How Should News Magazines Make the Jump Online?

uctpjac asks: "A friend of mine, a deputy editor of a 1/2 million plus circulation serious news magazine, is responsible for determining what they should be doing online. They already do the usual - selected free articles, subscriber only articles, archive search, some online-only material that is regularly updated. She asked me to think about what more they should do. My first simple suggestion would be to improve their RSS feeds (longer, better article summaries): I imagine the newsreader is the application through which most of us will be reading bitty things like weblogs and news stories, and competing for attention there needs a nice juicy inducement to click-through. I actually think that a traditional news magazine like this should also be using its reader-community more extensively. Again, Slashdot is my model for this: the readers, as long as their comments are well organized, are often at least as interesting as the writers. Are there any examples of old-fashioned papers/magazines making good reader fora? What else will the magazine be doing online? What should it be doing in 3 years, when we all have our low power, high quality, ePaper editions?"

Comments

Free (Samba) books can't replace dead trees

[davecb]

One of the first experiments in providing books in html and pdf was done by Tim O'Reilly and Andy Oram, with "Using Samba".

Useful, printable sections and chapters were available free and shipped with every copy of samba.

The result? The printed book leaped off the shelves.

You see, it's a total pain to read a laptop in the bathtub, and if you print a book ar magazine yourself on normal (thick!) paper, it is too big and clumsy to carry.

I don't expect one-page newsletters to survive web publishing. I do expect newspapers, magazines and books to continue to exist until I can get a 300 page ebook 1 inch thick. Which means each page needs to be less than 0.003" thick.

--dave