e-Magazines Still Archaic?
Posted by Dahlia on September 13, 2008 · 2 Comments
The Wall Street Journal was rather cocky about the release of their new lifestyle magazine, WSJ. (with the period) last week, taking slight swipes at their competitions like T Magazine from The New York Times.
After some reflections and analyzing e-magazines, I’m starting to wonder if e-magazines really offer you a different web experience or are they really just spruced up versions of their printed counterparts? We’re now expecting more and more from fashion websites, we want them to be updated daily, we want RSS feeds, we want comment capabilities, forums, and tons of pictures and videos to look at.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand why big reputable newspaper companies such as the WSJ and NY Times cannot afford to give its magazines the same web usability as their newspapers. Granted, these magazines only publish monthly or quarterly, but I believe the extra online features should be added.
Here are some of things lacking from WSJ.
- No comment feature - Are we not allowed to have dialogue in the luxury world?
- Only one RSS Feed of a blog-ish type of daily update called “WSJ. Magazine Today”, of which a couple of the articles don’t show up in the feed, or a few appear in the feed but not on the same page of the site? Where are you pulling your posts WSJ.?
- Videos - Ok. I’m going to rip this apart. What is up with their videos?? I really like Roland Mouret and his interview “The Shape of Things To Come” is a good read. But the videos on this site are little more than decorative and have little to say. I usually like WSJ’s reporting videos on the newspaper’s site, even if they do lack pizzazz. These videos’ intros sound off to the beat of something coming off of MTV’s Cribs. On top of that, you can’t even share the video, not that they’d be worth it… Is this really luxury? I’m not even rich but I know crap when I see it.
I’ve revisited T Magazine’s site and also found a few gripes.
- No comment feature - except for their blog “In The Moment” which I’m starting to believe is really a blog post overload of anything fashion related. Hardly anybody comments.
- RSS only for “In The Moment”, so you’d have to scroll through a maze of articles on the site itself.
- Videos are non-linkable, non-adjustable, and a tad too small for my taste (make it YouTube size at least). I like their “Screen Test” series, and can find a few gems in “Exclusive Films”, but I would do away with “T Takes” of short films, they don’t belong on this site.
I’m split between what e-magazines today should represent. As a print publication, it’s obvious we’re only doing the reading and there’s no interaction whatsoever between the content and yourself. But as a web experience, especially seeing how interaction is now possible between the content and the user, I’ve come to expect this extra feature to be available for online publications (whether they have printed counterparts or not). I suppose magazines don’t want to lose their authority on fashion, and open the gates to dialogue will expose them to direct, unfiltered critique of their content. But so far I think being able to comment and share content has only heightened the interest in fashion and we could get some very insightful opinions from individuals you wouldn’t never hear about. Cathy Horyn’s “On The Runway” blog is a prime example of being able to voice her opinions, and still be respected and receive both favorable or unfavorable opinions from different users. This interaction shouldn’t be ignored and for the fashion industry, reknown as a tough skin industry, to shrivel up so easily to opinionated consumers is sort of an oxymoron.
These are some good points that I had not really paid attention to, like the feeds and videos. My biggest issue with WSJ and T Magazine is that the way they present their articles is boring! Especially WSJ, it’s just as if I’m reading an online article, which I guess is what I’m doing, but I would think they would want to turn the reading experience into an entirely new and engaging way. T at least presents the articles in a sliding way, but still not interactive enough to me. I don’t know of ways that they can make them a entirely new experience, but I agree that comments are something that could really bring the dialogue to another level. The author gets feedback right from the people and we can also engage each other that way. Cathy Horyn’s blog is an excellent example, I have never participated in their discussions, but wow, her commenters have the best comments!
I think comments are the best part of any article, you get to hear two sides of the story instead of just one.
As far as reading the articles themselves, well I don’t need it to be ultra fancy that it’s almost a game to read an article. I would probably just prefer if T Magazine indexed their articles better, make the arrow buttons more obvious as to where they belong (there are scrolling buttons, and then there are buttons to skip through different sections).
WSJ. has too much white space and makes it look larger than it really is. They would also need to index and archive their articles more properly (but we probably won’t see that til the next issue comes out). Otherwise I like the format of their text, it’s readable and you can share the content. But they really need to do something about those videos, that Airline video is embarrassing!