A State of the Art Roundtable
Just
a little under four years ago I headed down to St. Petersburg, Florida for an
iPad conference at the Poynter Institute hosted and organized by Mario Garcia.
A small but very engaged group of newspaper, magazine, and digital designers
gathered to see and hear reports on the very first wave of app creations. My
iPad had just arrived from Apple the day before and was still fresh in its box,
and I spent a lot of the conference busily downloading apps from a wide array
of publications (remember how long those downloads used to take?). It was a
heady and exciting moment, and almost everyone at that conference left to go
home and launch new, groundbreaking app projects across a wide variety of
styles and platforms.
I
used the experience of Mario’s conference to talk my way into a job at Reader’s Digest, helping to launch their
magazine app, and later another for Best
Health, a related magazine published in Toronto. There were iPad
conferences, workshops, case studies that were published in design magazines
and websites, and it seemed like everybody was working on an app project.
Not
anymore. We’ve come a long way since a top creative director breathlessly told
me that “the iPad is the biggest thing to happen to magazines since the
printing press.” And while some magazines continue to publish exciting,
engaging iPad editions — National
Geographic, Esquire, Popular Mechanics, and Bon Appetit are doing top-notch work — for many the rich, textural
digital versions filled with original content and experiences have devolved
into what are essentially flat replicas. Readers and especially magazine makers
have failed to embrace the new magazine apps in large (or even medium) numbers.
I was recently with a roomful of top magazine editors and creative directors at
the National Magazine Awards and it was apparent that none of them had a
passion or sense of engagement with apps; iPad magazines simply were not an
essential part of their world.
What
went wrong? Are iPad apps dead, or do they still have a bright future? I
reached out for answers to some of the smartest magazine makers I know, folks
who have been active in creating dynamic editorial products on multiple
platforms, from print magazines to daily newspapers to websites. And of course,
they’ve all been integral in the development of some memorable magazine app
projects. I asked them about the lack of enthusiasm for apps, how the
production system has affected app creation, and whether there’s a future for
digital magazines on the tablet platform.
Here’s
what they had to say.
THE
PANEL:
Dr. Mario R. García has worked on more
than 650 media design projects as the CEO and founder of García Media. His last
app project was the Kronen HD iPad app for the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung.
David Jacobs is the CEO of 29th Street
Publishing. Their most recent app was Radio
Silence.
Josh Klenert is Executive Director in
the Digital Customer Experience team for JPMorgan Chase. Prior to that he was
Vice President, Design & UX for The Huffington Post Media Group and served
as the creative director for Huffington magazine app. His latest app project
was Huffington magazine and the
redesigns of the HuffPost news apps
for iOS7 and Android.
Jeremy Leslie‘s London-based magCulture
studio designs editorial projects for print and digital publication. He also
blogs, writes and speaks about editorial design (read more at
magCulture.com). His latest iPad project
is the Frieze magazine app; he also designed online publishing project Aeon.
Joe Zeff is president of Joe Zeff
Design, a boutique studio that designs and develops apps for corporations,
universities and publishers. His latest app is Spies of Mississippi: The
Appumentary. Prior to that, Joe Zeff Design created the official Super Bowl
XLVIII app for the National Football League.
A lot of people are very cynical about the
current state of magazine apps based on print editions. “The app is dead” is
something I hear a lot, amid complaints that they’ve been replaced by an
endless series of flat replicas, designed in a one-size-fits-all format. Do you
agree with this? Or are you still optimistic about the future of magazine apps,
and think there is lots of creative work ahead?
Josh Klenert: I would not say the app
is dead, but it might have a bullet wound to the leg. It’s probably not been
the silver bullet that the magazine industry hoped for 3+ years ago. There is
certainly some great work being done in the space, but the scale and audience
is just not there and that has a lot to do with replicating the production
cycle of a print magazine. A digital product that only updates once a month is
a relic. A lot of what was done in wave 1 of app magazines ignored the lessons
of web over the last 20+ years. I am incredibly optimistic about magazine-like
storytelling on digital devices, but binding them to print production cycles in
monolithic downloads must evolve. I think that’s why we’re starting to see lots
of robust feature-length stories told directly on the web in responsive web
packaging.
David Jacobs: I don’t think it’s fair
to say the app is dead – rather the app was never alive. (This question nearly
answers itself!) What we have learned is that the replica will never be
successful. Consumers have soundly rejected them: digital subscriptions make up
only 3% of total subscriptions. But I am of course optimistic about the future
of magazine apps, since the industry has an opportunity for a reboot. There is
a challenge (and an opportunity) since the mainstream conception of a magazine
app is what amounts to a photo gallery of pages of a magazine, with the
occasional widget or animation. But that’s not a transformation that is going
to happen overnight.
Joe Zeff: I wouldn’t say that magazine
apps are dead, but that they are in dire need of a transfusion. I continue to
be optimistic because there’s no stopping the proliferation of tablets. There
will continue to be a market for applications built specifically for these
devices. The industry needs to shift its focus toward brand extension. Let’s
face it, if consumers can get the same content in their mailbox, newsstand and
browser, there’s little justification for downloading a 250-megabyte magazine.
Instead, excite them with new products that come to life on tablets:
experiential content, utility applications, multimedia delivered offline. The
going rate for a digital magazine is zero, as publishers have made them free
with print subscriptions. The average price for an iBook is $9. There lies an opportunity
to monetize content — one of many.
Mario García: I am optimistic, first of
all. I think the state of magazine design for tablets is still in its infancy.
It has not helped that the economic climate for publishers has not been up to
par with the ambitions of editors and designers. Having said that, there is
much that could have been done already, three years after the first iPads
rolled out of the Apple factory. We still see a lot of static,
turn-the-page-type of magazine apps. We need to begin to look at the tablet’s
peculiarities, to what it can do, and then exploit that. It is not a print
publication per se. It is a combination of book, film documentary, a little TV,
some radio. It is multisensory, and we have not explored that fully yet. It is
also the closest we can come, so far, to a digital experience that matches a
lot of the intuitive movements that we are familiar with via print.
Jeremy Leslie: I’m very disappointed by
the current state of magazine apps, but it’s not as black and white as you
portray; we’re still only at the beginning of a longer experiment in the form.
The initial excitement across the industry, from publishers and creatives, has
subsided as the reality of making apps hit home. From a business point of view
the promise of easily slipping app production into the print workflow was
foolishly naive, while editors and designers who were keen to experiment soon
found themselves stretched too thin. On top of this, sales have been
disappointing so most apps have reverted to simpler replicas as a holding
pattern while publishers work out next steps.
Whether
or not paid apps downloaded to tablets is the way forward for editorial content
remains to be seen. But what they have done is demonstrate to the print-is-dead
fundamentalists that digital content can’t just be raw information.
Instantaneous access to content is becoming the norm; we’re now seeing that the
need for differentiation in digital presentation is becoming desirable. How
does my content look different to my competitors? How will a subscriber
distinguish The Guardian from The New York Times?
What do you think of the current format and
presentation of magazine apps? Do you think that the dominance of DPS as a
production/creation tool has had a good or bad effect?
Joe Zeff: It’s easy to blame Adobe DPS
for the spate of lookalike magazines; instead, I blame the publishers. They
blindly followed AAM née ABC guidelines and created digital magazines that were
hardly different from print. They prioritized customer retention over customer
acquisition and focused on rate base expansion instead of new product
development. They have failed to excite advertisers, blaming weak CPM numbers
that could be strengthened by aggregating audiences through networks. As our
projects at Joe Zeff Design have demonstrated again and again, DPS is a
wonderful platform for launching new products that engage consumers. A la carte
magazines, interactive modules, utility-based applications — they’re all
possible today, thanks in part to Adobe DPS.
That’s
not to say DPS couldn’t be better. The platform currently includes the ability
to publish folio content to Adobe’s proprietary web viewer. Most DPS features
work fine; there remain issues with scaling and swiping. If publishers could
push more dynamic experiences to the web, they could reach larger audiences
with app-like content and better address the opportunity to sell interactive
advertising.
Josh Klenert: DPS has its pros and cons,
but it’s not the only solution for publishing a magazine app. If building your
own app is not a solution there are plenty of other options out there including
PRSS, DShare, Mag+, and Readymag.
Jeremy Leslie: DPS served a vital role
kick starting publishers into thinking about app editions, but in the longer
term has proved to be a misdirection. I’m sure most of us remember opening
early editions of the Wired app on which DPS was modeled. Hugely exciting, but
absurdly over-promising. What budget and resource did the Wired team have for
those issues? (And why are those first issues unavailable to view today?) DPS
sold itself as a plug-in for InDesign, something easily assimilated into the
workflow, but its central conceptual link to the printed page is flawed. It was
the result of a rushed development to meet the iPad launch and has served the
industry poorly since. But it has had a domino effect on publishers and their
HTML developers. Snowfall and other attempts at web-based long form editorial
design have been encouraged by apps.
Why have readers failed to embrace magazine
apps in the numbers that we all once hoped? Is the problem the app format, the
tablets, or something more fundamental?
David Jacobs: A lot of the thinking
about how audiences work on the Internet is flawed. For years, the thinking was
“all audiences are moving on-line.” OK, that’s an interesting assertion! So
what happened? Websites rebuilt themselves to be better clients for Google, and
then again to be better clients for Facebook and Twitter, and now we are seeing
the beginnings of that happening again – for folks to be more like Buzzfeed and
Upworthy. This is an incremental improvement – Buzzfeed and Upworthy both
advertise their empathy for users as a cornerstone for what they believe in.
But
overall, the way audiences behave on-line (and on mobile) is much less
predictable than anyone thought it would be. Successful products focus on
accessibility, experience and flexibility.
Traditionally, mobile magazines have fallen down on all three of those.
By the way, print magazines, especially this most recent generation of
independent magazines, completely understand this and take advantage of it.
Start-up publishers are taking advantage of social networks to find their ideal
audience and then sending them beautiful print products. And it’s a great experience
flipped around, too – as a reader and a fan of magazines, the joy of searching
for (and finding) a new print magazine is not something the average tablet
experience can touch.
Mario García: I think the readers will
come around. I wish I knew why they have
not flocked to magazine apps in greater numbers and with greater passion. But
this is a matter of time. I repeat that this is a genre in its infancy. But I
also admit, that magazine apps must make themselves so unique and interesting
that readers will realize they cannot go without them. The flat and static ones
that abound are not going to do the job, except that they are more portable,
than, let’s say a 401-page edition of the printed Vanity Fair.
Josh Klenert: We’ve learned over the
last 20 years of publishing on the web, that to gain scale you need to leverage
search and social to build an audience. It’s not true that “if you build it,
they will come.” The same is true for apps. Right now, they are a destination.
If a user connects with your brand, they will come, consume, and hopefully
return. For example, with our HuffPost
news app, we see that it’s a destination that sees more page views per visitor
versus mobile web, but mobile web sees more unique users. But this is for a
news product that is updated hundreds of times a day, not a weekly or monthly
publication that lands with a thud. Those weekly/monthly publications then just
sit in the Newsstand collecting dust in between updates while users move on to products
that embrace the always-connected digital platform; ones that simply provide
more stuff more often. I certainly don’t think you can blame the tablets
themselves. You can’t argue with the vast number of iPads or Android tablets
sold or apps downloaded (and used), and it’s not the usability of the iPad
either. How many times have you seen a two year old flawlessly zip around on an
iPad?
Joe Zeff: At Joe Zeff Design we’re less
enthusiastic about magazine-style apps as a broadcast medium; instead, we leverage
their ability to narrowcast. We target specific audiences with specific
content. Personalization is the next frontier; my own magazine should reflect
my own interests, not just those of the masses. Whether that takes shape
through browser-based or native applications, there’s an opportunity to blend
curated, dynamic and social content to deliver unique experiences. Apps can
make those experiences even more personalized by attaching that content to
utility functions that interact with one’s calendar, photographs, contacts and
preferences.
Jeremy Leslie: Tablets are great for
watching movies, playing games, reading websites, checking emails, listening to
music, tweeting, facebooking and answering questionnaires like this one. And
now you’re saying that in addition to all these activities I have the option to
spend money on a 350-meg download of a product that is better in print? The
problem is fundamental (and reflected in Apple’s lack of interest in the
magazine app. Abandon Newsstand!) An exception is as an alternative to physical
distribution. If a print magazine is expensive and slow to arrive in a
far-flung part of the world, an app is a great get-round. I designed the Frieze
magazine app, and that’s their strategy.
Who is creating exciting, dynamic magazine
apps, and will we see more of them in the future?
David Jacobs: Obviously, I think our
apps (29th Street Publishing) are the best. I would say, though, that we are 1
or 2% of where we have to be in terms of offering design flexibility and the user
experience. DPS was necessary – it was a brute-force solution (and really a
rather remarkable one) to get every title in the store and doing business. And
for the last few years, from a business perspective, it’s basically a cool perk
for print subscribers. The most successful stand-alone app has mid-four figure
subscribers. But if you look at every other form of media – books, music,
television, media, video games, it’s all gone majority mobile, and at some
point this year may even go to 66%+ penetration for mobile. Magazines are still
stuck in single-digits. So we can’t really say DPS was good or bad. It is
dominant, but it’s dominant in a relatively small fishbowl. But what we’re
allowed now is the chance to figure out what comes next. And DPS deserves
credit for priming the pump.
Josh Klenert: National Geographic continues to do amazing multimedia storytelling
and that ports to their magazine app really well. I really like how Esquire and
The Atlantic have started to put out weekly editions. Popular Mechanics explodes every month with unique story telling
devices. GQ & Time have been doing an amazing amount
of incredible work in video. Just looking over the list of finalists for this
years SPD Awards show how much awe-inspiring, vibrant, and creative work is
being done in the digital medium.
Joe Zeff: Conde Nast has been the most
forward-thinking publisher. Wired has
been out front since Day One, creating new content for their tablet editions
that make their apps feel special. The
New Yorker and Vanity Fair have
wonderful iPhone editions that combine smart design with sensible HTML
programming. The company’s partnership with MasterCard to infuse magazines with
e-commerce capability is a step in the right direction.
Mario García: I’m not so sure. I haven’t
heard of many in the traditional magazine app mode that are doing interesting
things lately. The most interesting apps for me are those trying to rethink the
mobile news experience altogether: Circa, Breaking News, NYT Now, NowThis News.
I am also interested in the few experiments in new packages of content (rather
than adapting a printed magazine to the tablet), notably Esquire Weekly. The publications that are more able to experiment
by breaking out of the confines of translating a printed page to digital are
the most promising. (Thanks to García Media art director Reed Reibstein for
assistance with this question.)
Jeremy Leslie: I think we’ve seen many
apps shine brightly for an issue or two then fade. They take a huge investment
in time and money for very little response from a skeptical public. DPS happens
to work very well for The New Yorker
— that magazine’s strength of vision meant it translated instantly to the
tablet. It didn’t feel the need to add bells and whistles, it understood what
it’s readers valued about its print edition — reading.
The
only other app worth mentioning remains Letter to Jane; that app is the single
one I’m aware of that sought to link content design and ux design to produce a
simple intuitive and enjoyable experience. Some of Tim Moore’s other work at
29th Street Publishing shares his thoughts in this too, but the necessary
templating restricts invention. Steve Gregor made clever use of DPS for an iPad
edition of his Gym Class Magazine,
hiding some of the clumsy nav tools. Other bespoke apps have made some
interesting experiments, but are generally too reliant on video and animation
and become heavy files — too long to download and too large to keep on your
tablet.
When the iPad and magazine apps were
launched, there was a lot of enthusiasm in the art director world, but with the
rise of replica apps, a lot of the initial energy has dissipated. Many people
feel now that app work is basically production work. Is there a future for art
directors who are interested in creating apps?
Mario García: I think that there are
great possibilities for creative art directors, but I admit that those
possibilities may still be greater, in terms of freedom with the canvas, in
print. Digital design can have a lot of
creative input, but one must adapt to the realities of templates that
facilitate production. It is, in my view, the quintessential 60% formula, 40%
surprise. But the surprise element is there for the creative art director to
explore and to enjoy with gusto.
Josh Klenert: Right now various
business rules are probably getting in the way of products that are designed
more for a digital medium than print. That said, we’re still in the early days
and as we are still seeing with the web — the rules continue to change. I would
not throw in the towel just yet. The cliché “change is the only constant” comes
to mind. I lean towards digging in and being apart of this ongoing evolution.
There is certainly still opportunity for exciting development — most likely
stepping away from being bound so closely to print.
Joe Zeff: There is enormous potential
for those with entrepreneurial spirit, as the playing field is flat. Large
publishers have few advantages over individual designers when it comes to
creating content for tablets. In fact, the burdens placed on publishers to support
mulitplatform ubiquity give individuals and small studios a decisive edge. Our
latest project, Spies of Mississippi: The Appumentary, started with a blank
sheet of paper, not a mandate to create weekly or monthly issues on five
different platforms. If you approach app work as production work, then that’s
all it will be. If you approach apps as a way to deliver immersive, intuitive
multitouch experiences that leverage the capabilities of tablet computers, you
may just change the world.
Jeremy Leslie: We mustn’t let initial
app production experience dilute the bigger message — the digital future for
editorial designers is online. Well-designed digital editorial is inevitable,
but probably won’t be apps.
How will the magazine app publishing scene
be different a year from now? Will we be having an “apps are back!” roundtable
next year?
Josh Klenert: My best guess is that
there will be bigger shifts on the business side that will allow for more
scale. Platforms like Zinio, ISSUU, and Next Issue will reach massive scale
with ecosystems to consume magazine content no matter where users are will
thrive. Think of YouTube for videos. Videos can be watched on YouTube or be
embedded anywhere. Publishing ecosystems that don’t allow for this will
disappear.
Big
publishers may go the way of the music industry and start to unbundle content
(think singles vs. full albums) — possibly with a fremium model. Content a user
consumes will become more passively personalized for the user. Its like adding
elements of a personalized Flipboard-like experience which shows the content
you are most interested in. For example, I read lots of movie reviews from Entertainment Weekly; well then I should
start to see more entertainment content from Time appear in my magazine. I
bookmark a story about summer suits in GQ;
well then I should start to see more fashion content from Details appear. These apps need to ultimately become native to
their digital platforms and evolve into utilities that people go to on a daily
basis. In order to do this, like the web before it, the direct connection to a
printed publication cycle needs to be broken.
David Jacobs: Next year — about the
same. Maybe a 1.5x or 2x growth, with a few new hits by start-ups and
established players alike. Hopefully a couple of our titles will be in the mix,
but I think folks like Offline Magazine
and the team at Glide are going to be
pushing new titles as well.
If
you think of the watershed apps, very few of them were anything considered
replica. There are huge video games that are similar to the big Xbox &
Playstation hits of the last decade, but the biggest hits are built with the
iPhone in mind – touch-focused interface, playable in short bursts, quickly
addictive. The same is true for albums like Beyoncé’s — a launch like hers
(with videos for every song) wouldn’t have been possible with iTunes. She just
couldn’t have pressed & shipped 10M DVDs without people getting a sniff of
it. And I think we’re beginning to see the same sort of “on-line-first” release
with TV and movies now as well. That’s possibly the best analogy to magazines.
The DVD market was enormous (and still is), but all of the exciting art is
happening in serialized dramas that are basically produced to be consumed later
— not when and where it’s aired.
Mario García: A year from now? Perhaps
we’ll see more of the multimedia storytelling (à la Snow Fall) that some
newspapers are exploring come to magazine apps.”
Joe Zeff: The next generation of
digital publications shifts control from the publisher to the consumer,
allowing the consumer to determine what content they want and how and when they
want to consume it. It’s time to rip the covers off of traditional magazines
and deliver a la carte publications with a la carte advertising. Apps for
phones and tablets can more readily access personal information than browsers,
and that makes them a worthwhile platform for innovation. Personalized
magazines combine content from all over through plug-and-play APIs — magazines,
television, social feeds, Nest thermostats, Fitbit trackers, and bank
statements. They are always in the right place at the right time, helping me to
work, shop, decide and play. Done right, they become inextricable.
Whether
that happens one or five years from now remains to be seen. But we need to keep
moving in that direction in order to get there. We can’t and shouldn’t stop
now.
Jeremy Leslie: I’d love to be able to
respond positively here, but I think we’re closer to the “remember when we
thought apps might be the saviour of publishing” reunion roundtable. And
perhaps someone will bring a first gen iPad that hasn’t been synced for three
years, and we can view those original Wired apps.
Source: http://www.robertnewman.com/are-magazine-apps-dead-a-state-of-the-art-roundtable/
