Portal strategies become increasingly important to all magazines

Since there can be no doubt that most magazines want to have as robust a web presence as they can afford, for multi-title publishers there seem to be a choice of ways to go: standalone websites for each title, styled and presented with its own voice or image; and portals, which gather together different titles and present their information and archives in a consistent way. Magazine companies are thus catching on to ways of using the power of the web linking and searching to tempt readers to stay longer and visit more than one title.

MochaSofa, the portal at Transcontinental Media, is perhaps the biggest, providing access to four big, women's interest consumer titles Canadian Living, Homemaker's, Style at Home and Elle Canada. Each title-specific web page can be reached from the portal, but each site shares a common architecture and presentation style.

Horticulture Portal, from Annex Printing and Publishing, brings together four trade titles: Greenhouse Canada, Fruit and Vegetable, Canadian Florist and Garden Centre magazines, again with a common, relatively simple style.

Rogers Media uses a somewhat different model, having standalone sites for each magazine, but cross-marketing the various sites through Canoe.ca. So, in effect, Canoe is a portal where you can get at the same magazines, in various combinations, by subject: Home & Garden, Lifewise, Money and so on. And, in a relatively recent development, there is a page where a miscellany of stories from a bunch of Rogers titles (Maclean's, Canadian Business, MoneySense, Flare, Today's Parent and Chatelaine, are accessible. Links lead the reader to the individual magazine pages. Canadian Business, Profit and MoneySense are also clustered together under a separate Canadian Business banner.

So portals are obvious and inevitable for multi-title publishers.

But what we're not seeing (though I'd be happy to be pointed to examples) are cooperative portals for similar or complementary magazines from different, independent publishers. It may be a matter of style or preference or simple rugged individualism, but it's worth thinking about the ability of a group of literary and cultural magazines, for instance, banding together to create a "reader's portal" or a number of smaller health and fitness titles doing the same. Most of these magazines have a website of some sort, and maybe a blog, maybe even a podcast. But they might be able to do so much more.

Not only would they have significantly higher traffic (and perhaps even the capability to sell some online advertising) but they could also find ways of doing web-only editorial that spanned their titles and gave readers more reason to come back. And they might be able to offer merchandising, audience-building and customer service tools that aren't within their reach individually.