E-Media Tidbits

I'm at the annual conference at the University Research Magazine Association (URMA), where yesterday I gave a talk on opportunities in online media. This morning I attended a session given by Don Ranly, a professor from the Univ. of Missouri School of Journalism, in which he critiqued various print magazines by URMA members.

I really liked Don's talk. He's not afraid to challenge his audience directly or to be challenged directly by them. His main point: "At magazines you put a lot of effort into crafting long stories. What makes you think people really have the time to read all that?"

Ranly's advice: Print magazines succeed when they emulate the Web to a large extent. Namely:

• Don't make people guess about what's inside your magazine. Offer intuitive coverlines with page numbers.
• Make the table of contents prominent and usable. "Consider that your home page." In addition to intuitive article titles, give blurbs too. Present all content (including photos) in page order, and list the stories contained within department sections.
• Publish letters to the editor and other products of reader interaction.
• Use the second person ("you") more frequently.
• Divide content into shorter chunks with prominent and engaging microcontent (subheads, captions, graphics, etc.) for easier scanning, and get writers involved in crafting microcontent.
• Ditch "useless content" such as bland, pro forma letters from the editor or the organization's president.

I've heard these print magazine tips before, but I like how Ranly placed them in the context of online media. The new crop of readers of print magazines (including those focused on university research efforts) will increasingly include people for whom the Net is their first-choice media. The functional similarity (from the reader's perspective) between magazines and the Web is, I think, something that magazine pros particularly have a hard time believing.