Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age

6: Off the Page

6 off the Page Medium-Specific Approaches to Content The cover story of the May 2009 issue of Publishing Executive, a resource for magazine professionals involved in business management, print and e-media production, and audience development, featured an inaugural list of the “Top Women in Magazine Publishing.” One of the honorees, Dwell Media president and publisher Michela O’Connor Abrams, issued a clarion call to her publishing peers: “Publishing is platform agnostic. The sooner any publisher recognizes that they represent a content brand that serves a community , the better off they will be. No publisher should be without a cohesive online, mobile, event and print content strategy. . . . Put your community at the center of your brand by tailoring and expressing your content on every possible platform.”1 From her perspective, two simultaneous strategies will pave the road to publishing success in the digital economy: the collapse of traditional media boundaries (“a content brand”) and the unguarded embrace of interactive (“community”) features. Magazine content, then, should flow effortlessly off the printed page and across online, mobile, and outdoor spaces. The religious symbolism inherent in the term “platform agnostic” is not incidental; by deflating the image of print as the supreme deity of the magazine universe, agnosticism offers an alternative to “traditional” media orthodoxies inherited from the pre-digital age. What Abrams fails to acknowledge , however, are the practical challenges involved with implementing a platform-agnostic approach. In the face of emergent cross-platform and convergent media logics, producers confront many issues and questions that may unsettle their deeply ingrained cultural practices. For example, should the same type of content off the page · 115 that gets created for the magazine qua magazine circulate online and across mobile and tablet formats? Or should content vary depending upon the platform for which it is produced? Can the norms and guidelines established for the print magazine stretch to accommodate new content demands? Or, conversely, should producers rethink traditional approaches to content, audiences , and advertisers? And, finally, what do the responses to such questions portend for magazine producers and consumers in the digital age? This chapter finds answers to these questions by uncovering producers’ explicit conventions and implicit assumptions about medium-specific content . Rooted in film and cinema studies, media specificity theory is predicated on the idea that each medium has “essential and unique characteristics” that differentiate it from other expressive forms.2 This notion thus runs contrary to the current logic of convergence (blurring of different media), revealing tensions in terms of the organizational identity—central, distinctive, and enduring traits—of sites of production. Against this backdrop, I show how the practical realities of media convergence are much more complicated than contemporary narratives indicate. On the surface, magazine industry leaders appear confident about the opportunities for magazine content to move across digital sites and platforms. Yet behind this thin veil of optimism lie individual and organizational practices that continue to affirm the particularities of various media and, especially, the longevity of print. I examine the apparent disjuncture between rhetoric and reality by focusing on three key media/platform variances: content standards, the centrality of a title’s editorial voice, and expectations about the extent of advertiser influence on content. The distinctions between print and online are particularly compelling; in addition, tablet devices are being positioned as a tool that can elide medium-specific challenges while also serving as a test bed for advertising /editorial relations within digital environments. In the end, it seems that magazine content does not easily flow off the printed page, but rather swirls in the midst of many crosscurrents. the industry Rhetoric of Convergence Media convergence describes the confluence of formerly separate technologies onto a single device; it implicates the crumbling of traditional media boundaries to make room for the ascendance of multi-platform media brands. “Convergence” and sister terms such as “platform agnosticism,” “cross-platform,” and “media brands” were frequently invoked during interviews and within accounts published in the trade and mainstream presses. 116 . chapter 6 Yet the deployment of these terms was highly uneven; that is, individual magazine producers exhibited a high degree of reflexivity about the various meanings and applications of this new lexicon. This brought the tension between the reality and the rhetoric of media convergence into stark relief. Industry associations, which according to sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell provide organizations with models for change at moments of uncertainty, have swiftly and fully...