Digital Magazine News - July/August 2005
Playing wait and see with e-editions
Teenspeak publisher sets the example as a digital for teens worldwide
For cash-strapped associations, non-profit organizations and educational institutions, digital publications would seem to be a life-saver. Digital editions could cut print costs, help these organizations reach international audiences and help them expand their educational activities.
Yet a variety of factors have slowed demand for digital editions among associations and not for profits. While many have long used PDFs to deliver educational materials and newsletters, only a handful have begun offering more sophisticated digital editions of their magazines.
One interesting example of how digital editions can cut costs and help a not-for-profit better serve its audience can be found at TEENSPEAK Today for Leaders of Tomorrow, which is published by the Institute of Young Journalists.
Debra Mamorsky, editor-in-chief of TEENSPEAK, explains that she founded the publication in 1999 so teens could share their perspectives with peers all over the world. The quarterly publication is entirely written by younger people, with about 40 to 60 percent of the content coming from outside the U.S.
The magazine is published interviews with many well known people, including former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in the U.K., and it emphasizes positive stories designed to encourage the optimism and idealism of young people.
“We see so many bad things and so much extremism that I wanted to create an outlet that would showcase the idealism of young people and highlight all the wonderful things people are doing in the world,” Mamorsky says. “We deal with serious issues and controversial ideas but we didn’t want a publication that showed only the worst of people.”
During its history, TEENSPEAK has printed as many as 78,000 copies per issue but the printing and mailing of the magazine all over the world “became prohibitive,” says Mamorsky. After learning about the digital editions used by SI On Campus, Mamorsky contacted Olive Software and launched its first digital edition in January with the winter edition of TEENSPEAK. The winter edition and the spring edition were distributed entirely as a digital product, available to anyone who visits the Web site. This summer’s issue, however, will be both digital and print.
Mamorsky doesn’t have an exact number of how many teens have downloaded the digital edition but she’s been extremely happy with the results. “Typically we get around 300,000 hits on our Web site around the time when a new issue is available,” she says.