Olivia Batty - Paper, Pixels, and Ipads Blog Response

Rebecca Burns spoke Tuesday in the Drewry room of Grady College.

Her impressive resume includes editor, historian, author, and now Director of Digital Strategy. Burns began her lecture by describing the ways in which magazines are different than other print mediums. She said that the below list depicts the major characteristics of magazines:
- long form fiction stories
- investigative reporting with high standards for fact checking
- great photographs/design/illustrations
- lifestyle stories (especially food)
- narrative stories
- service journalism (stories about education, doctors, etc.)

Burns essentially created her own position at Atlanta magazine because the website for the magazine was in such bad shape that it needed a complete overhaul. Burns signed herself up for the job.

The major issue was that the web content of the online site did not match up to the magazine. It featured random blogs and a design that did not reflect the magazine's style. With hardly any technical expertise, Burns managed to place herself in the readers' position and redesign the whole web layout.

She began by thinking about how to supplement the articles in the magazines instead of just reiterating the content of the magazine or adding random gimmicks. The point of online content is to include interactive elements that draw in the reader and get them involved with the magazine in between issues. This way, they stay tied to the magazine and the brand even when a monthly issue has not been recently released.

Burns did this by adding an easy to use search system and guides on the website, web content that reiterated the strengths of the magazine, blogs that addressed a few central ideas instead of random subjects with few followers, a better understanding of each city the magazine represented, newsletters that offered teasers for the upcoming issues and supplementary content to the articles (Burns and her colleagues planned that these newsletters would eventually turn into "apps" for iphones.)

By transferring the newsletters to ipads, one can still get the effect of the images produced in a magazine while adding page buttons to the screen and making links to the articles that are easy to send to people and share with friends and relatives. Other interactive elements included slideshows and audio such as interviews with radio hosts.

The lecture was informative about the ways that the internet and web design has made certain jobs in the magazine business obsolete while introducing others that have never existed before.