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Picture yourself reading a magazine…

…A printed magazine that you can:

• Search the first few pages for a table of contents to locate the articles of interest.
• Physically turn the pages.
• Read from cover to cover.
• Skim through the pages until you land on something that appeals to you.
• Tear out the pages you want to share with a friend.
• Bend the corners to bookmark the pages you want to go back and read again.

Now picture the online version…

…that you can:

• Do a search to find the topics that interest you most.
• Click on the hyperlink titles to get to the full story (and click additional hyperlinks to related content).
• Review articles via RSS feed.
• View on the road via your mobile phone.
• Favorite it, bookmark it, or add it to Delicious or Digg.
• Share articles with your friends/followers through email, Facebook or Twitter.
• Contribute to the dialog by commenting right then and there.

The delivery of content in print (old) vs. web (new) is different, there’s no question about it.

For a content site like Fast Company the content on the site is very similar to their printed version. The reason may be at the company’s very core since 1995:
“We don’t just want to publish articles. We want to shape the conversation about business at its best and the real meaning of success.” said Bill Taylor co-founder. ¹

Still today their focus is publishing innovative business practices for its readers, but also encouraging those readers to “challenge convention and create the future of business.” ²

Fast Company Web Site Today

Content on the Fast Company web site includes innovative business-related news stories, blog posts, and video series.

The home page is a publication of its own right. It changes daily with a new feature story at the top boasting a large hypertext headline and photos. Filling the rest of the page is a long list of stories in blog format with a thumbnail picture, headline, excerpt, category, number of comments, author and date.

Menu items at the top lead you to different categories: Technology, Design, Ethnography, and Leadership. These sections are updated daily, are displayed in blog style, and have some overlapping stories as they don’t all fit neatly into just one category.

The printed magazine has a place on the site too, linked from the “Magazine” menu item. This section includes the most current printed magazine reformatted for web. It is similar in look to the site’s home page and other sections offering content via hypertext and does not aesthetically mimic the physical magazine.

Through the whole site, readers are able to participate online through commenting at the end of articles.

To comment, though, it is required that the reader be logged in as a member, which is free and pretty easy.

All content is free. Readers do not need to subscribe to the magazine, nor join as a member on the web site to puruse the content. To allow this “freemium” Fast Company does sell ad space on their web site. A banner ad is at the top, and other ads are along the right side of the page, intermingled with stories so there are probably some accidental clicks there. It’s minimal compared to other sites, and small price for the readers who want access to Fast Company’s articles.

In addition to Fast Company’s web site, the content is delivered on mobile and through RSS feeds. On mobile, the content shows fewer stories, and only shows the thumbnail picture and headline with link. There is no additional information regarding author, comments, date, etc.

There is the ability to share it or bookmark it, but not the ability to comment. You could click to view the full site on your phone instead, which looks and acts exactly the same as on a desktop / laptop version so you could comment… it’s just smaller of course.

How This Compares to “Old” Media
For Fast Company the content doesn’t differ too much.

Content in the printed magazine includes innovative business-related news stories just like online. The difference is there is no video series in the printed magazine, and the web site can obviously include more up to date information, and stories daily, vs. a printed version published monthly.

Table of Contents vs. Menus or Search Box
There’s a table of contents in the beginning of the magazine to guide the reader to certain sections or stories of interest. On the web site, the home page itself acts as a sort of table of contents. The excerpts, the menus at the top, or the search box all can highlight and delivery you to the stories of interest.

Turning the Pages, Clicking the Hyperlinks
With the printed magazine you would physically turn pages. Some printed magazines, will actually use an interface more like their physical magazine (via zmag, pagesuite or similar) for their web site.

Fast Company has opted to concentrate on delivering the content from each month’s printed magazine in a very similar interface as the rest of their web site. This allows for readers to comment, and probably aids in search engine optimization.

Read Cover to Cover / RSS Feed
Obviously if you have a printed magazine in your hands, the experience of reading it cover to cover could be a relaxing experience and take some time. Even if you don’t read a particular story, you may look at the pictures, read the captions, scan a few paragraphs, and browse the ads. It could take awhile.

On the Magazine section of their web site though, the articles from the printed magazine are displayed on this one page. So the reader may be choosing just the specific articles they want to read and using the hypertext headline and excerpt instead, thus not being drawn into an article in the same was as if you turned a page and something caught your attention in print. The other factor of the Magazine section on the web is that it stays the same for the whole month, so it may not be visited as frequently as the other sections of the web site.

The rest of Fast Company’s web site, however, changes daily and produces just as much content as a full magazine EVERY day. The content is contributed by staff, and also expert bloggers. You can read it every day through your RSS feed if you want. It’s like getting subscription sent to your door every day with new content.

These online articles have links to related articles, comments by readers and you could conceivably get pulled into the experience as if you were sitting leisurely on the couch reading a magazine from cover to cover.

Bend the Corners or Rip it Out / Bookmark or Favorite or Share Electronically
Say you’re reading Fast Company’s printed magazine and you may want to read a story again or share it. You could bend the corner of it or tear it out.

Online you could add it to your favorites/bookmarks on your computer, or through Fast Company’s sharing tools you could bookmark it on Delicious or Digg, or send it via email to a friend or tweet it or post it to Facebook. There are numerous options.

Interaction
What’s really different in the “new” media is the idea of interaction and immediacy.

Sure, in a print magazine you can write a letter to the editor, and it may or may not get printed in the following month’s issue. On the web site, you as a reader can also contribute by commenting right on the specific article, and it’ll appear right there.

And of course the capabilities online for hypertext, letting the reader click the titles to immediately be taken to that particular “page”.

The Future?

Most everything indicates that the future is:

• Social media
• Open source
• Mash Ups

This future was already attempted at Fast Company though. Early on they created a social network called “Company of Friends” (CoF).

“Through CoF, Fast Company has helped readers and forward-thinking business leaders and innovators connect, communicate, and collaborate with each other, both online and face to face, in communities around the world.”³

And about 10 years later, that social network migrated to a more collaborative open-source model. Anyone could set up their own blog and contribute content. “Personalized profiles collect most everything a member contributes to the site: from a blog if you choose to write one, to your answers to daily questions from our editors, and much, much more.” ⁴

This was shortlived.

CoF is gone. Readers’ blogs nor articles are featured. There is no option to contribute videos. There are no more groups; no more communities.

So if this forward-thinking successful company tried social media and tried open-source and didn’t stick with it, then what is the future?

Who the heck knows?

Maybe it’s a mix of old and new. Maybe it is just listening to what readers (and advertisers) want and trying to give them their preferences.

Fast Company is able to sell their printed magazine (average of 725,000 paying readers each year for the past 5 years).⁵ And they get a good amount of traffic to their web site: 1.7 million visitors daily. ⁶ They can sell advertising space in print and online.

The print media has an uphill battle to compete with the “I want it now” mentality. Back in 1998, Fast Company recognized that:
”Simply selling a magazine is just not enough anymore,” said Alan M. Webber, one of Fast Company’s two founding editors.⁷

As a business model, Fast Company tries to stay ahead of business, so watching what they do next may help us see a glimpse of what the future may hold.

Sources:

1. Mavericks at Work A Quick History of Fast Company by Bill Taylor
2. About Fast Company
3. A Company of Friends
4. Fast Company The Media Is Social By EDWARD SUSSMAN Published February 8, 2008
5. Fast Company’s media kit
6. Sharenator
7. New York Times Cultivating A Cult Audience; Fast Company Magazine Takes ‘Community of Readers’ Idea To New Extremes By ALEX KUCZYNSKI Published: December 14, 1998

Today after finishing my new favorite book, “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug for grad school, I took a break on Twitter and saw a disturbing post by Smashing Magazine complimenting a not-so-nice read.

Maybe this was a “nice read” 10 years ago, but it’s not today.

The not-so-nice-read’s title alone The UX Design Education Scam sounded like it would have some hard hitting facts about one or more specific universities or instances of a scam. Nope.

No data.

No documented sources.

No specific universities sited.

No actual courses outlined.

The basis of this generalized article is that universities and colleges are a waste of money for UX design and web design and that the schools are outright lying. What schools?

Andy Rutledge, who wrote this article outright says that anyone who disagrees is “uninformed” or “insane.” That’s convenient. Talk about uninformed, there are numerous colleges and universities that offer the kind of curriculum he claims is not offered. Who’s uninformed?

True, there are many people looking for work these days, and chances are they will not be immediately hired. That isn’t necessarily indicative of the type of education they earned. In fact, taking a look at classified ads, the specific education requirements many companies are looking for are exactly the type of curriculum offered at TOO many colleges and universities to list: Stanford; Carnegie Mellon; University of Michigan; Quinnipiac University; Rochester Institute of Technology.

These schools and many more have changed with the times. They go beyond the basic programming side of things, and really integrate user experience. I should know. I thoroughly researched my options after realizing that to get a better job — that I had the experience to do — I had to go back to school to qualify educationally.

So, don’t believe everything you read…even if a decent magazine says it’s a “nice read.”

Hi, my name is Ryan. My work experience and educational background are in interactive communications.  I like to observe and sometimes write about user experience. That doesn’t always mean I’ll stick with technology and web related experiences though.

feetPLANTED started as an outlet for me to express some of my opinions. The name represents me… someone with my feet firmly planted while my mind reachers higher and higher.