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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Time Mag on iPad Sticks to Basics .PNG) minonline will work backward this week, from the content-side out. A number of magazine brands succeeded in making iPad app versions of their brands available on launch day, and each is coming at the tablet format differently. This week we will give quick takes on each of these early attempts. Look for a roundup of the Top 5 iPad magazine ideas we found among these books in next week’s "Eye on Digital" Column in min. Later this week, and only after spending more time with the hardware on a day-to-day basis, will we reflect on the device itself. Let’s start with the magazine with the most ambitious release schedule for the iPad and the current bestseller among paid magazine apps, Time. Each pricey $4.99 issue will be available to iPad users on Friday each week. The inaugural issue we loaded Saturday morning had, of course, the hall of mirrors effect—Steve Jobs on its cover and the iPad itself as main subject. Managing editor Richard Stengel fronts the issue, explaining, “We believe that the device and others like it, from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Sony, will change people’s lives by ushering in a new era of portable computing.” We’ll see about that. Unlike some of the monthlies, Time’s iPad approach is workmanlike and easily navigable. A pop-up strip of thumbnails lets you flick through the full magazine layout and pop down into a page. A thinner strip of section nav buttons drops you into the main magazine topics. You swipe laterally to move from page to page or section to section, but then swipe vertically to scroll down into the deeper text of any given piece. In certain stories, changing orientation from portrait to landscape kicks in a slideshow. Overall, the reading experience is palatable, if not compelling. The text is sized well and the entry page feels zoomed for  comfortable lean-back reading. We found it easy to fall into lengthier articles and to read through without the customary zooming and pecking required for many digital magazines in the past. Still, other iPad titles like Men's Health and GQ are making better use of pop-up navigation boxes that synopsize and telegraph the content around the magazine from one spot, and this is badly needed in the Time execution. The thumbnails themselves are not sufficiently communicative, and unless a loyal reader is well acquainted with the section titles (Milestones, Postcards, Verbatim, etc.), they tell too little. Notably missing from this initial version is content sharing. There is no article forwarding or social network sharing tool embedded yet, and we can only surmise that there wasn’t time to include them. There are technical glitches, however. We frequently had the bottom portion of the page blacked out when operating in portrait mode (usually fixed by flipping from landscape and back again). Apparently the Page Viewer ribbon of thumbnails was not restoring the screen correctly when it was supposed to recede. Also, the section navigation bar never crawled all the way to its end, so we couldn’t get direct access to the final sections of the book. As a content repurposing project, the iPad rethink is just that for now—magazine repurposing. A few nods to multimedia and connectivity are here. The Newsfeed feature does pull in the latest news from Time.com, and this is formatted very nicely and makes a welcome complement to the print weekly. How cool will it be someday when the print and Web media will be more neatly merged and contextual hooks in the repurposed pages link to updates and related breaking news in the real-time feed? As we will see in a review of Men's Health for iPad later this week, Rodale is starting to go down this path already. That is when we let technology like the iPad help us reimagine the relationship between contemplative, long-form journalism and real-time information. Until then, we’ll be happy to have Time the magazine and Time.com the site living side by side in a similarly attractive format. According to recent reports, the advertisers featured in these first iPad issues paid a nice premium to be here. They are the ones who get much of the multimedia glitz, with embedded videos in some ads for Fidelity and Toyota and changed functionality when the iPad is reoriented. The Toyota ad is particularly suggestive of where enhanced advertising could go. Not only does the ad have an embedded video but it also includes a full-screen slideshow that tells a story about the advertised minivan. Clearly there is an opportunity here for a new kind of advertorial and custom publishing within a magazine that offers clients TV-like storytelling with print-platform immersion, share of voice and time spent. Out of the gate this weekend, Time’s iPad app was among the most popular of the paid apps. Does the iPad remind us of the newsweekly's unique editorial value and reading experience in an age of real-time news feeds? Perhaps. It will be interesting to see if it can sustain this initial curiosity. At $4.99 a week without any apparent subscription discounting or tie-in to one’s print sub, the brand is setting a fairly high value on itself. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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