As a technology culture publication, Wired Magazine has always pushed the boundaries in the marriage of innovation and telling stories. It was among the first news outlets to embrace a website, podcasting, and now tablet pcs with the Wired iPad app. In my previous posts on the iPad, I mentioned how it seem like the device finds new use-cases to surprise me with everyday. Almost immediately upon opening the Wired iPad App, I was in complete utter future shock. This is undoubtably the future for the “printed page”.
The tablet form factor of the iPad in the hands of the designers at Wired takes every setback of ink on dead trees and throws them into a shredder. First thing that readers will notice is that this is the exact content that they would get if they bought the magazine at a newstand, but delivered to their hands without even having to leave their house. Unlike some media outlets (COUGH the New York times COUGH), there isn’t anything left out because they want the reader to still buy their traditional media.
As I flipped through the Wired App, I was in awe. Like most e-reader apps, every single page has been formatted for the iPad’s screen. Every word is completely legible, but that is where the similarities to other e-readers ends. This is Daily Prophet from Harry Potter. Touch them and some pictures become videos, articles about music play the music they are writing about, one picture of iron man rotates as you drag a finger across it… Best of all? None of this seems gimmicky and adds to experience of understanding the content.
It may seem small, but the most impressive moment was when I pressed one of the teasers on the cover and it jumped to the story in the magazine. One of my biggest pet peeves about reading magazines has always been buying a magazine from some promise on the cover and not being able to find the article inside. That frustration is gone.
Wired nailed navigation in general. With a touch of a button, the table of content drops down over the page. To address the one criticism I have heard again and again when talking to people about reading magazines on an e-reader, the “I like to flip through the pages” defense, Wired added a mode where the magazine pages break apart and the reader can flip through them with sort summaries of each article.
The final thing I noticed could be the most important to the print industry. The biggest reason for our favorite magazines getting thinner and thinner has been the lack of ad buys, as fewer companies think their ad dollars are worth it. With the Wired iPad app, I think I have spent equal time playing with the interactive ads as the actual articles. The ads have videos, music, photo galleries, and something that could only be on an internet device, the ultimate in a call to action, links to the companies’ websites.
The first issue is $4.99, the exact price of the magazine on news stands. Pricing will be important, but Wired has promised subscription models and with their paper version going for an affordable $10-a year, I am sure that will not be an issue.
I can not wait to see what comes from this model of magazines. With a mix of interactivity, audio, and video, it really seems like the best of all worlds and something that basically every genre of magazine can embrace. Add to all of this the idea of instant delivery and I think news has finally reached a new level of maturity and way to remonetize itself. Can we stop declaring print dead now? Its not dead, its moved on.
