Sunday 2 December 2007

Kim Hollamby and the relationship between magazines and websites

Last week IPC’s Kim Hollamby provided an insightful take on the relationship between a magazine and its website. It’s a conundrum that’s had me wondering for a while now: do you replicate the print version’s content word for word, offer a sample of enticing nuggets from the paper copy to encourage people to go out and buy it, or publish an entirely different selection of stories, thus reaching out to a larger audience?

Kim’s answer was that you should not replicate the entire publication, but focus on one element and do that really well (eg Country Life on property). I’m not sure if this would work with all magazines, many of which are popular because of the breadth of material they contain – it would look lazy.

One of my pet hates is websites which are full of promising teasers that take you to a page saying ‘For the full story buy our magazine’ – the ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ approach. Maybe it’s because the editor thinks if their content’s all online, people won’t bother buying the mag. I beg to differ: there’s nothing quite like the wonderful tactility of my sumptuous new papery-smelling, glossy-paged Traveller.

Personally I think the magazine industry needs to look to newspapers, which are miles ahead on this issue. They should embrace multimedia enrichment through complementary video – for example, how about footage of the preparation for a big photo shoot, which we multi-skilled Cardiff kids will be more than able to assist with…

No comments: