Top magazines chart a digital course

More magazines are reinventing themselves with an eye towards the digital future. Atlantic Media is just the latest to step up its digital efforts. Much has been written about The Atlantic’s transformation from a lagging traditional publisher to a digital-first entity, but now it’s beefing up its efforts even more with new hires and a clear editorial strategy for Quartz, its digital business news brand. “Quartz won’t really be a website in the conventional sense,” explained Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo. “It is positioning itself first and foremost as a publication distributed over the web through mobile connections, geared primarily toward consumers who can read it on their tablet or smartphone browsers via HTML5, same as they would, say, The Financial Times.” Meanwhile, the New Yorker has been busy transforming itself as well by ramping up its online operations. It recently added the Frontal Cortex blog, written by former Wired contributing editor Jonah Lehrer, and last month the site debuted both a books blog and a health care hub. Plus, there’s “more stuff planned,” Nicholas Thompson, the New Yorker’s digital editor, told Capital New York’s Pompeo. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the website is becoming more important and that we’re putting resources into it.”

But MIT’s Technology Review may be taking the “digital first” mantra the furthest. Starting in June, people will be able to read everything they publish free of charge on the web, and nothing will be published first in print. “The changes are part of a new commitment on our part to becoming a more digital-first media company,” editor Jason Pontin wrote in a note to readers on the site. “For us, print will be just another platform [and] by no means the most important. I began as a traditional print journalist, and I still delight in what print does well. But there’s almost nothing … that print now does best.” And Pontin warned that traditional publishers need to break free of traditional restraints. “There are smart editors out there and smart publishers, and at a high level the lineaments of what the future of publishing will look like are more broadly understood than new media critics sometimes allow,” he told GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram. “But in many cases those smart publishers and editors are constrained by the actual economic demands of publishing companies.”

• New Yorker digital editor Nicholas Thompson on rapidly expanding newyorker.com (Capital New York)

• The New Yorker Will Conquer the Digital Future and You Will Like It (Mediabistro)

• Why MIT’s Technology Review is going digital first (GigaOm)

• MIT’s ‘Technology Review’ Launches Digital First Initative (Adweek)

• Behind Technology Review’s Digital-First Strategy (Folio Magazine)

• Atlantic Media business website Quartz staffs up and strategizes (Capital New York)

• How Atlantic Media magazines, websites hire for intellect, generosity, digital dexterity (Poynter)

• Atlantic Media Hires Marketer for Quartz (Adweek)