SXSW Interactive 2012 is in the past. On behalf of Next Issue, I was sent to Austin to cover sessions and seek out conversations related to digital publishing. Anything to help magazine and newspaper publishers succeed was fair game.
The Team
The Next Issue team. From left: Claus Enevoldsen, Nicole Martinez and Efren Salinas.
I teamed up with two very talented journalism graduate students, Nicole Martinez and Efren Salinas. In addition to being great writers, they both have specific areas of expertise. Nicole is a master of social media and did a fantastic job of combining original with crowd sourced content to create really compelling articles. When she’s not studying, she works as an Internet Marketing Manager.
Efren is a wizard videographer. He has a knack for boiling down long interviews to compelling 2-3 minute clips perfect for the YouTube age. He’s also an enthusiastic gamer and runs his own gaming site: lonestargamer.tumblr.com. I tell you all of this, in case you are looking to hire, or you know of someone who are. Click to contact Nicole. Click to contact Efren.
Inspiration for digital publishers
On to the content! You can check out all the posts we created at SXSW here, most of them syndicated through eMediaVitals.com and a couple through PubExec.com. For this post, I wanted to call out a few I think are especially helpful for digital publishers.
Digital editions attracting new audiences, not just print readers
During the panel hosted by Next Issue and titled Digital vs. Print: Storyboard to Digital Delivery, four top executives from the magazine digital publishing world gave advice on four topics: User experience, creation process, Business models and personalization. Read the article.
Following, we interviewed Liz Schimel, chief digital officer at Meredith, and Chris Wilkes, VP of the App Lab at Hearst. The result are these two great videos:
Rethinking touchscreen design
Josh Clark is a designer and founder of Global Moxie and an expert on mobile design. And he’s a great guy. We covered his session about designing for touchscreens and following met with him in the hallway.
In particular, I love his thoughts on abandoning buttons for gesture based design. Read the article. Also, check out his blog, lots of great stuff!
Highlight app: Ubiquity trumps privacy
Just launched iPhone app Highlight got all the buzz at SXSW. Highlight runs in the background and notifies you about people around you. After having cleared a pesky PR lady asking me critical questions (no seriously, she was very nice and just doing her job), I got a quick interview with founder Paul Davison in a badly lit back room at one of the many SXSW parties.
Davison had some very interesting and perhaps controversial comments about privacy versus social sharing. I got the Highlight app, and personally I’m not deterred. But, I’m still waiting for critical mass for the app to truly provide value. Read the article here.
BostonGlobe.com: Using responsive design to tell interactive stories
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know I’m a fan of responsive design. So, I was excited to get the opportunity to interview Miranda Mulligan, Digital Design Director at The Boston Globe.
The biggest take away for me was her insistence that you can tell really compelling interactive stories using HTML5. The biggest obstacle though comes down to resources. The technology is there, but does digital publishers have the right skills and motivation to execute? Read the article.
