Four swing tips for publishers from Golf’s iPad edition

I don’t have time to read a lot of magazines cover to cover, but I do take time every month to relax with the latest issue of Golf Magazine and pretend – at least for an hour or so –
that my slice will, in fact, one day go away and I can start getting my game ready for the Champions Tour.

But reading Golf (a Sports Illustrated/Time Inc. publication) has taken on new joy the past three months with the introduction of the magazine’s iPad edition.  The iPad edition is smartly put together and extremely easy to read (especially for those of us with older eyes), and offers features that aren’t available in the print version. More importantly, though, there are some key lessons for other publishers making the shift to digital editions of their print products:

1.  Design for the end product.  Golf’s iPad edition isn’t simply a reproduction of the print pages.  Each editorial page and feature has been reformatted to fit nicely on the iPad screen, which means for starters that the vertically oriented pages are now horizontal.  There’s no need to zoom or move from side to side or up and down to read an article.  The edition does take advantage of the iPad’s scrolling functionality but does so only where appropriate (as in a chart), makes it clear where you should scroll, and doesn’t leave you wondering if you missed something.
2. Offer features that take advantage of the medium. The iPad edition offers additional photographs (and the photos are spectacular, of course) that the editors don’t have room to run in the print edition. Sometimes these are more timely, such as a photo from a recent PGA event that ended after the print edition deadlined. Bonuses in the February iPad issue include beautiful photos with short descriptions of several holes from Donald Trump’s new course in Scotland.  And the lessons that sometimes are little challenging to grasp in print come to life with links to videos on the golf.com web site. The iPad edition also doesn’t just tell readers to go to golf.com; it tells them specifically what they will find when they get there and links the content to what’s in the magazine.  That kind of specificity is critical to driving traffic back to the web site without alienating readers.
3. Keep it simple. Readers can page through the iPad edition just as they would the regular magazine (my preference – for serendipity’s sake) or pull up a table of contents and choose which articles to read or scroll among thumbnails of the pages to find a particular article.  Also, each subscriber has a “library” of past editions, which means I can go back and review that key tip from an earlier edition (still haven’t fixed my slice, though).
4.  Deliver when it’s ready.  The iPad app/reader for Golf magazine sends me a pop-up message when the new issue is ready.  The February issue was downloaded on Thursday, and by the time the print edition arrived in my mailbox on Saturday, I was already more than halfway through it.  This kind of timeliness creates additional reader engagement and would be even more valuable for publishers of daily or weekly products (imagine if you could read the next day’s newspaper at 10 p.m. – that’s what time most papers are heading to the press these days).

Despite these highlights, there are a couple of opportunities that Golf’s iPad edition still seems to be missing, although they might appear in later iterations:

1.  Effective digital ads.  The ads in the iPad edition are not reformatted for the device but are simply reproduced from the magazine. This makes them difficult to read, although many do link directly to the advertiser’s web site.  Still, the next step is for the advertisers to provide an iPad-formatted ad to go along with their print ad and maximize the value of their investment, especially as more readers transition to the digital product.
2. Immediate feedback.  There are no apparent ways to comment on articles or share them via social media sites.  Feedback and sharing is a tremendous way to increase reader engagement, and digital media allow it to be done so effortlessly that publications should take advantage of that at every opportunity.

Still, I’m sold – to the point that I’d be willing to convert to a digital-only subscription and save Time the cost of printing and mailing my issue every month. Now, about that slice …