A whole new kind of controlled circulation: rickshaw magazine tied down

Some enterprising publishers in Mumbai, India have created a monthly magazine called Meter Down that is aimed at affluent young professionals who can afford to travel by motorized rickshaws in the crowded streets in the city of 14 million people.

According to a story in The Guardian, the magazine was started by three recent graduates in February 2010 and is now carrried by 7,000 rickshaws in Mumbai and other western India cities such as Pune and Ahmedabad.

Drivers are lured into the scheme with a share of 35-40% of the profit from advertising sales. That works out at around 200-250 rupees (£2.30-£2.87) each, according to Mulchand Dedhia, 26, one of the founding trio. Mumbai auto drivers make 400-500 rupees working a normal shift, according to the Mumbai Autorickshawmen's Union.

Designing a publication to be read while travelling on Mumbai's famously pot-holed and chaotic streets had its own challenges, said Dedhia. After an initial trial his team decided to keep articles short and snappy, with no article longer than 300 words. There are lots of pictures too.

To stop passengers taking the magazine with them, it is tied to a shelf in the vehicle.

One of the partners, Mulchand Dedhia, says that each three-wheeled rickshaw makes 90-95 trips in a 24-hour period which would represent a readership of 600,000. In addition to on-page advertising, the company sells ads on the back and the inside of the rickshaws, which are nicknamed tuk-tuks for the noise they make (they are powered by compressed natural gas engines). Rickshaws are cheap by comparison to western taxis -- a three-mile ride costs 68 rupees (about 10 times the equivalent second class train ticket) -- but too expensive for most Indians to use regularly.

Aggregation magazine says its the first "wayfinding" magazine for the internet

Digital composite image from issue 1, by Gary Campbell

There is an allure in the unexpected; it is one of the reasons why one can invest hours following links and conversational threads online. And it is that proposition -- getting its readers caught up in a topic they didn't realize they were interested in that makes good magazines work so well. 

Yet when they go online, magazines seem to suffer from a creative inertia -- continuing to do what they have done and, as a result, not taking maximum advantage of what the web has to offer.

That's certainly the view of Gary Campbell, who has launched a monthly online magazine called Aggregation that is a sort of laboratory for what he thinks the ideal online magazine should be. There is a certain evangelistic quality to it. Campbell, as some of you will know, oversees the digital operations for Toronto Life magazine, Fashion magazine, Quill & Quire and Ottawa magazine. But Aggregation has nothing to do with his day job(s). It is entirely self-funded and not particularly concerned with making money right now (though it may, later). He has relied on the help of family and friends who are mentioned on the initial contents page.

"I'd like to see web magazines become a refinement in the way we view, catalogue and respond to the web," says Campbell. "Magazines of tomorrow won't have tightly controlled, fixed boundaries. They'll need to embrace the larger Internet and at the same time provide a more curated experience than Twitter or Google."

Every issue of what is characterized as "the first wayfinding magazine for the internet" has five contributors, each of them introducing five links on any topic they choose, resulting in that web of serendipitous connections I mentioned earlier. Campbell says it's optimized for the iPad but looks good on any desktop browser.

"The current crop of web magazines seem to just be trading paper for pixels," he said. "More often than not, it's just a print publication squeezed onto the iPad screen, with a couple of videos thrown in."

This "DVD extras" model isn't very innovative, he says and he clearly feels that there is a better way.

"One of my favourite pages in any magazine is the contributors' page. So I enlisted the help of of friends and acquaintances and tried to create something where the contributors page was the magazine, where you learn something about the personality of the people whose work you're reading. It's as much about the mix of people as it is about the mix of stories. An issue of Aggregation works if the mix leaves you feeling like you were at a great dinner party."

Campbell's views of what most online magazines are doing now are synchronous with recent criticisms that magazine publishers are too focussed on building apps that are much like their magazines, ignoring how people use mobile devices and the web generally. An article in Techdirt was entitled Why iPad magazines suck: They're defined by the past, not the future. It quoted Khoi Vin, until recently the design director of NYTimes.com:

"The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all -- a problem that's abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city -- with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you -- these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac."

Comments on this will, as always, be welcome. 

British magazine New Scientist uses brain scans to select cover

The British magazine New Scientist chose its most recent cover by sitting 19 right-handed men down and recorded their reactions to a variety of covers while measuring their reactions with an electroencephalograph. According to a post by Peter Krafka in All Things Digital, the magazine's editors hired the firm NeuroFocus essentially to pick the brains of their target audience. 

The design [shown] scored highest, because it supposedly made testers most receptive to the concepts “eye-catching,” “intriguing” and “must-buy”. This type of testing is unusual in magazines, but increasingly used in consumer marketing. As the New Scientist said:

In what we suspect is a world first, this week's cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people's heads and discover what they really want. You may find that sinister. What right does anyone have to try to read your mind? Or perhaps you are sceptical and consider the idea laughable. But neuromarketing, once dismissed as a fad, is becoming part and parcel of modern consumer society. So we decided to take a good look at it - and try it out ourselves.

Up Here magazine uses swimsuit models to provoke discussion of climate change

Up Here magazine, the national magazine of the year for 2009, has released it first "swimsuit" edition,with the goal of fostering discussions about climate change in the Arctic. A story on CBC.ca quotes editor Aaron Spitzer saying that the issue's purpose is to show how global warming is affecting the environment and people north of 60.

The latest edition of the magazine, which came out this week, features 10 swimsuit-clad women posing in threatened northern landscapes, from melting icescapes to burnt-out forests.

There was some criticism, questioning whether this was the best way to spark conversation about climate change and, in particular, restricting the shots to women.

Spitzer said Up Here wanted to make reference to Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit edition, which has been popular around the world for decades.

"We liked the idea of … taking this sort of stereotypical 'swimsuit issue' concept that Sports Illustrated has made sort of legendary, and putting a total Arctic twist on it. And they don't put guys in their swimsuit issues," he said.

Northern model Charlotte Overvold said she believes the photographs were tastefully shot. As well, she said she wanted to take part, given the issue being discussed.

"For me personally, animals, and the hunting and stuff like that, it's, like, greatly affected. So I felt very strong in being a part of this," she said.

Spitzer said while the latest issue may shock some people, he hopes it will get everyone talking about the bigger issue of climate change.

Experimental magazine to be created in 48 hours, start to finish

A group of wacky magazine mavens are about to launch 48 Hour magazine, described as "a raucous    experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits". The goal is to produce a finished website and a glossy paper version of the magazine in two days. The originators say:

We'll unveil a theme and you'll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We'll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.

The idea is being guided and promoted by six individuals, including Derek Powazek, a San Francisco author, designer and editor of fray.com. He is the co-founder of the photography magazine JPG and "chief of awesome" for MagCloud.Others in the guiding collective are Heather Powazek Champ, Dylan Fareed, a designer and printmaker, Wired magazine contributing editor Mathew Honan, Alexis Madrigal, a Wired.com science and energy staff writer,  and writer and editor Sarah Rich, who is co-founder of Foodprint and a former senior editor of Dwell magazine.

Interested participants can be anywhere (and we've seen lots of tweets about people in Canada who want to be part of this idea). The theme for "Issue Zero" will be announced May 7, submissions close May 8 and May 9 the magazine wraps up and is shipped to the printer.

Concept to finished mag in a day and a half

In a day and a half, Derek Powazek created a one-off magazine called Strange Light about the red duststorm that swept eastern Australia. He blogs about how he created the finished product, complete with 54 gorgeous photos (cleared with the photographers) in less than two days. We read about it in Nieman Journalism Labs.

Quick turnarounds are not exactly new, with insta-books and special commemorative issues (for example, Michael Jackson's death). But usually those are repurposing and expanding existing, syndicated or archival content. The interesting thing about Powazek's mag is that it illustrates how digital production tools and small-batch printing can really cut the angle.

Of course Powazek has a vested interest since he's involved in MagCloud with Hewlett-Packard, the system used to produce this special issue. But it is still very cool and should set publishers to thinking about customized editorial products that could spin out of their organizations without increasing overheads. I imagine the thing that will slow these products down is the difficulties of getting the printed product distributed. But with digital and online delivery, even that becomes manageable.