New Republic Redesign
posted in Business, Technology |I heard an interview on NPR a couple of days ago with Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic which has apparently just had a big redesign. Part of the redesign is moving to less frequent publication, with longer articles and photos in the print version and more of their former content moving to the web.
On the one hand I think its great that they are adapting to the web and agree that there really are appropriate ways to divide content between the web and print. But the way he described stuff that made sense for the print edition really missed the mark on some key points. He described the stuff for the print edition as being content of longer-term interest. I get putting longer articles in print (which they do also) since often that is a more satisfying format to sit down and do a relaxed extended read. But content that is going to be relevant for years is the worst thing to put into print vs. the web. A month from now the print edition will be in landfills and hopefully recycling centers (maybe this is too painful of a truth for the editor to grapple with?) and Google will just be getting around to featuring your online content. Online is the perfect place to put something that everyone will want years from now.
This feels like a classic case of old-media people not fully understanding the intricacies of modern “new media”, the importance of the search engines to bringing in traffic, and the life-cycle of content on the web. It is easy to think of the web as like publishing a serial magazine except you can publish a new issue every day inexpensively. Old content then gets filed away into your archive of “old issues”. That of courses misses most of the powerful techniques that people have been developing to expand their audience and reach.