Yesterday's NY Times article about online news raised some very interesting questions about the newspaper of the future. Susan Mernit has posted a letter from Ken Sands, the online Publisher of the Spokesman-Review one of the papers whose models the Times wrote about. In a Poynter online discussion group he wrote;
We're at an interesting period in the evolution of online news. Many newspapers simply put their print content online, add some breaking news and maybe a few bells-and-whistles multimedia and interactivity and call it good. Sell a bunch of online advertising and everybody's happy, right?
I don't think so. In the next few years, in my view, online news should become much more independent of that print content. If you think about it, posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web, including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment, archiving, aggregation and community publishing. When you truly take advantage of those attributes, you've got a much different web site.
I think that this is even more the case with online magazine sites. A recent design review on designinteract.com (a publication of Communication Arts) says, " We all know that magazine sites are intended to support their offline counterparts and further their subscription base." The site is putting up partial articles, listing the table of contents, and party photos (though as the review points out it would probably be more satisfying for the user and those in the phots if the images were captioned.) They could do a better job announcing upcoming issues and it looks like a pain to update given the paucity of content, but I suppose as a marketing vehicle it is fine. But I wouldn't call it a real magazine site.
A real magazine site has many of the same attributes that Sands thinks would make a good newspaper site. Done properly it can be a real partner with a print magazine and since it would be so compelling, I bet it would also be a powerful driver of subs.