So, yes, it turns out that running the world’s most popular Books section (no exaggeration, I’ve seen the numbers) is somewhat time consuming.

Which means no frequent magazine-themed blogging in the mainstream for me. But I did manage to somehow squeeze one out before the end of the year, and more will emerge before too long.

For now, you may satisfy yourselves with my newest missive, “11 Amazing Magazines You’ve Never Heard Of“, a title that regular Magtastic readers will find inaccurate, and grammarians will find ends with a preposition. Still, plenty to enjoy by clicking through. It will also surprise no-one that it’s a slideshow. We have company standards to maintain, you know.

AND! It gives me a further opportunity to keep up with an annual tradition here on Magtastic, which is to remind you all that a Stack America subscription is an excellent last-minute gift for anyone Stateside. Just sayin’.

Much to catch up on, so just this once, I’ve divided this feature into categories

News

Woodwing makes its format an open standard
It’s a risky strategy, but I suspect they’re losing ground to Adobe’s InDesign plugin feature. Meantime, GQ 2.0 shows what can be done with the new Adobe system. Seems like an important step forward (though still a long way to go)

New Lineread POD magazine features a decade roundup
Also features me writing about this blog. Worth the price alone, I should think

New edition of Kilimanjaro out
Since the demise of Is/Not, it’s probably the biggest magazine currently being made. Looks like the latest one spoofs Fantastic Man

Newsweek only has six ads
Though given the way ads are booked, this is actually an indictment of how poor the previous product was, not the relaunch

Pay what you want seems to work for pre-launch niche sports mag
Also contains some great writing about football (aka soccer)

Huge augmented reality spread aimed at Nintendo 3DS users
I’m not generally a fan, but in this context AR makes a bit more sense

Dumbo Feather, Pass it On passes the feather to a new team, new design
I’ve always been fond of this Aussie mag. Great to see it evolving

Founder of Tiger Beat dies
The NYT has a slideshow of the magazine’s history, most notable for demonstrating how many cover lines can fit in a small space

A magazine goes online, signs off print with this cover
Nice sense of history

Mag love

Roundup of great Bloomberg Businessweek feature designs
That man Turley, he’s something special. And only 34 years old, too

How to make an Argentinian poster magazine
Documentary about a graphic designer’s publication, which was created as a response to his country’s financial troubles

Hand-stitched Vogue covers
Really very lovely

Stack and Magculture team up to host The Magazine Club Printout!
Rumours of a potential New York version run by me may or may not be accurate

Every cover of Time magazine
Could every magazine now do this, and keep it updated? Cheersthanksloveyoubye

The Economist to halt production for a month
I kind of want this to be true

New magazines

Dust magazine launches
Yet another fashion/art publication. This one *might* be different…

Boat magazine travels to overlooked places
The name doesn’t do them any favours, and there’s a danger of the high concept sliding into cultural tourism, but the spreads on show look great

Timbuktu is a kids’ mag on the iPad
Looks like what Anorak would make if they weren’t busy getting distribution in the USA and then going grown up in their spare time

I really like the look of Buffalo‘s design
Love how they take advantage of the large format to place a smaller mag template on the page

So here we go: The Relaunch Issue, on newstands till March 14th. What’s it like? Multiple personalitied, that’s what.

Firstly, the cover: there’s some subtle touches of silver ink (strange echo of NYT mag there, except they used gold), and a slightly bland redrawing of the classic logo – which is then tucked behind Hillary’s head. She’s a good cover star, though it’s a slightly awkward-looking photo.

Also features the smallest bar code I’ve ever seen on a mag cover.

Elements of The Daily Beast design are visible in various places in the magazine – here, it’s in the use of thick black portrait-style frames. Opinion is clearly still a mainstay of the mag – the first thing mentioned is “Columns”, and there are eight of them.

Tina Brown’s intro – called “Notebook” – opens the content. She mentions that this issue is themed “Women in the World”. I suddenly had a dizzyingly exciting feeling of “hey, the entire content is going to be themed around this – every news story through the lens of the female experience. Wow!” And then I realized it wasn’t, and felt a little disappointed.

The piece also asserts the existence of the word “newsmagazine”. I guess “newspaper” gets away with it, but this is on paper too. Perhaps it’ll catch on in other areas, too. Newsnewsprint? Newsglossy? Newsapp? Newstweet?

“Perspectives” is the first of a few Daily Beast-esque pages scattered throughout the issue. It’s about “what they did and said on Newsweek’s website, thedailybeast.com.” It includes quotes from the news, and “The Daily Beast’s take” – single lines, each. Not sure if these are edited from longer pieces on the site, or just reflections from their staff – no links to further reading are suggested.

There’s one of The Daily Beast’s notoriously spurious, headline-grabbing “Top Ten City” lists, a cartoon and a series of “Oops! Leaders cozying with dictators” photos that is remarkably unnuanced in its message given that this is a serious news magazine. This disconnect between gossipy gag and proper analysis continues throughout the issue.

Free! A small white square of card. It’s the flip side of a bound-in subscriber card that appears near the end of the mag. Shame not to use it for something. The first proper piece, underneath its card mask, is a column by a Washington Post writer who makes some interesting and well-written points about female inequality in between reminding us of her book, the fact that she’s met some of the famous people in this issue, and a speech she gave where she said something important. Kind of reminds me of the self-importance of the Bill Keller opening piece in the NYT mag.

Historian Niall Ferguson’s column talks about the fear of male-dominated Asia, then a non-female-focused piece from an American political figure with one of the more demonic byline sketches I’ve seen for a while. Though none of these three really brings any incredible insight or amazing information to the table, there’s a plurality of knowledge and opinion in there that could become pleasing enough.

There are some icons used where drop caps would usually be – which is fine until a couple use a dollar sign, and I instinctively read them as an “S”.

What this Newsweek does do well is the photo editing, particularly in this News Gallery section. Strong images, printed large, with informative captions.

There’s another odd Daily Beast addition with “Xtra Insight” on these pages – sometimes it’s an interesting fact, sometimes it’s a fact and a place to read more, but in the case of a story about Steve Jobs, the best you can get is “Read Wozniak’s book”.

There’s a bigger problem with one of them, which reads “Visit THE DAILY BEAST online for Dirk Vandewalle’s look at the future, “Libya After Gaddafi”. Finally, thinks I, some genuine interplay between online and paper, even if it’s the most traditional kind – and then I go the THE DAILY BEAST, and the piece mentioned wasn’t on the homepage, nor even on their politics page. I had to search for it under the author’s name to track it down. The piece in question says it was originally published in the magazine, so presumably it was spiked at the last minute. Really should have changed that intro.

For an issue about female empowerment around the world, this is a strangely sexist / menacingly misogynist “jokey” headline about Sarkozy and Bruni’s relationship.

The First Report piece about Libya is really excellent. It points a direction for the magazine, and even a reason for its existence. It’s an insightful piece about the diplomatic background we don’t know about, in particular a man called Musa Kusa. The odd thing is that there are no pictures of Kusa used to illustrate the piece – only Gaddafi, who isn’t actually the focus of it. I like the illustration, above, but it really isn’t what the piece is about.

The section name NewsBeast makes me think of CurrencySusan, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, it includes a timeline with its design taken from The Daily Beast:

Neat synergy, but there’s some strange events included – such as Bin Laden’s 54th birthday, don’t let’s forget about him now – and a strangely gossipy politicised picture caption “John Boehner licks his chops after persuading the Democrats to slash $4bn from the federal budget”. Or he might have had dry lips. It might be very Daily Beast, but such mocking partisanship don’t help the magazine seem impartial or mature.

The next spread feels more like Radar than Newsweek – silly cartoons, short pieces out of context and without explanation, and a very strange sense of levity compared to, say, its columnists and lead feature writers. It doesn’t really work. I’m not saying that all should be frowningly serious, but this style of lifestyle content doesn’t complement the rest of the magazine at all – and can be found in a thousand other mags, done better.

And then there’s this Charlie Sheen spread – well designed, but I have my doubts about a spread called “Big Fat Story” fitting snugly as part of the Newsweek brand.

Reliving History is a nice touch – usually the sort of thing that magazines put on the inside back page, to give some historical context to the issue you just read. Here it’s halfway through. I am, admittedly, a sucker for magazine history. Obviously.

The main cover story is a good one – about Hillary’s mostly unreported work to improve the lot of women and girls around the world. It’s sadly lacking in much from the lady herself, though. At six pages plus a double-page opener, it’s the longest piece of journalism in the mag.

The 150 Women Who Shake the World is a strong concept, and well designed – though I can’t help feel that 50 covered in more depth would have done all of them more justice. A few get a couple of paras, some five or six sentences, most a single line that asks more questions than it answers.

And, weirdly, there aren’t 150. I counted 146 pieces, with the subjects of some being of very indeterminate number – “Women of Italy who protested against Burlusconi” is an odd inclusion, as are “Runaway brides in Yemen”. I’m not saying they’re not worth featuring, but if you have a piece ostensibly focused on 150 individuals, perhaps there would have been a better way to talk about these issues elsewhere.

The Feminists in Tahrir Square is the best piece in the mag. It’s a great insider article, carefully researched, showing an unreported angle on a story everyone knows. Again, as with the First Report, it was missing an image of one of the key figures, however: Mrs Mubarak, described in the piece as the country’s Lady Macbeth. It would be good to put a face to such a prominent and hated figure in the article.

The rest of the magazine is pretty lightweight. The Dior piece has a great photo (top), but is a glorified catwalk review with little new to say, the lifestyle Omnivore section (note the Daily Beast iconography again) feels like Reader’s Digest. However, I have to point out some serious reservations about this piece:

It begins thusly: “Popular uprisings, while inspiring and (we hope) good for the citizens who spark them, aren’t just bad news for dictators. They’re often trouble for tourists as well… Political upheaval – in the Middle East or elsewhere – can suddenly limit access to some of the world’s most breathtaking sites. With that in mind, NEWSWEEK offers a guide for seize-the-day types.”

Really, Newsweek? Are you really saying “quick, go visit these pretty dictatorships and give them your money, before the people demand some rights”? Or is that a joke? I can’t decide which I’d rather it was. Whichever, it’s quite absurdly offensive in the context of all the previous pages, including the strong talk about women’s rights.

And though “My favorite mistake” is a cute idea for the inside back page interview, perhaps someone with whose money Tina Brown wasn’t so closely identified in her last big magazine failure (Harvey Weinstein famously part-bankrolled Talk) would have been a smarter choice for this highly scrutinized first issue.

What surprises me most, however, is how little print-digital synergy there is. I can’t easily follow Newsweek journalists talking about events in real time online. The only website featured is The Daily Beast, but Newsweek.com is not only still going, but carries more of the content of the magazine, clearly labeled, and without any Daily Beasting around it.

I can only presume that there will be a proper digital relaunch, and that some synergy will emerge – but right now, the two are as separate as if still produced by different companies. So much for the duality of digital and print. I hope to be able to report something more interesting happening on that front soon – and am surprised it wasn’t at least trailed in the mag. There’s a great opportunity to do something interesting in that area.

Summary
There’s some really strong journalism in there, and some really mismatched, poor-taste news-related gossip. And without the excuse of SEO bait, the gossip doesn’t really wash. This magazine has to stand or fall on the authority of its opinions, and the strength of its knowledge.

In a couple of pieces, I felt they were genuinely giving me well-written insight I might not have found elsewhere, on big news items I thought I understood. Much of the rest felt like cheap news-themed gags surrounded by throwaway, poorly researched information – and for that, I’ll stick to the web, thank you. At least there I don’t expect anything better.

As for the design, it’s crisp, clear, does its job, and good photo editing/placement allows the whole thing to work. Not groundbreaking, but serves the content well enough, has some smart nods to its online sibling, and doesn’t shout too loud. Nice to see some illustration in there, too.

Does it justify itself? Not yet. But, despite some missteps, I still feel that it’s a good enough platform from which to build. I don’t have any truck for those who say there’s no space for a weekly print news roundup in the internet age – just look at the success of The Week and The Economist.

The last relaunch had high aims, but thin prose. Tina Brown is known for having better instincts, and if she can get the news balance right, and truly make a content relationship between web and print thrive – for which she has the best opportunity yet to make something interesting, as her web platform existed independently of the mag first – then Newsweek might just become strong and, crucially, relevant again.

Very early days yet, though. Other critics have been sharpening their claws on it. Tina Brown responds to them here. What did you think?

NB: this is not the only model for an interesting, in-depth news magazine. Keep an eye out for my forthcoming review of a very different, new publication about current affairs, which proudly labels itself “The last to breaking news”.

A Brit and a woman created and nurtured Newsweek. Now a British-born woman is moving it forward, pinning its hopes on a high-profile, print-digital merger. Can it survive – and is it any good?

I’m dividing this into two pieces, because I think that, in order to better judge and understand the magazine, it would be helpful first to understand something of the history and nature of American news weeklies, and their previous digital forays.

And so, here is a brief runthrough of the back story, gratefully gleaned from David Sumner’s comprehensive book The Magazine Century (2010) and his excellent 2003 piece on the subject, plus Carolyn Kitch’s Pages from the Past (2005), as well as further personal online research, linked to below where relevant.

Weekly news magazines have always been distinct from newspapers and their supplements. The first significant player in the market was/is Henry Luce’s Time, which launched in 1923 with the aim of creating a short, quick-to-read summary of the week’s general-interest news.

Newsweek followed nine years later (eight years before the other big American news weekly, US News & World Report – lesser known internationally because of its lack of overseas presence).

Newsweek was founded by Time‘s first foreign editor, a one-legged Brit called Thomas Martyn (he left the other leg in Yugoslavia during WWI). The prospectus for his “News-week” made it clear who his new publication would aim at: “Time is too inaccurate, too superficial, too flippant and imitative.”

The new magazine was also to be, its early ads stated, “an indispensable complement to newspaper reading, because it explains, expounds, clarifies.” On the cover of its first issue (shown above), there were seven photographs – one for each day of the week.

It struggled in its early years, before merging with another magazine called Today, and relaunching in 1937 without the hyphen and with the slogan “The magazine of news significance.” Newsweek became a success, with circulations topping a million – still less than Time, but more than enough to make it profitable and influential.

This was because, Carolyn Kitch argues, in the 1930s to 1960s in particular, “media had joined the institutions of education, religion, and civic life as an important disseminator of political and cultural ideals. Magazines were leaders in this process because they were the only medium capable of reaching a national audience and using illustrations and then photographs in a large-scale and dramatic way… The stories the newsmagazines told… created and reinforced a particular view of the national character. If film offered varying versions of national identity, the newsmagazines collectively crafted a unified, patriotic vision.”

These were the arbiters of what was news, who the good guys and the bad guys were, and of how America saw itself and everyone else. With combined circulations of up to ten million, the “big three” of Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report had a huge cultural and political impact.

That’s not to say that its own house was in perfect order. In 1961, a rudderless Newsweek was purchased by The Washington Post Company. New editor Osborn Elliott later wrote that “Newsweek was in shambles.  Not only had the editor left, the whole staff was shot through with drunks, incompetents, and hacks.”

Following the suicide of Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Phil Graham, the company passed into the hands of his widow, Katherine Graham. She trebled Newsweek‘s editorial budget, improved its design, and made it genuinely become what it had originally been created to be: a serious competitor to Time.

Worthy of note in this period is the moment when, in 1970, 46 female employees filed a groundbreaking gender-discrimination case against the magazine, under the Civil Rights Act. The magazine promised to hire more senior female staff. The 40th anniversary of the event led to much discussion about whether things had much improved since.

There doesn’t seem much to report about the magazine during 1980s, other than that through occasional redesigns, the big three continued to be positioned at the heart of American culture, with Newsweek mostly seen as being politically closer to the Democrats than Time. The rise of cable TV had changed people’s media habits somewhat, but thanks in part to vastly discounted subscription rates, readership remained high.

In 1993, Newsweek was the first of the three to dabble with digital, launching an ill-fated quarterly CD ROM featuring “as many as three original articles” called Newsweek InterActive (“At first, “Newsweek Interactive” will be compatible only with the $999 portable multimedia player introduced last week by the Sony Corporation.”)

Later that year, Time started to have an online presence, teaming up with AOL, and Newsweek followed in late 1994, through a partnership with now-forgotten ISP Prodigy, before relaunching at the end of 1998 as Newsweek.com, combining magazine stories with updates from Washingtonpost.com and MSNBC.com

In the mid-2000s, as news audiences moved online and to 24-hour cable news, and one advertising slump followed another, the large expense of Newsweek combined with falling sales and ad revenues to make it a big financial liability. Its stated subscriber base dropped 50% during 2008-10 – though at 1.5 million, it was still not to be sniffed at.

In 2009, Newsweek relaunched as an opinion and commentary magazine, with some bold, polemic covers but little engaging content. The relaunch didn’t seem to stem the bleeding, and in August 2010, the magazine was sold to nonagenarian millionaire Sidney Harman. At the end of 2010, it merged with two-year-old news-aggregation-opinion-gossip website The Daily Beast, splitting ownership 50:50 between Harman and the owners of The Daily Beast, IAC (who also own ask.com, match.com, vimeo and others.)

Which brings us to today, and the relaunch of Newsweek featuring Thedailybeast.com written at the bottom of every page. Is there still a place for a weekly news magazine? Can it explain, expound, clarify news from the internet? Do Newsweek / The Daily Beast together point to a new hybrid model of publishing? Or is it – and perhaps much of the rest of print news media – destined to become a loss-making way for rich men to gain political access and influence?

Click here for my review the first issue of the relaunch.

Two weekly American news-related magazines relaunched in two days. Very different stories, however – and very different results.

First up, The New York Times Magazine.

Sunday magazines are tricky territory. On the one hand, it’s an incredible opportunity: you don’t need to make a cover that sells, and it’s unlikely that your work alone will make or break a sale of the newspaper. And so, it’s an incredible chance to tell bold, unheralded, controversial stories in greater depth, without celebrities or newsstand pressures.

On the other hand, you’re competing not so much with other Sunday supplements (though that does happen) as much as also with the rest of the newspaper that surrounds you. The New York Times on Sundays is a huge tome of various sections, including a monthly style magazine, and long pieces about books, sports, arts and leisure, business, the week’s news in depth… Just to find content that doesn’t tread on someone in the building’s toes must be tricky enough, let alone then hanging onto it long enough that someone else doesn’t scoop you.

A little context. According to this piece published online in 1999 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the first Sunday newspaper magazine came out in the USA in 1869. Using rotogravure printing, 19th-century newspaper magazines were created to offer more detailed images and high-quality print to advertisers who had moved over to magazines from the daily newssheets; The New York Times Magazine launched in 1896, and featured the first photographs to appear under the newspaper’s banner. (Sidenote: there’s a fascinating blog featuring articles from the magazine published 100 years ago. It’s a consistently interesting read.)

In the States today, not many newspapers have their own Sunday magazine supplements any more, and few, if any, break even. Two pretty insipid magazines – Parade and USA Weekend – are syndicated to most local publications. The New York Times, as well as the LA Times, Washington Post, and a few others, are the exceptions.

In September, Hugo Lindgren was hired to be the editor of a relaunched NYT magazine. Formerly at New York magazine, and then one of the senior figures in the highly successful relaunch of Bloomberg Businessweek, he was a bold hire, and he promptly set about changing the entire set up of the publication. “Everything but the crossword”, as his witty introduction has it. And, as Khoi points out, a five month turnaround is remarkable for such a renowned battleship company.

As for me, I’m an occasional Times reader, who felt that the previous magazine could at times seem pretty aimless. It had some well-written journalism and photographs, and a sense of heavyweight portent that only the Times and a few others can pull off, but it was more often lacking in consistency and clear shape. It certainly didn’t stand alone as a strong publication.

So what’s the relaunch issue like?

First, the stats: 56 pages, 11 of which are ads. It also looks like there’s an extra, gold ink used incredibly sparingly on the cover. The writers are clearly important – seven journalists are named on the cover, with only one non-journo (cover photo subject Lori Berenson) identified. Others are represented through epithets: “the billionaire”, “the radicals”, “the graceful losers”.

There are two contents pages – this is the more interesting, its layout irregular enough to drag your eye from one thing to the next. It’s very effective. The first, as has been noted elsewhere, includes the names and email addresses of the editors who worked on them.

Next comes the letters page – now called “Reply All”, with every piece of correspondence originating from electronic sources, be it the website, a journalist’s Facebook page, email or Twitter.

This analytic on Reply All is the only real infographic in the magazine. But it’s a bit meaningless – it’s not clear if these are the top, middle and bottom of their stats, or just five randomly chosen pieces.

Structure: the magazine is divided into The Front (eight pages), The Features (four of them, taking up 20 pages in the middle, plus four at the end for the continuation of the main story), and The Back (seven pages) with puzzles and the inside back page added at the end.

Front consists of a Bill Keller feature on how his experiences connect with the news, an interview (above; here with South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley, who comes across pretty well, despite a strangely aggressive lede); The Ethicist – ethical dilemmas, now answered by a former NYT city reporter; a slightly odd page of jokey shorts called Last Week On The Internet; a column called You Are Here, which has a salmon pink background, and is presumably about a particular location, though this one is stronger on the detail of people than of place, and a return for an old column, What They Were Thinking, which here has Tom Waits explaining why he squatted in a puddle, and Robert Frank entirely avoiding the question in the title, and talking only about Waits.

Some of these concepts are stronger than others, but at least they all have a sense of being front-of-book, and none feels like it deserves more space than it gets.

Then the main features. Two of them – about the billionaire health-food freak who wants to extend the human lifespan (ironically, exactly a hundred years ago a not-dissimilar theme was explored), and a highly readable 8000-word piece on the American who was jailed for 15 years in Peru – are very strong, the kind of involving long-form journalism tales that draws you in with a strong lede, and makes you think that they’re about one thing, before the story twists and turns into something else entirely.

This is what this magazine can, and should, do best, and they’re strong pieces to launch with.

The other longer story, however – Broketown USA – feels like half a story, and one that could easily have been placed in the business section of the paper. Its opener looks great, though – and feels very 1970s.

The whole design feel is one of a return to a previous age. The reason is that, although there are some very neat little touches – different drop caps on each story, horizontal black lines in different positions, colourful column separators on a dance piece, and then a subtle vertical, prison-bar black line motif in Lori Berenson’s piece, a kind of matrix of soup in the recipes bit in The Back – overall there is a seriousness to the design (no guest title fonts, very little colour beyond a few photos), and a firm separation between word and image.

So that means no headlines going over images, straightforward images and captions, no cutouts, very little colour, very few aggressive crops. It is very clearly the New York Times Magazine, with every letter capitalized and in bold. They commission writers to write strong pieces. Images are there to make the pieces seem more legible. It is a serious business.

Surprising, then, is its lack of hard-hitting photojournalism. There’s one (lovely) double-page image of ice hockey games which is a little unseasonal – all the snow disappeared last week – but otherwise images are small and feel distant, used more to break up the page than to illuminate the story. Aside from Mary Ellen Mark’s images of Lori Berenson, which aren’t reproduced very big, and the video stills of amateur dancer Anne Marsen, there’s a real lack of strong storytelling being employed through the photography.

This is a huge shame, because beautifully reproduced photography and illustration are the one area that the magazine should do better than the newspaper. That’s why it existed in the first place, after all, and glossy paper remains better than newsprint at faithful reproduction of colour and detail.

When I think about great Sunday magazines, I think about Espilon (aka “Y“) from Portugal in the early 2000s, and the covers of arts magazine Metropoli from El Mundo in Spain, where El Pais Semenal also does and did some great pieces.

I have memories of striking design and photography from the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, and of course the Independent Magazine and the Sunday Times Magazine in the UK, at which Colin Jacobson and Harold Evans did remarkable work, strongly based around powerful photography. For the NYT magazine not to do more than a three-page “Look” section, featuring two folksy photographs, feels like a missed opportunity.

Overall, then, this rethink feels like a deliberate return to tight concepts and old-fashioned strengths, with a few – very few – subtle concessions to modernity.

The big question, however, is whether will it bring new readers to the newspaper, as the Sunday Times Magazine used to in the 1960s-80s. On this evidence, I doubt it. It’s not trying to lead the news agenda – and perhaps the days when that was even possible are gone. It’s not trying to lead the design agenda either – but that’s not its job, and never has been.

Lindgren says that their “overarching goal of the redesign is to monopolize as much of your Sunday as we possibly can.” In these ad-scarce days, that’s a tough challenge. It’s still a thin magazine, and the lack of variety in its serious visual storytelling definitely counts against it.

I can’t say if it’ll still feel fresh in six months, but right now, at least it feels more like an ambitious, serious supplement with plenty to read, which is a good start. And some stronger photo editing would work wonders.

Tomorrow: Newsweek, and then a very different kind of news magazine.

Why fashion struggles with race
A really good piece on the colour barrier faced by fashion editorials and the catwalk – and why societally the “paint chip” theory doesn’t work

Eye gets a preview of Port
Review here when I can get my hands on it

Slate writer hates his iPad
The backlash is strong with this one

How a publisher is dealing with the OnePass/Apple subscription situation
Fascinating reading. The key for the big players seems to be “be everywhere, but hope Android on tablets gets big enough to force Apple to back down”

Marie Claire Brazil goes 3D
3D fashion apparently also featured in new mag Archetype X (about which I can find nothing at all except for descriptions of this shoot – does it even exist?)

A round up of books about zines / comic books / small magazines
Contains short summaries of a few things worth knowing about

i-jusi exhibition hits London next month
Well worth checking out their back issues at that. Speaking of which…

Mute offers complete set for 200 pounds
Intelligent mag that did some interesting design things in the late 90s (disclosure: I interviewed Cory Doctrow for them once, eight years ago)

Indiana University student magazine actually well designed
Text’s a bit ropey, but it sure is purrty

People create their own Top 10 magazines
No, don’t ask – I wouldn’t know where to begin

A fascinating-looking Chinese magazine blogger
Sadly, I suspect something is lost in the Google Translation

Though I am a subscriber, I can usually take or leave Wired US. Each year, there’s a few good articles and some interesting design choices, but overall it has an unnecessary love of celebrity, and each issue never really hangs together as a package. The front sections in particular are very uneven.

That’s not the case, however, with the latest issue: The Underworld Exposed.

It takes its regular features and subverts them in interesting thematic ways. The piece about “what’s inside a product you know” is about street heroin; their How To is “How To Ship Coke”; the Test page is about knockoff versions of famous products.

The main features are about the small Romanian town at the centre of European internet scams, the value of illegal human organ trafficking, and people who break lottery codes in order to launder money. The text never tries to moralize. It’s surprisingly bold stuff.

It often feels like an issue of mid-1990s Colors, with a bit of VICE thrown in. Which, in my book, is a very good thing.

I really enjoyed the design of this infographic spread about New York sex workers – nothing stereotypical, no fake neon or tittersome burlesque design. Just straightforward facts, letting the banality of reality speak for itself.

Still not sure about some of the design decisions – the layout of Ricky Jay’s superb collection of historical criminals is a little awkward, for example, and as so often happens with Wired, the cover feels like an overly researched missed opportunity – but overall, this is an unusually focused and engaging issue.

Definitely worth picking up or buying on your iPad.

You know the one. So what’s it like?

One-line pitch
According to the press release, The Daily “gives readers everywhere the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the need-to-know content of a newspaper and the immediacy of the internet.”

NB Everywhere is defined at time of writing as “everywhere that people use the US iTunes store”.

Made by
A team of 100 or more apparently, including “top journalists, thought leaders and opinion makers”.

There’s certainly a breadth of experience: the Editor in Chief and Gossip Editor both came from the New York Post, the news editor from AOL via The New York Times news blog, the Sports ed from a New Jersey paper, the Opinions editor from Forbes via The Wall Street Journal, the Lifestyle/culture Ed from the New Yorker, the Tech Editor from Time magazine, and the Creative Director came from AOL Media.

The app itself has no masthead, but the top names are listed here.

Made for
Rupert Murdoch’s email to UK senior staff (none of whom can currently buy it if they don’t have a US credit card) says “audiences everywhere”. At the launch event, the editor in chief said it was a newspaper for “everyone”.

Navigation
The app opens with a short animation, a seven-note Intel-esque melody, then this loading screen. I’m not sure if they updated during the day, or there was a bug, but it reloaded today’s edition three times for me. Each time, you only get the spinning wheel, so you don’t know how long you’ll have to wait.

Once it loads (and every time it loads, regardless of if you were halfway through an article and switched briefly to another app), you see a “carousel” (aka cover flow) of the front pages of each feature. The images on the carousel are low-res jpegs that often look a bit sketchy. You get the category of the article, but that’s all – so you have to rely on the headlines to guess what each one is about. It also marks which features you have read.

There is also a table of contents, but it only lists a few select articles, and feels like an afterthought to accompany the entirely unnecessary “how to use” directions.

There are six topics – News, Gossip, Opinion, ARts&Life, Apps&Games, Sports – and they appear in that order. There’s no customization options to change the order, or to open each day with your favourite section.

The bottom line of Carousel buttons, which you tap to reveal and then slides out of view automatically after a few seconds, offers: a video short of “today’s highlights”, an audio version of the same thing that also animates the coverflow, a “fast forward” button to run through the coverflow images while pausing for a couple of seconds on each, a “skip to a random article you haven’t read yet” option, “my saved pages” (more on that below) and “settings”, which are options to customize local weather, your horoscope, breaking news alerts, and your account information. Can’t imagine why anyone would want to use the linear/static video or audio summaries – I’d expect them to be phased out within few months.

There’s also a top menu that is always visible, providing shortcuts to the front pages of each section, and a “scrubber” – when you touch it, mini versions of the pages appear, for you to tap and jump to a piece. It highlights in blue pieces you haven’t read yet, but otherwise the thumbnails are too small to be anything other than memory aids.

Longer articles are two-column in a serifed font, and most pages are image heavy except for the Opinion section. Pages are images, so you can’t copy/paste, change the type size or search for terms, and zooming has been disabled. Quote marks, by the way, alternate between straight and curly – deep inside my soul, a tiny subeditor is weeping.

There’s a sense of indecision regarding orientation – most pages can be viewed both in portrait or landscape, except in news articles where landscape is used for slideshows, and portrait for text. Even more confusingly, if you open an article that tells you to rotate for a photo slideshow, then flick through that slideshow, and finally return back to portrait, the app places you in the middle of the article, rather than back at the beginning. A bug, presumably – and not the only one in there.

There’s a similar confusion attached to the reading method. Most are on multiple pages (between one and three), with no up/down swiping to read on. Except for one article in the Apps&Games section, one in the Sports, and the table of contents containing How to Use instructions, where you are told to swipe vertically to read on. Odd.

Sometimes, exclusively branded videos are included in place of still images, and these can be full-screened without much fuss. Some are genuine exclusives, others made up of wire footage. There are a few interactive “push button to read caption” elements, very few web links, and some stories also feature Twitter feeds on topics or, in one instance, a celebrity’s own Twitter feed.

Each page (not article – so multi-page articles have different, unconnected comments pages) can be commented on in-app via text or by recording an audio comment (a neat option), or via email, Facebook or Twitter (though twice trying to login to Twitter on the app made it freeze each time). Only registered users can comment in the app itself, and it uses a “Report abuse” function to police the commentaries. No sign as yet of Daily editors engaging with the discussions.

Facebook/Twitter/emailing a page created a bit.ly link to web editions of the pages, sometimes as text, sometimes as an image. Not sure why the difference – it might be a news deadlines vs other sections issue. The one time I tried it out, though, it sent a link to the wrong page.

Crash total during review period: five, plus one freeze.

Advertising
There’s 113 pages total, and I counted 11 ads. They’re mostly video-based, loading dynamically. Fox products feature heavily, requiring the user to rotate to landscape to watch trailers, plus Verizon, Pepsi, Macy’s, a neat Land Rover interactive ad, and Virgin Atlantic (their interactive ad from Project fits neatly here). Ads are not labelled as such anywhere, which could get problematic.

What’s inside
It’s a strange mix of content, and it doesn’t really hang together as a single entity, either in its writing or its design.

Each section has its own section front page, highlighting one or more stories.

The News section – 29 pages of the 113 – is very light, similar to the kind of thing you might read in Metro – one or two correspondents, but mostly a lot of wire rewrites. The videos are embedded in the pieces, and rather than enhance the stories, they just repeat the information in each article, in a cable-newsy way. It’s very irritating. Still, at least they don’t start up automatically.

For a brave new force in journalism, its coverage is incredibly limited. Issue one’s news totals, in order of presentation:

* two main stories (Egypt and American snowstorms) with ten pages and one video, and three pages and one video devoted to them respectively
* one non-time-sensitive, non-revealing, wonkish interview with Obama’s former budget director
* two “bizarre/frivolous short stories” pages
* a completely non-news fluff story, with a New York Post-ish headline, that occupies two pages, talking about a disco in New York that admits dogs
* a page with two stories: “Arizona places high tax on medical marijuana” and a two-paragraph story on “American woman pleads guilty to conspiracy to recruit terrorists”
* a very short story with a huge 360 panorama image on a proposed one-euro tourist tax in Venice
* a page with “the number of illegal immigrants in the USA has stabilized, but is still three times larger than in 1990″ and “Anna Chapman, sexy spy, trademarks her name”
* An image of a Japanese volcano spewing smoke
* a page containing “Putin turned on by brave pinups” (including photo of Russian girl in lingerie), a very short story about how American-made products were smuggled into Iran to build missiles, and a one paragraph story that opens with the line “Pump some iron, Gramps – you’ll live longer if you do”.
* A Daily exclusive short video in what seems to be a series labelled “Americana”, about how prisoners in a Louisiana jail make children’s toys. The 2:20 film is the visual equivalent of repeating that sentence over and over. It has no narrative structure, and tries to squeeze in far too many characters. It ends up saying nothing more than its opening statement.
* Biz Digest – Copper’s up, the trader Steve Cohen lost $23m, BP reported profits, and people are using smartphones a lot.
* The Daily reports that Allstate apologized for a report that ranked road users by their star signs. And then reprints the entire study with fancy (non-interactive) infographics anyway.
* Horoscopes and location-based weather.

So, no foreign news that doesn’t involve pretty pictures, and no depth or links on a couple of fascinating stories – “American companies caught smuggling to Iran” and “American woman tries to recruit radical Islamists to kill Swedish cartoonist”. Strange, all round.

Gossip gets seven pages, and leads with the unstory that quotes unnamed sources to reveal that “Natalie Portman has been talking to her friends about her pregnancy”, followed by typical Page Six-style shorts, a photo gallery of press shots that you have no option but to swipe through in order to get to the next page, a shock story that “Palm Beach socialites have never heard of Rhianna”, and then… an apparently exclusive story about how former Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier has been hiding a chic Parisian apartment, with lover in tow, from his people.

Pardon? An investigative exclusive about a former dictator who is currently in the news, dropped in at the end of the Gossip section? Its placement suggests either a stunning lack of news judgement, or more likely, that each section head is fiercely protective of their own turf, and the editor doesn’t overrule to reassign stories to where they belong. Worrying.

Opinion‘s eleven pages open with a predictable “We are the world, We are The Daily, new times demand new journalism” piece that quotes American exceptionalism as the foundation of its foreign coverage (at least they’re up front about it) and claims no other particular political leanings. The news stories are so short and superficial, I certainly couldn’t contradict that claim.

This essay is followed by a remarkably intelligent, indepth, wordy piece about the connection between Bollywood and the rise in moderate Islamism. Yeah, you heard me.

Just as you continue to reel from the shock of your brain being forced into gear again, it pulls out a tech think piece about the rise in “ephemeralization”, then a quick piece on the situation in Egypt in Numbers (again, why not in the news section?), and a History page about the greater significance behind the launch of Voyager 1 (no links to the ace Voyager2 probe Twitter feed though). I spent more time reading these than the other sections put together. It feels like it belongs in a different publication.

Arts&Life gets 14 pages, in which it tells us to choose stripes, and shows catwalk shots to prove it, includes a few pages of style-related gossip (erm.. isn’t there a Gossip section elsewhere?), gives us love and male fashion advice, includes a Straight-Up taken for some reason in Mexico, and then suddenly leaps to intelligent movie summaries, including a three-page in-depth look at hipster spoof Portlandia. Strange to see Arts have so much style/fashion – it would probably go better with the gossip section.

Apps&Games gets 11 pages, and opens with “Last Minute Travel Apps” including iTunes store links, a non-critical blurb about the game Oregon Trail on Facebook (including a trailer and “tips”), a three-page interview with the founders of Quora (but no link to it), very well-programmed Sudoku and crossword puzzles that link to the Game Center (but no indications of difficulty), a one-page “What I have on my iPad” yawn, and one-paragraph shorts under the title “System_Update”.

Sports is perhaps the most content-intense section. It gets 26 pages in this issue, in which it covers American Football, basketball and ice hockey. There’s no way to skip to your favourite sport, so you have to go through it page by page.

It understandably goes big on the Super Bowl (though it’s still four days away), with videos about the atmosphere, columnists, plenty of in-line polls, some wacky shorts, and plenty of videos. Seems disappointing that the animated plays are only videos, not interactives. There is a tappable timeline about previous Superbowls, but the information is very brief and superficial.

Articles are brief, but expertly look at different aspects of their theme. Headlines appear on a black background, caps only, and the whole thing has a ESPNish feel to it. There’s also a “learn the tricks” basketball video, and a scrolling ticker of college basketball results on one page – though it looks as though that’s not actually live updated, just a gimmicky way to display the previous day’s scores.

There’s no single “results” page in the sports section, though there is an odds page for forthcoming games at the end. At least, I think that’s what “today’s line” means.

Summary
The Daily is very strange.

Firstly, the structure, and the design, feel very much like print. It is intended to be flicked through, every page of it, and the design and typesetting are as print as you can get without digging up a zombie Gutenberg.

The only non-printness of it all is its use of video, Twitter feed boxes (more than half of which are entirely superfluous, placed there because they can, not because they should), the occasional “tap here to read the caption” feature, a local weather display telling you what’s happening outside your window RIGHT NOW, and the limited ability to comment in/share pages – but these are added layers to what is clearly essentially a print product with bells on. There is no live reporting, no updated feeds from their correspondents, no new stories throughout the day. Nothing to make it feel “live” and digital.

This first issue feels like the product of competing personalities – half of it reads like an American-style Daily Mail in its approach (not its politics though), being deliberately and stereotypically female friendly in its gossip and fashion coverage.

It covers news lightly, without much insight or investigation, often leading with an image rather than a gripping story. This matches the formula of the designed-to-be-throwaway Metro, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post – all of which have far higher female readership percentages than the average newspaper.

And then there are the Opinion and Sports sections, which are densely packed with huge amounts of content, much of it on themes that are more traditionally male oriented. Men get depth, women get fluff, except of course for the “hot Russian spies/students in their lingerie” news stories. Is this really what journalism has come to?

The content and outlook of the six different sections suggest that The Daily is aiming to be a generalist news roundup-in-very-brief, for people of both sexes who somehow don’t get to read the news elsewhere. A breakfast read, let’s say, for those who want short, fast snippets to talk about at work. Almost like cable news, in fact, except that cable news already exists, and does it better.

Is the iPad market even mature enough yet to provide enough paying users who aren’t very connected to current affairs, in order to make money? As Joshua Benton at the Nieman Lab perceptively asks, Who is it trying to reach? What problem is it trying to solve? The Kindle, perhaps, might at a push have enough of an older demographic who want short summaries to support this venture. Does the iPad? Will the iPad?

And then there’s this: on the Bizarre/Frivolous News pages, four articles are linked to under the heading “What we’re reading”. The four stories are a video on BoingBoing coherently explaining Senate filibusters, an inside story from someone who went to Thailand for breast enhancement surgery, a fascinating and damning ProPublica investigation into nationwide coroner mismanagement, a long and interesting New Yorker profile of Guillermo del Toro, and a new study that shows how traffic cameras save lives. So, smart analysis, clever infographics, indepth reporting, a detailed arts profile… you’re reading it, but even with $30m at your disposal, you’re still not writing it.

At least, not yet. This is their much-delayed launch issue. Making a daily product is not easy, especially when your deadlines are shortened by the need to convert each page to be iPad ready. No launch issue is perfect, though it surprises me that they didn’t have a zinger of an exclusive to pull out, either in interactive graphics or investigative reporting, to showcase what can be done and to get their name out there even more. Maybe they’re saving it, to pull people in again post-launch. But right now, there’s not much exclusive or even interesting anywhere in this “pioneering digital venture.”

I’m going to follow its progress, and will absolutely post a revised review if it merits it in the future, when it’s had some time to bed in. As has been widely reported, there’s a lot of money behind The Daily, and Uncles Rupert M and Steve J have put the considerable weight of their names behind it, so they definitely won’t want it to fail.

But right now, it feels like it’s trying so hard to be all things to all men and women, frothy yet serious, fashionable and sporty – without having enough of any of the above to satisfy anyone. And most damning of all – its weakest section by far is the news.

Swallow is a big, bold and heavy food magazine. Not quite Self Service in its solidity, I grant you, but it’s a hardback book that’s 306mm x 235mm (about a foot by nine inches). Inside are 136 pages (plus a 20pp comic insert) on a lovely matt stock. It feels like the kind of Christmas annual I used to get as a kid. It’s a biannual, and it retails at $25. As an object, it’s bold, weighty, and attractive. But how does it read?

The biannual magazine, according to its website, is “a New York-based food and travel magazine with a difference. Each issue focuses on a different region of the world, bringing the reader evocative intelligence from unexpected corners of the globe, and always casts a considered glance at its subjects, whatever they may be.”

It’s the brainchild of the magazine’s creative director James Casey, and this, their second, is The Trans-Siberian Issue, “a thoroughly unscientific survey of the Trans-Siberian Express.” The cover (top) is a little indistinct and confusing – it turns out to be a tiny model of a steam train in a bed of ice, with caviar for smoke. Still, its magenta title is bold enough to stand out regardless.

The issue is divided into Appetizers, First Course, Main Course and Dessert (using the Russian names for each).

First, let’s focus on Swallow‘s strengths. It uses some really strong and imaginative imagery, with an artistic sensibility that comes across as a little cold sometimes, but it certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously. Documentary photography is also featured heavily, and makes the most of the large page size.

The magazine publishes a broad and imaginative selection of content, from a short playscript to a great mini comic about how Casey lost his passport (spoiler: a giant talking cat may have been involved). This is clearly an ambitious publication that is open to creative ideas around its theme.

Perhaps its freedom is part of its problem. Though the structure – short at the front, interviews, then longer features, then recommendations at the back – is as traditional as you can get, the actual narrative of Swallow is all over the place. In the introduction, the magazine admits that even to call it the Trans-Siberian issue is “a stretch” as it also includes the Trans-Mongolian train line.

“After finishing the first issue, the consensus was that another geographically hemmed food issue was too expected. So instead we used the train route as a device to connect our explorations of three distinctly different cuisines.”

I have a few problems with those two sentences. Firstly, they’d only done one issue at that point, about Scandinavia, and it appeared nearly a year ago – so nobody outside of their own coterie was expecting anything. To throw out or subvert their own conceit before it had established itself seems a strange move.

Perhaps it might still have worked if they had truly used the train route as a consistent device throughout the issue. However, the route is barely explained and quickly discarded. Occasionally the train comes back in to the mix, but as the issue goes on, there is no following narrative, either chronological or geographical, to give the reader a sense of progression on or connection to a larger story. The issue seems to broadly be themed “Russia, China, Mongolia, Train”, with its content thin, superficial and randomly assigned.

It covers vast areas and cultures, with very little pause for depth – small details and local stories are present, but are thrown in without enough context or explanation to feel relevant or useful. This issue of Swallow would have been a lot stronger had it stuck to, say, only Russia, and told half as many stories in far more depth.

There are other problems, too. Only prominent figures get a voice. Famous chefs, socialites, and mover-shakers (above: the creator of the lovely Russian food magazine Eda) are openly interviewed, while the rest of the populace are mute, present only through photographs, illustrations, or reported second hand. In fact, pretty much the only non-socialite figures who get a voice in Swallow are fictional characters in the play script and the comic. That wouldn’t be a problem if this were a magazine about wealthy eating, but it isn’t, and so such an omission is problematic.

The content is also weakened by its perspective. Most of the articles are written from the point of view of an American traveler who has just arrived in town, or at best, an expat. Rather than give the reader someone to sympathise with, it actually makes the entire exercise feel somewhat shallow and disconnected from the real, everyday context of their experiences. It also makes the genuine insights and histories featured seem somehow inauthentic or less trustworthy.

And perhaps most damningly for a food magazine, very rarely did I feel any sensations of taste, pleasant or otherwise, from what they were describing. Perhaps the coldness of much of the imagery, and its design, didn’t help. Instead, the choice of food almost feels like a conceit – but if that’s the case, what is Swallow actually about, other than an excuse for its staff to write about their travels around the world?

When I first came across it, I really liked the idea of Swallow, and though pricey, I felt that there could be a niche for such an imaginatively presented title. I still think that, but in order to succeed, it needs to sharpen up its editorial, make longer and more insightful features, and stick tightly to a clearly defined concept in order to tell a series of connected, engaging, well-researched stories.

There’s plenty of flair evident in what they’ve done so far, and more than a potful of ambition. Unfortunately, It doesn’t taste nearly good enough to live up to the description on the menu.

www.swallowmagazine.com

In 1971, MAD magazine – famed for its parodies – was itself hung from the hook by National Lampoon (whose art director at the time, Michael C Gross, went on to design the Ghostbusters logo).

Readable scans are available here. It’s a pretty scabrous view of the title, though of course MAD got the last laugh, as NL ceased publication in 1998.