Marco Arment Launches "The Magazine"
There’s room for another category between individuals and major publishers, and that’s where The Magazine sits. It’s a multi-author, truly modern digital magazine that can appeal to an audience bigger than a niche but smaller than the readership of The New York Times. This is what a modern magazine can be, not a 300 MB stack of static page images laid out manually by 100 people.
In my opinion, magazine publishers have wasted a golden opportunity put in front of them with the iPad. Nearly all of them have given us bloated ports of their print variety. They should have re-thought their products from the ground-up — use the same content, fine, but present it in the elegant and streamlined manner that the iPad allows for. Total fail.
I have a lot more faith in something like The Magazine to pull this off. And if it works, it could have some pretty far-reaching ramifications in the publishing world.
