Digital Magazines Emerge—But Glossy Paper Publishers Haven’t Turned the Page on the Past

$2.99 iPhone version of its December 2009 “Man of the Year” issue—or rather, part of the issue, as most of the articles seem to have been omitted in favor of photos (including timeless ones of Paul Rudd in a pink bathrobe, Twitter’s Evan Williams and Biz Stone tweeting behind each other’s backs, and the new Captain Kirk flying a paper Starship Enterprise).

The GQ iPhone "Man of the Year" Issue on iPhone -- Twitter's Biz Stone (L) and Evan Williams (R)The only interesting twist in the GQ app is that if you hold the phone vertically, you get a scrolling table of contents and Web-style article pages, and if you hold it horizontally, you get tiny facsimiles of the corresponding pages in the print magazine. You can double-tap the screen to zoom and navigate between pages by flicking. Alas, I couldn’t get all the way through the magazine, as the app kept crashing on me.

A few digital publications are getting slightly more creative. Jettison Quarterly, a Flash-based online periodical focused on the Chicago arts and culture scene, still has the goofy Zmags-style page turn animations, but it veers away from the literal magazine metaphor in a few respects. For example, it uses fonts that are sufficiently large that you don’t have to zoom in to read the text. And it usually plasters words and images right over the gutter, the area around the fold in a traditional magazine spread.

However, Jettison is inconsistent on this score—and the page turn animation is built around the premise that there is a fold, meaning the readers are never quite sure what they’re meant to be looking at. Is it a print spread? A Web page? A billboard? It’s odd to see Jettison‘s designers confining themselves to the old paper metaphors when the magazine doesn’t even have a print edition.

Flyp - A Sample SpreadFlyp, a multimedia publication based in New York, is taking more chances. It’s still guided by the magazine spread metaphor (and it’s still got the goofy page-turn animations!) but its tagline—“More than a magazine”—is accurate. Flyp‘s creators aren’t just churning out the standard text and photos. There’s also audio, video, and animated Flash infographics, and the feature packages come with Hollywood-grade video introductions—the intro to Flyp‘s piece on end-of-life care is a nice example.

I like what Flyp‘s designers are doing so far because they’re not slavishly imitating print magazines. Rather, the publication uses new media to carve out a space analogous to, not the same as, the one that magazines inhabit in the print world.

What do I mean by that? I think there are a few fundamental things that set magazines apart from newspapers. One is the tone and intent of the articles: A little less rushed and ephemeral, a little more synthetic, analytical, and writerly. Another is the imagery—especially large-format photography and things like charts and maps. Then there’s the design, meaning the way text and images are juxtaposed, and the way typography itself is used as a graphical element. In the hands of good editors and designers, these things can be brought together to create an immersive experience that makes full use of the possibilities of print—the “affordances” of the paper medium, as an interaction designer might put it.

But if you just transplant that same experience from paper onto a screen, the way Zmags and Zinio do, you create something that immediately feels stunted and incomplete, because digital environments provide different affordances from paper. (You can scroll an online article up or down infinitely without ever having to “turn” a page, to name just one.)

Flyp‘s articles are well written and serious, and they integrate story material with photos, videos, and animation in a way that feels inviting, not imposing or forced. (This piece about Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio, the married architect/designer couple behind the new Institute of Contemporary Art building in Boston, is especially good.) With Flyp, you get to explore a subject at your own pace in a guided setting. You aren’t overwhelmed with data, but since the whole thing is running inside a browser window, Google is only a click away. The publication hasn’t

Author: Wade Roush

Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco. Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.) I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia. I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats. My personal site: waderoush.com My social media coordinates: Twitter: @wroush Facebook: facebook.com/wade.roush LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/waderoush Google+ : google.com/+WadeRoush YouTube: youtube.com/wroush1967 Flickr: flickr.com/photos/wroush/ Pinterest: pinterest.com/waderoush/