, HotWired, which made its debut on the Web in October of 1994."You need to understand why you're doing it, and then make it a real business and give it the autonomy it needs."

And Anker should know about autonomy. HotWired, with its generalist approach to art and culture, news and entertainment, looks and feels nothing like the techno-centric Wired. The staff is different, the content is different, and even the approach to hiring differs from that of most print magazines. When Anker hires new employees, their interests take a back seat to the Internet. "The first step is you have to be Web-savvy. Then we ask, `What are your interests?' and put you on that."

HotWired currently has a staff of more than 50, and the ranks are growing at a rate of one or two new employees a week. Unlike its print progenitor, which focuses exclusively on the digital arena, only one of HotWired's eight sections addresses technology. The rest focus on art, literature and entertainment, news, sports and interactive dialogues with its more than 235,000 subscribers. Ultimately, Anker says, HotWired plans to house a travel section with a version of Rough Guides travel books, and possibly a version of a Reuters or AP feed--all fully searchable, of course. "Essentially, if you look at any consumer area--whether it's sports, entertainment, home and garden, travel--we think we can do something to serve our audience in each of these areas," says a confident Anker. " Wired talks about the digital revolution; HotWired is the digital revolution."

Time Inc.'s Pathfinder Web site, which rivals HotWired with more than 200,000 registered users, has an entirely different vision. While the staffs of HotWired and Wired are entirely separate, Pathfinder is extra work for roughly 130 regular time Inc. employees who upload much of the exact texts and music from the 40-plus titles of parent company Time Warner. Although some might view this disdainfully as "shovelware"--that is, mere replication of existing editorial or other material--former Pathfinder editor James Kinsella claims digitized information is different from print because users can do so much more with it.

"Who cares what this material was like before it got digitized?" Kinsella asks rhetorically. "We need to think about how this is being ported out much more than how it came in." Kinsella says that Pathfinder has been "bluelined up the wazoo," providing readers with searching capability and background information not found in the print versions.

"We've turned Time into a highly explorable database, and suddenly we've got a powerful system," Kinsella says."The reason we came up with the name Pathfinder is to help people find a path. It's really about personal empowerment."

Still, Pathfinder"is a weird idea for a magazine' says Jack Powers, director of the Graphics Research Laboratory in New York City and a publishing consultant on new-media technology. Powers says it doesn't make sense to lump all the disparate products of a company together in one online magazine.

Home alone

But there may be a middle ground. HomeArts, the new Web site from Hearst New Media & Technology Group, is a hybrid of HotWired and Pathfinder in its concept. Its staff (three full-time editors) works closely with the other Hearst magazines to choose material for online publication.

Kathryn Creech, vice president of Hearst New Media & Technology Group and general manager of HomeArts, says that the site builds on the identities already established by titles such as Good Housekeeping, Country Living, Redbook and Popular Mechanics by providing home, garden, family and relationship advice. (Hearst also has separate Web sites for two of its publications, Popular Mechanics and Esquire.) Ultimately, Creech says, the site will also provide content from affiliates such as Books That Work or The Food & Drink Network, in addition to content from advertisers.

"Our job is to really serve the magazines," Creech says. "Good Housekeeping has five million subscribers, so they must be doing something right. We want to build on all of that knowledge and put it into new media."

But "long articles don't work because they're easier to read on paper," adds Creech. "For us, expert advice, exchange of information and interactivity are the things that work."