I think a lot about the magazine industry. I work for an academic literary journal, which isn’t really the same thing as a magazine, but there is a lot of overlap between the two. An important part of my job is keeping on top of what’s going on in the industry and figuring out ways to apply and develop good ideas into something usable for us. Anyway, a couple blog posts got me thinking more than usual about the way magazines work online.
Masthead Online
Masthead Online is the online extension of Masthead: the Canadian magazine about the Canadian magazine industry. They relaunched yesterday with a ton of new web-friendly features including, finally!, the removal of its pay wall. But I spent some time looking around today, and wow is it cluttered. A four-column web layout! The information, as per usual with Masthead, is the top of the tops but I can’t see myself returning very often. I also don’t read Folio very much because of the clutter (I just noticed it also has a four-column layout! What is going on here?).
One of their big sells is the MastheadOnline Forums, with the Independent Publishing section moderated by “Michael Brooke, member of the Independent Publishers Association of Ontario (IPAO) and publisher of Concrete Wave magazine.” This I don’t get. Michael’s certainly active, even posting what turned into a very awkward (to read) discussion with Masthead’s editor about Adbusters not getting on the 20 Most Influential Mags list, but this is Masthead and I can’t see the relevance. I don’t read Masthead to discus what my magazine would be if it was a song; that’s why I read personal blogs. I read Masthead for industry news.
Paperless Offices
A post by Vaivoda, someone who works in publishing, got me thinking about my office’s effortless to move into a paperless environment. There’s such a push for journals and magazines to have web content right now, but there’s really no good way to do it yet. I’ve been exploring the options that have been made available to the industry and, objectively, they’re awful. In an effort to wrap my head around the system we’ve decided to use, I’ve had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just learning how to parse their documentation. I’ve had to create my own print out training manuals for each individual who will use it because nothing is clear enough. We’ve wasted a lot of time and paper trying to save time and paper.
Confusion
I think the industry’s confused. I don’t think it understands the Internet. I still see magazines who claim to be “online”, but just link to a PDF. I think that Canada has an incredible magazine/journal industry that deserves world-wide recognition. We have online magazines like The Tyee, great magazine blogs like Quill and Quire’s, and print magazines like Geist who seem to understand what it means to publish online better than the rest of us.
What can be done? Lead by example? A couple days ago, I think I thought that was enough. I’ve been talking a lot lately with a friend who is trying to start a literary magazine and its eventual website. There is a lot of misunderstanding between us (probably due to statements of mine like “If you use the WYSIWYG view in Dreamweaver, I won’t be your friend anymore”) about how one should be online, but it’s definitely helped me understand the argument of shitty magazine websites.
Magazines need websites. Tools like Dreamweaver make it really easy to make websites if you know print design. People with magazines tend to know print design, so they make their own sites. The problem is that web design and print design aren’t the same thing and most people don’t know that. When you really enjoy a website, it’s probably not because it looks good, but because it works. You understand what you need from it, and how to get that; same as a magazine (think about the disconnect when you pick up a magazine without a table of contents). Transferring print technique to the web, while hopefully resulting in beautiful typography and white space, usually is a colossal failure.
Beyond immediate problems like poor site searching, unintuitive menus, and inappropriate fonts, there’s also an entire world going on behind the scenes that most people won’t ever (need to) know. Most magazine websites I see are coded horrendously. They’re inaccessible to screen readers, use all kinds of proprietary code, and rarely degrade gracefully. This is equivalent to publishing your magazine at Kinko’s, but people know that you won’t get a good product at Kinko’s.
What To Do?
In general, I don’t know. The people who would be in a position to make a big impact are obviously as confused as everyone else. I’d love to see Magazines Canada learning how, and then creating a series of tutorials on how to make a good magazine website. I want to see more magazines using WordPress for their online presence. Hire a university student and $500 later you’ll have a site you can administer yourself, submits itself to search engines, and has already worried about accessibility issues. I want to see Masthead Online get a complete redesign by someone who knows what design means on the Internet.
I want to get the same passion from reading online magazines that I do from reading print and it’s just not happening.