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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 7650023" data-attributes="member: 150">We've seen a few changes in the TRPG magazine market lately.  A few months back, Dragon and Dungeon switched from their daily publication schedule to publishing the entire bundle of content once a month.  Then Kobold Quarterly decided to end their long run.  Then <a href="http://www.rpgnow.com/product/111516/Gygax-magazine-issue-%231" target="_blank">Gygax </a>magazine kicked off with an excellent premiere issue. Meanwhile, in the broader magazine industry, Time Warner is spinning off it's magazines -- including Time.  Newsweek has been digital only for a while. [ATTACH]56700[/ATTACH]Print has widely been understood to be in trouble, but as Barbara Rowlands posted in her Guardian article "<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/mar/07/fall-rise-magazines-print-digital" target="_blank">The fall and rise of magazines from print to digital</a>," magazines have an edge over their sister print engines, newspapers.  "all magazines are built around the twin pillars that have always eluded newspapers – passion and community. The most successful ones are returning to their roots."Passion and CommunitySo, if there's one thing we've got around here, it's passion. And Community. Two things we've got.  At the same time, these "successful" digital offerings are successful because they understand themselves very differently from a digital facsimile of a print magazine.  Rowlands' piece is excellent, and well worth a read if you have a chance.  She looks back to the ancestor of our word "magazine", the "Arabic term makzin or makzan, which means storehouse." She argues that the digital magazines that succeed are the ones that embrace that sort of vision for their product -- they provide their passionate community a multimedia storehouse of content that suits their interests. But Wait, What About WordsHey, words aren't dead -- the New Yorker has proven that when the community is a community of readers, text can still work just fine.  Of course, the New Yorker has added some digital features that go well with the new format -- like poetry read by the poet, and hyperlinks to the resources cited in an article.  You know, like the New York Times article where I read this stuff.  Even better, words (in the form of Blogs, at any rate) continue to be very high on the list of influencers -- <a href="http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/blogs-outrank-social-networks-for-consumer-influence-new-research/" target="_blank">rating higher than any social media outlet, including Faceboo</a>k (though just barely). Facebook is (theoretically) getting too cluttered with fishing posted and corporate marketing messages, but blogs remain a strong source of opinion, ideas, and connection to the audience.What This Means For UsIt's no secret that we're swimming in a sort of protoplasmic stew of potential energy right now.  With D&D going through extended playtesting, Pathfinder growing and other game systems stretching on the margins, the future is there to be made right now.I've said before that one of the key differentiators for games and game companies in the future will be how they embrace the digital world -- and their regular magazine content will be one of those differentiators.  It's going to be a big advantage for whomever comes up with a dedicated magazine app for the gaming industry -- either a house engine like Dragon or a community-based effort -- that has the look and feel of the more successful magazine apps.    Until The Future Gets HereThere are a couple of terrific apps that do an excellent job of presenting a magazine-style experience on a tablet. I'm a big fan of Flipboard and Newsify.  <a href="http://flipboard.com/" target="_blank">Flipboard</a> is my favorite (available for iOS and Android devices).  Early on, it mostly fed off twitter and it's own pre-fab content streams, which works pretty well, but these days it will connect to a wide variety of content outlets (including Facebook, Google+, Linkedin), and best of all, Google reader, my RSS reader of choice.  The user interface (UI) in Flipboard is the key -- and the app is free, so there's no harm giving it a try.  But, with the feeds from feeds you manage (like your own collection of RSS feeds, Twitter contacts, or Facebook friends) you have what amounts to a news rack of digital magazines full of content that is custom tailored to your individual interests.  Essentially this is what I have now -- a digital magazine about gaming topics, customized to me. Gaming blogs from all corners of the interwebs combined into an attractive, very usable package. Where it breaks down is sites that have paywalls, and that are posting their key content as PDFs, not as html.  Both force me out of the flipboard experience to get my content.  A new gaming magazine app solution would have to navigate those challenges carefully. So, tablet users -- what are the UI features that are most important to you?  How would you like to get your magazine content in the future? And, what's a fair price for that app and/or content? (Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualsugar/316210950/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Monica's Dad on Flickr</a>)</blockquote>

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