Serendipity35

Considering how many techfolks are asking if print is dead, and if colleges should still be printing alumni magazines and other promotional materials, it was interesting to read that reversal.

Here are a few of the responses they received:

• A print magazine sounds good if it's a 'best of' for the year. Otherwise, regular print production defeats the purpose of why web content is popular.
• I quite like the idea of cross media content. At the end it is all about content.
• We have too many magazines as it is, never mind the countless mail catalogues and other junk mail. Even printing on recycled paper is wasteful.
• Why would you waste natural resources putting out content that can be easily accessed on the web?
  
• The trick of course is to find the sweet spot of niche plus having a critical mass in numbers to make the printing sustainable (if not even profitable!).
• I learned this weekend that advertisers are looking for the whole suite of media from one outlet--- so video, online, radio, itunes, print-- the more the merrier for them.
• I can't see SLATE Magazine going to print...
• They will find an inexpensive print on demand model versus a mass produced run.
• Print magazines are declining not because of their content but because of factors like accessibility, ease of use, and shifting consumer practices. Putting web content into a magazine could be self-defeating
• Putting your site's best user generated content into a magazine – that seems like a better idea to me since it's a different model from what most magazines do.

Would you read a book or magazine taken from a web site or blog? I think I would. I still print far too many web pages to read later because I hate reading off a screen. There are blogs that I have only started reading recently, but they have a backlog of several years of posts. I'd prefer to read a well-edited selection of those posts in print.

A friend suggested to me recently that I should take some of the better posts from Serendipity35 and expand them for a book. Though I have no plans to do that, it wouldn't be the first blog to become a book. I started looking at the odd blog called indexed by Jessica Nagy a few years ago. She does witty daily diagrams on index cards. Quite unlike all the other blogs. It won a Webby Award and other honors and it became a book.

In a culture where comic books become movies and movies become comic books or TV shows or Broadway shows, it wouldn't be surprising to see new media transposed to old media forms.

For higher ed, it's more likely that print needs to go digital. There's a webinar series, "Stop the Presses: Why and how to go digital with your magazine or newsletter" running on June 24, 25 & 26 if you're exploring that path. The series looks at why and how higher ed institutions have gone digital with their news-oriented publications.