Finding The Formula

The traditional wisdom in publishing holds that you have two types of product: a print-based one and a web-based one. Say what you will about any perceived differences in writing - the big disconnect between the web and print is gloss, chic, experience, whatever you want to call it. Web pioneers give you text on a clear background with a few images around the edges. Magazines give you a page that is crafted to the article; the background might be an image from a game in question; a montages of images is arrayed around the page and the boxout is an art form in itself. The content is specially picked for you by editors, rather than you heading out to dib and dab at articles on the net.

Being a web journalist myself, I'm not saying that magazines trump the quality of the web. What I am saying is that despite the fact that the web offers all of the content of magazines - and in many cases even more - the glossy paper tomes still sell month to month; even in the tech sector, where you think the average punter would know better. People want the experience of reading a magazine, and they're willing to pay a premium for it.

Naturally enough, many moons ago somebody came up with the idea of combining the web with magazine quality publications. Most attempts have bombed after only one or two issues, however. People have an ingrained sense that despite wanting magazine quality, they don't want to have to pay for it when it's a "Bring-Your-Own-Paper" web job.

Enter UK-based Cranberry Publishing with a solution: offer eMagazines for free and without asking for so much as an email address to get them. While somewhat ingenious, it's almost obvious why the traditional publishers never copped on to the strategy.

Cranberry is the result of the rising and falling tides of British tech publishing. Publishing Director Dave Taylor was a group publisher at Future Publishing before moving to Highbury as Publishing Director. When Highbury did its impression of the Titanic in late 2005, Taylor brought Highbury's editorial and commercial directors (also formerly of Future), Dan Hutchinson and Duncan Fergusan onboard. The goal was to invigorate Cranberry, with the objective of becoming a major publisher of eMagazines.

Cranberry now has two eMagazines in the wild: Pro Evolution Soccer Fanzine and 360Zine; a third, PCGameZine, is scheduled to be published on November 30. All are free, and all feature traditional magazine quality. Will Cranberry's GamerZine experiment succeed where many others - including those of their former employers - have failed? I asked Dave Taylor what his master plan is.

Interview With Dave Taylor, Cranberry Publishing Director

Aaron McKenna: First of all, tell me a little about your background, and how Cranberry came into being.

Dave Taylor: I set up Cranberry after leaving Future Publishing in 2004; I had been Group Publisher at Future and worked there for ten years. We launched an emag that was very much a prototype of what you see today, and while working on that I ended up working at Highbury Entertainment in 2005 as Publishing Director. Dan [Hutchinson] was there as Editorial Director and Duncan Ferguson as Commercial Director, both of whom I knew from back at Future.

After the collapse of Highbury in late 2005, and its subsequent sale of titles to Imagine Publishing, the three of us talked about what we might do, and a few months ago the idea of Gamerzines was born. We wanted to learn from the experience that Cranberry had already had with emagazines, however, and build on the format. That's why what we've created is so polished compared to some emagazine launches out there.

Aaron McKenna: Why have you gone for a magazine-on-the-web approach, as opposed to a vanilla mag or website-based product?

Dave Taylor: You've got to understand that the three people in the management team at Cranberry are all magazine people through and through. We've all worked for fifteen years in specialist press - that's the posh name we in the industry like to give to computer and videogames magazines. So, you know, we'd be lying if we didn't say that we love magazines.

That said, we have to face the fact that the Internet has changed the way people access information. Printed magazine sales in this area are not what they once were, and that trend is not going to reverse.

Websites are great, but they can't recreate the state of mind that you get when reading a magazine. Plus, they can't be viewed offline. They still have issues with printing, and even though CSS can do a lot, the designer can't guarantee that the page will look the same on your PC as it does on mine.

Also, they expect you to do all the work. This is exactly how you want it sometimes: you tell me what you want to read next and I'll send you that page. But a part of why magazines have succeeded in print form is because people like the element of pre-selection. An editor has considered things and decided what weighting and space to give to each game, so you don't have to make those decisions.

The emagazine format brings together the absolute best of all of these things. It's print quality, in every respect, from the quality of the writing to how it looks coming out of the printer. It's delivered via the web, so it's available at the click of a button, and it uses software that any gamer will already have [Adobe Acrobat Reader].

And you, and everyone else who's read it, has cottoned onto the best bit. We can embed video and multimedia, so you can go further than just reading about the games and seeing static screenshots - you can see video clips and play around with animated elements. It makes it an immersive environment; an entertainment form in its own right. And that's what we read these types of magazines for, to be entertained about some subject that interests us.

Aaron McKenna: Publishing magazine-type products online has been tried before with little success. What lessons have you learned from those efforts, and what do you think will make your approach a success?

Dave Taylor: First and foremost, we learnt that people want two things before they will even look at your emagazine: it has to be free, and they don't want to register. These barriers are often put up by media owners, because, you know, it costs a lot of money to create content. But the truth is, the Internet is free. We all expect it.

So, as much as learning from what others had done, we also approached it from a personal viewpoint - what would work for us if we were the reader? And in that respect, that's exactly how we've always approached printed magazine design and delivery. With 360Zine, Dan and I spent hours discussing pacing and whether it felt right as a magazine. Design elements went on the page and were dropped because we felt they were too forced.

I think this depth of experience in the magazine industry separates us from a lot of what has come before. We knew what was required to put a magazine together, online or offline. Sometimes I got the feeling with emagazine launches I'd seen elsewhere that there was a hope that online would be easier and didn't require as much experience.

And then finally, though I could talk all day about this, there is broadband. Previous attempts have been hampered by bandwidth, but these days, I think you'd struggle to find a gamer without 2 Meg broadband.

Aaron McKenna: 360Zine seems to utilize some nifty PDF tricks - is the production of a mag in PDF format much different from that of a paper-based magazine?

Dave Taylor: At its heart, you need a well-designed page, and in that respect it's the same as a paper-based product. Don't forget that one of our aims was to ensure that people could stick this in the print queue at work, pick it up and take it for a read in their, er, private time. [laughs] So the basis was a landscape, rather than portrait, print magazine page.

On top of that, we wanted to make the screen reading and viewing as simple as possible, so we added code for navigation, printing, emailing to a friend, zooming, and so forth. That's tricky, and you really need to understand the relationship between different pieces of software. So yes, I would say an emag, done right, is harder to produce and requires more thought than a print mag.

Some people say "I don't like PDF magazines," but when you talk to them, you discover what they mean is "I've seen some bad PDFs". PDF is a great format, but it's rarely used correctly. We think we've done as much as possible with the format to make it work, and we couldn't have done 360Zine in any other format and achieved what we wanted.

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