Charlotte Squire is the irrepressible optimist who has been living and breathing online magazine Happyzine for the past five years and trying to succeed with what she calls “solutions focused journalism”.
Ohbaby becomes the latest magazine publisher to join the digital fray with the launch of its magazine on Apple’s Newsstand platform.
Top Gear Magazine New Zealand has ceased publication after seven years in the game, with this month’s issue its last.
Hark! The iPad hath been released, the feverish purchasing (300,000 on its first day in the US, Apple says) hath begun and the opining, reviewing, analysing and critiquing of one of the world’s most talked about devices is well underway. And, overall, it seems the opining, reviewing, analysing and critiquing of this ‘game changing’ gadget has been very positive.
Over the past few years, there have been numerous attempts to make magazines more interactive. Sadly, most of those attempts tended to revolve around gimmicky, impractical augmented reality stunts, where a magazine might be held up to the computer screen and a photo ‘comes to life’. There was already a medium for this: it was called video. And there was plenty of it on that thing called the internet. But for the first time in a long time, if some of the app demonstrations deliver what they promise, the integrated digital content soon to be offered up appears to offer actual benefits to everyone involved in the process—the readers, the advertisers and, if the money starts coming back, the publishers.
The US Magazine Publishers’ Association does a ton of great research about the power of magazines to deliver hearts, minds and eyeballs. Ironic that the message is being delivered via online video.
On bludger patrol
Doyen of the leftie literrati, Brian Edwards, has launched a surprising attack on that near-sacred liberal institution, the public library. In his blog yesterday, he writes:What pisses me off as an author is that for every person who buys your book, dozens of other bludgers get …