Here’s an interesting article to stretch your concept of the digital magazine.
5 Digital Magazine Trends to Keep an Eye On in 2015
Magazines have traditionally been issue based, because that was the only way to distribute them. But the web is a constantly moving target. So what does a magazine on the web look like? Some folks at Fast Company are looking at new ways to think about online magazines.
Their vision of the next generation digital magazine app is more than just a publication. It resembles an article-based hub, or one central location combining magazine content with a steady stream of regularly updated content from Fast Company’s various websites and Top 5 stories of the day.
They want to “put the reader first” and ensure that “every time [the reader opens] an application there is going to be new content in there.”
Well …. That’s certainly nice in some ways, but not in others, and I’m not sure it’s really “putting the reader first.”
I enjoy Facebook, for example, but the fact that it’s always scrolling by — and that it has atrocious search — makes it good for keeping up with “right now,” but lousy for looking up something from a week ago.
Is that “putting the reader first”? It all depends on what the reader wants to do with the content, doesn’t it?
Digital does not necessarily mean transitory, and we don’t want to structure all digital content as if it’s only supposed to survive for a day. Twitter is not the entire world of content.
There’s also the question of retention of what you read. There have been studies about content retention when reading print vs. digital material. The jury’s still out, but there’s reason to suspect that people retain more when they read in print because the experience involves other senses.
E.g., “it was on a right-hand page about 2/3 of the way through near the bottom.”
I discuss that a little in this post: Why the cool kids misunderstood the actual kids.
How can a digital experience add some of those tactile stimuli to help in retention? Whoever can figure that out will be helping digital readers immensely.
The effect of the print medium on retention, and the issue-based, tactile experience with a mazine, highlights this even more. As I implied in the title to this post, sometimes you remember an article by what issue it was in — and you remember the issue by the image was on the cover.
If a “digital magazine” becomes an issue-less, constantly flowing river of content, how will that affect retention?
I’m not saying any of this to argue for “editions” or to argue against a continuous flow of changing content. What I’m saying is that there are trade-offs, and it’s not a sure bet which one is more useful to the reader.