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 “The app is dead” is something I hear a lot, amid complaints that they’ve been replaced by an endless series of flat replicas, designed in a one-size-fits-all format.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.
