Thursday, March 19, 2009

Time Offering 'Customized' Experimental Magazine

Breitbart.com published an article this afternoon about a new experiment with Time magazine.

US news weekly Time, which like other publications has been looking for ways to reinvent itself in print and on the Web, is allowing readers to put together their own personalized magazine.

The experiment, called "Mine," allows readers to create a print or Web version of a magazine with content drawn from titles owned by Time and its partner in the venture, American Express Publishing.

The titles are Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, InStyle, Golf, and Travel + Leisure.

Readers are being encouraged to log on to timeinc.com/mine to choose content from five of the eight titles to create their own free 36-page "customized" magazine, which can be received either in print or online.

Time said 231,000 print and online copies of each issue will be available and readers can receive a new issue of "Mine" magazine every two weeks for 10 weeks.

"We're always looking at new ways to engage readers with our trusted content," Stephanie George, a Time Inc. executive vice president, said in a statement.

This is a rather interesting concept. What if Source Interlink, who publishes Soap Opera Weekly, Soap Opera Digest and many other magazines, did something similar? Perhaps between Weekly and Digest, fans could be more satisfied by choosing the content they want. The problem with that concept is those magazines are so similar and have so much of the same content, Source would need to include some of their other publications like Motor Trend, Shutterbug and Horse & Rider which may or may not be a good fit.

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