With marketers able to craft their own interactive environments, the most important sources of revenue for editorial websites are also becoming rivals—possibly rendering online publications less necessary. How to maintain that crucial relevancy, all while their print siblings continue their own struggles for brand identity and relevancy, was the subject of the final McGraw Hill Media Summit panel, Publishing 2.0: How Multi-Platform Newspaper and Magazine Strategies Are Transforming the Publishing Landscape. “It’s the dark mushroom cloud hanging over all of us,” said Jamie Pallot, editorial director for CondeNet. Pallot and the other panel speakers offered their prescriptions for maintaining pertinence.
For CondeNet, that means unveiling more stand-alone sites like Flip, which debuted on Monday and combines a social network and a magazine. Pallot showed off one example: a reader created a forum on presumptive presidential candidate Barack Obama—it shows how the audience is part of the creative. “By allowing readers to customize the site, they are an intrinsic part of the site and provide a more highly engaged audience,” he added, noting that CondeNet is preparing to revamp Wired magazine’s site to make it more engaging. Vivian Schiller, SVP/GM for the NYTimes.com, said that it is still beta testing its Times Reader, a downloadable software application created with Microsoft that lets Windows XP and Vista users read the Times electronically, online or offline, in a paginated format as opposed to scrolling down a web page. “It’s a big leap forward for both the paper and the website,” she said, adding that the Times is also experimenting with a variety of mobile offerings over the next few months.
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