How Should News Magazines Make the Jump Online? 21
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?"
Subjects are worthless (Score:3, Insightful)
So what happens with the other 85% of comments?
In 3 years? (Score:3, Funny)
Printing a review of Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom Gaming Console?
My suggestion (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
I think they need to think carefully about the ratio between free and paid content. Not knowing what publication this is, it's hard to be specific, but I believe that only the truly authoritative sites can get away with putting most of their content behind a subscription wall. Let's face it, with so much stuff available for free today on the Internet from reputable sources, you have to provide something unique, some extra value-add that makes it worthwhile to subscribe to your content.
The local newspaper
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Re:On a similar subject (Score:2)
Slashdot runs on Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/ [slashcode.com]). If you want to, you can change the appearance of it with skins and whatnot. I would also recommend Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/ [drupal.org] and Zope (http://www.zope.org/ [zope.org]). Hire somebody to create a nice skin for it, and any one of the above systems should be able to neatly handle the backend work.
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Online magazines need "commenting" enabled (Score:1)
I would love to see a site have a pretty magazine and then have a "commmenting area" where you can read all the comments, in the same way that some magazines today have a few pages of comments at the beginning of the magazine that talk about last weeks articles.
Magazines need this method of creating trust w
Free (Samba) books can't replace dead trees (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Free (Samba) books can't replace dead trees (Score:1)
Why oh why would an ebook have individual pages (and thicknesses?) But even given that, pretty much any PDA is thinner than that, and most tablet PCs are only about 1.5" thick. (I did find one by transmeta with dimensions of 0.98"x7.95"x9.5") which not only seems perfectly reasonable for reading, but a 40GB hard drive and a wireless car
Re:Free (Samba) books can't replace dead trees (Score:2)
Right now on my desk I have two manuals open, and a pen stuck in at the page in one where the diagram is.
To do this with e-books I would need three, two for one manual and one for the other, plus some DRM workaround to allow me to have the two displaying different pages of the one manual.
And I still wouldn't care to take any of the curerent e-books into the tub.
--dave (yes, I do read technical manuals in the tub) c-b
Basics, basics, basics, basics (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in a major metropolitan area, and we have a newspaper here I really love. I don't think it's the perfect paper, but I really like it. I think the print version is great.
However, for some reason, they can't get the online version nearly as good as the print version, and it drives me crazy. It's gotten better in recent years, but not nearly as good as the print version.
What especial
Advertising is critical (Score:2, Insightful)
What you really need to do is find a way to prove to advertisers that going online will give them the same or more exposure to readers than print ads do. In the print world, nobody really knows how much of an effect an ad has on readers...advertisers just take it on faith that it works. But for some reason, when you try to convince them to buy an online ad, they say "But how will we know if it will reach the readers?" (even though you can give t
Economist (Score:2)