according to information technology research and advisory company Gartner. When Apple created its Newsstand in 2011, the digital magazine became a reality.
Over the past year, digital editions of
several magazines have been making waves; Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc, and Meredith, to name just a few, have risen to the challenge, producing quality content via apps and Newsstand editions in a relatively short space of time. Continually producing content for the digital sphere, however, is a costly process.
So how can the smaller-budget magazine
market compete? It seems that for many the answer lies in ‘working the long tail.’
Unlike digital-only ventures, magazines
have treasure troves of well-researched, well-edited content from past issues. For some, such as The New Yorker, these archives go back to the early 20th century (the first issue of The New Yorker was published in 1925) and contain some difficult-to-find, quite historically valuable works - such as its archive of short stories by the late J.D. Salinger.
In what now seems a ‘no-brainer’,
The New Yorker bundled up its archives and began selling them as The Complete New Yorker in 2005 in an eight-disc DVD set. More recently, the magazine has opened up its online archive to subscribers – rather than selling separate access, the bid appears to be attracting consumers in a value-for-money package.
Andrews notes that his “collection of Wired magazines runs back to 1995. The earliest editions are a precious record of the birth of the digital age. The collection is outgrowing space in my home office, but I dare not throw them.”
Archive access is a valuable commodity,
and one that could encourage a broader subscription base. The New Yorker grants full-archive access to digital and print subscribers. And the cost of offering digital archive access is likely to be significantly smaller than creating new content, particularly as the hard work of crafting the app itself, along with layouts and other templates, has already been done.
Asked about granting unlimited archive access to subscribers in a February 2012 piece for PaidContent.org, Condé Nast UK digital director Jamie Jouning said: “We are thinking about it for various of our brands. It’s a big process. We’d want to do it so it’s searchable, so it’s more than taking flat PDFs… If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it properly, and we’ll do it on a brand-by-