The list of magazines in Apple’s Newsstand is growing each month, with the popular covers being transformed into digital masterpieces for ever-lower subscription rates.
Editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair Magazine, Graydon Carter, speaks resonantly of the power and beauty of digital magazines, and how Vanity Fair (iTunes Link) has been transformed by venturing into the digital realm in the video below.
Carter and the team at Vanity Fair give great insight into the creative process of going digital, and speak of some of the challenges they faced convincing photographers their work would look as good, or better in tablet form.
Carter also re-affirms that despite changing the vehicle of the content, it doesn’t “change what you actually do – telling stories”
There are obviously still challenges across this new area, with getting subscribers to the online issues, making the content interactive enough that customers see the value in an online subscription, and also the extra hours and cost to the company in having staff with the ability to make digital content. However, Carter is a fantastic example of an individual in the magazine industry who has overseen many changes in the publishing industry, and states,
“if I was 27 and looking to start up another one, I wouldn’t even do a print edition, I would only do a digital edition”.