By Ethan Casey
Content Spotlight columnist
How can a magazine whose stock in trade is long, literate essays make use of the Web to supplement and promote its print offering? I recently learned the answer from Ben Campbell, who runs the Web edition of the London Review of Books, one of the most respected highbrow literary magazines in Britain.
The LRB started publishing online, says Campbell, "when it became clear that there was an expectation of a Web edition. It also became clear that the Web is a good low-cost medium for publicizing the magazine and expanding its readership beyond established subscription and newsstand sales — and, of course, a great place for picking up subscriptions from people who wouldn't otherwise come across the paper." About 70% of these come from outside the United Kingdom, he notes.
"At present, we publish three articles from each issue on the site (out of between 15 and 20 in the print edition), and we publish these pieces in their entirety," he explains. "The site is, in that sense, shovelware, insofar as we don't have any Web-only content at present. The Web site is really a showcase for the range and quality of the material in the print edition. We try to give a taste of what the paper is like with the fraction of it we put online. Sometimes what gets put online is self-selecting — the [UK] general election is a recent example. But the spread of topics covered by the paper is vast, and we use the site to demonstrate this."
The LRB is currently in the midst of its first major site redesign. "We are going to have more material online, including the few shorter pieces we publish in each issue," says Campbell. "There will be some Web-only content, but this comes down to resources. We have talked about reader forums from time to time, but the feeling at the moment is that it is not something which is a natural extension of what we are doing now, so why put effort in that direction? User feedback shows that what most of our online readers want is more of what's there rather than something different."
Interestingly — and contrary to my own experience as a user — Campbell says that the LRB's online visitors don't mind reading long essays on screen. User feedback, he says, shows that "the overwhelming majority of people who read the articles we put online do so on screen rather than printing them to paper. I know that my tolerance for reading from a monitor has risen over the past few years — in part because of the technological improvement in displays, but I think largely because I am now familiar and comfortable with the medium.
"The core content of the LRB is always going to be long essays, so we are really saying take it or leave it. Our traffic has increased month-on-month pretty consistently since 1997, so I'm really encouraged that people seem to be taking it. And we are not unique; you only have to visit Arts & Letters Daily to see how many sites are putting faith in the Web as a place where substantial and challenging content will be read."
After the redesign, the site "is going to have a lot more content for casual visitors and full content for subscribers. We'd love to have the whole paper up free for all visitors, but it doesn't make sense commercially at the moment, and there are the usual intellectual property issues: Articles in the LRB are often of the length that they are published as books."
Campbell remembers how, in the early days of the Web, "one felt one had hit the edge of it — at least in terms of one's own interests — very quickly. Now I can always find something great or a great way to waste time enjoyably. It seems likely to me that as the Internet becomes more a part of people's lives, there is going to be an expectation that a subscription to a magazine will give you access to an archive. Even non-subscribers will expect a level of service — in searchabilty and access to articles. Publishers will have to confront this.
"The tech sector slump has had one upside for publishers working on the Web, which is that cheap alternatives to content management systems like those offered by Vignette and Broadvision have become inevitable. This access to powerful publishing systems will give smaller publishers a more authoritative voice."
© 2001, by Ethan Casey
(Ethan Casey is based in London, and is editor of BlueEar.com: Global Writing Worth Reading. He can be reached at editor@BlueEar.com. His columns run bi-weekly in Content Spotlight.