Adventures in digital publishing

In the day job, I produce Newcastle University’s alumni magazine, which goes out to 26,000 graduates in print and a further 52,000 online. Until recently, its digital presence had only comprised an RSS-driven website and an Issuu widget. So when our design agency, Infinite, offered us the chance to experiment with the iPad, we – quite literally – swiped it.

Infinite uses QuarkXPress to lay-out the print edition of Arches, and a plugin called the App Studio Xtension to adapt the spreads into an iPad ready format – with rich content including video, audio and hyperlinks to enhance the reading experience. I was really chuffed with the results, and send my thanks to David Whitfield and the team at Infinite for all their graft.

Although it’s not certain whether tablets will be the platform of choice for magazine readers in the future, they certainly offer a user experience which fuses the tangibility and portability of print with the rich content and versatility of digital. And, behind the scenes, readership, circulation and feedback are much easier to monitor and evaluate. I, for one, am sold.

You can download the Arches app for free from the App Store, and read a case study on the Infinite Digital website.

The girl’s been on fire recently. Here’s JesmondLocal’s latest radio podcast, produced by Sophie Bauckham, and featuring the talents of Bob Cooper and Nathan Buck – on the back of a couple of live shows we did a few months back.

I help to run a hyperlocal news website called JesmondLocal.com with a team of volunteers. Aside from the local news beat, we’ve been dabbling in some independent media projects too, like the 48 hour magazine we created when the Turner Prize came to Gateshead last year. This summer, a filmmaking team led by Sophie Bauckham made a documentary about running in Jesmond Dene – our local green belt/vegetative utopia. Here’s the result.

Writers, photographers, illustrators & data interpreters needed for Thinking Digital’s first magazine – in print!

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The BBC College of Journalism held its first conference for hyperlocalists on 24 May at its new northern HQ in Salford, MediaCityUK. People came from around the UK, and as far away as Detroit in the US – with a mix of journalists, students, academics and everyday enthusiasts. 

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Our hyperlocal experiment, JesmondLocal, has a funding application in with Nesta – an innovation agency which believes locality will rule the web by 2020. Its ‘Destination Local’ project is offering up to £50k to 10 hyperlocal media projects which are dabbling with mobile technology. After seeing some of the excellent submissions on YouTube, I think we’re in for some serious competition. Successful projects announced at the end of June.

**UPDATE** We didn’t get the funding, but we’re looking forward to seeing what comes out of the 10 projects that did. We did, however, get a visit from BBCR2’s Today programme.

A little Storify showing how one technical fault at an inopportune moment at BBC MediaCityUK in Salford went mini-viral in the North West. Oops…

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I was lucky enough to do an interview with the mighty Jeremy Leslie of magCulture – one of the magazine industry’s most respected designers – for issue seven of independent North East mag, Novel. Here’s the text, but I recommend picking up a copy of the mag, which is stocked in a number of bars, cafés and shops in Newcastle – and it’s free. Photo by Sam Ashby (with thanks).

Print is dead. Long live print.

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Here’s an interview I did with Anna Jones, Chief Operating Officer at Hearst Magazines UK, for the Newcastle Uni alumni newsletter in February 2012. Hearst owns the likes of Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping and Digital Spy. Thanks to Phil Adams for the photo.

Turnaround: turned around

The North East’s first 48-hour magazine, in full pagey-turney splendour, for your viewing pleasure. If you’d like a printed copy, drop me a tweet.