31st Jul 2011
Inside Sports Illustrated: Building a Magazine for the Digital Age
Among magazines, Sports Illustrated has emerged as a leader in the digital age.
In addition to its print edition, the title has produced a tablet edition for the iPad every week since it debuted last June and more recently added to its roster weekly editions for Android and webOS tablets. Sports Illustrated also produces daily content for SI.com, highlights 10 sports photos every day on its Chrome web app, and offers more content on special cross-channel packages, including Swimsuit.
The numbers support the digital push. Sports Illustrated‘s digital revenue was up 22% between 2009 and 2010, and it is on track for double-digit growth again this year, says Scott Novak, VP of communications at Sports Illustrated Group.
Curious to know how and why the team could keep this pace, we visited editors, producers and operations managers as they put together a special double issue over a seven-day period.
It became clear that Sports Illustrated has alighted upon the best model for a print magazine in the digital age, not only in terms of content and design (i.e. the product itself), but also in the way the publication has organized its staff and workflow to produce consistently top-tier products across multiple platforms. Here’s why.
There Is No “Digital Department”
If you walk into the offices of almost any major print magazine, you’ll inevitably find a corner housing the so-called “digital department.” The staff there will be diligently putting together a website that is sometimes only loosely tied to the print title. These departments are byproducts of the early days of the Internet when publishers weren’t sure if a web edition had long-term potential. Magazine websites were treated like side projects rather than core parts of business and distribution strategies. The tablet edition usually ranks even lower on the priority scale.
Having a separate — and sometimes marginalized — digital department often leads to a discrepancy between the quality of the print product and the web product. Fewer resources are allotted to digital, in part because digital advertising revenues are far less than print.
This discrepancy is most apparent in women’s lifestyle magazines. Glamour and Lucky run thinly staffed, independent web operations that churn out upward of 50 pieces of original content per day. These are short, image-heavy pieces that have proven successful on the web. Both launched “blogger networks” earlier this year, an advertising play that allows the publications to sell ads across a network of content, namely pictures of the bloggers wearing different outfits.
Although the blogger partnerships enable the publications to bolster their advertising revenues in the short term and broaden their readership, there’s little sense that the content on these sites is curated. Rather, they feel like content farms licensed under the Glamour and Lucky banners.
At Sports Illustrated, by contrast, web and print are divided mainly by article length: the web is for shorter, newsier hits and print is a repository for long-form journalism. Quality is consistent largely because most of Sports Illustrated‘s staff touch every extension of the brand. Nearly all the writers (95%) produce content for both the web and print, filing short news pieces for the web while building out longer, weekly pieces for the print and tablet editions.
As a result, Sports Illustrated‘s brand and voice are consistently strong across platforms. But how do they do it and without substantially expanding or changing staff?
Producing More With the Same
It’s surprising how long most Sports Illustrated editors have been on board. Most digitally savvy media companies (The Huffington Post and Gawker Media, for example) are relatively young, or many of the older companies have brought in younger staff to turn things over (both The New York Observer and The Atlantic Wire are run by thirty-somethings who got their start at Gawker Media).
Take Assistant Managing Editor Chris Stone, for instance, who is tasked with overseeing the development of Sports Illustrated on multiple tablets each week. He has been with the magazine since 1992. The pace of the production was much different in the “pre-web” days,when he focused on the production of one to two stories per week as the baseball editor.
“Once upon a time you had a few ideas in the course of a week and they held up. If something happened six days before close, well, it was six days before close,” he recalls. “Now we deal with new ideas and three to four different ways to present a story every day.”
Stories are assigned for print, tablets and the web by the same vertical editors in conjunction with SI.com Managing Editor Paul Fichtenbaum and are then optimized for their respective platforms. When a large story breaks, for example, separate angles are developed for the web, for Sports Illustrated‘s social channels, as well as for print.
“Print is no longer separate,” Stone says. “We’re able to see the good idea that might just work better on the web because of the urgency of that story.” When stories are conceived, the editors think how to enhance them for the web and tablets, sometimes by including multimedia like audio interviews, galleries or video.
Social media is included in the ideation process. During a Monday morning run-through of the print edition set to close that evening, editors debated what to do with an extra Charlie Sheen interview that would not make the print edition before it closed later that night. Should they release it as a web exclusive, or perhaps as a bonus for tablet readers?
They elected to publish it on both, accompanied by a series of 10 tweets titled “10 Pieces of Wisdom from Charlie Sheen.” Although the print issue was the focus of the meeting, staff discussed the entire integrated publication: print, tablets, the web and social media.
Design is integrated as well. The design staff formats print and multiple tablet editions simultaneously, closing print Monday night, the iPad and HP TouchPad editions on Tuesday, and Android versions on Wednesday. The spacing in deadlines prevents designers from having to prioritize one version over another.
Editorial Workflow
“It became clear to us pretty early on that we needed to establish processes well beyond what we had in place for the print magazine,” says Bob Kanell, director of operations. Kanell has been working at Sports Illustrated for 17 years, long before it started to make its digital shift.
The week now starts Thursday morning. “That’s when we solidify what is going to be in the next particular issue. There are long-term stories that are in the works that we know we are going to run at some point, and our editors will decide when it is the right time to run that story,” he says.
The editorial team meets again Fridays and Sundays to discuss the issue, which evolves over the course of the week as major events occur. Saturday is the one day the entire editorial staff has off. Each editorial member works four full days each week and takes their remaining off-time on different days so that the issue doesn’t grind to a halt on weekends.
On Monday mornings and afternoons, the editorial team meets again to run through the print issue before it closes that same night. The issue is roughly 80% complete by the 9 a.m. meeting Monday, during which time Editor in Chief Terry McDonell runs through the entire issue on a large screen. He poses questions to Creative Director Chris Hercik about various design decisions and ensures that editorial layouts are properly differentiated from the ads.
The editorial team meets again Monday afternoon to review the edited copy and debate final photo selections. As articles are reviewed, McDonell inquires where add-ons for the tablet editions will appear.
At around noon on Tuesday, a mix of editors, designers and producers crowd around a single Mac in the production studio and walk through the nearly complete weekly editions for the iPad and HP TouchPad, both of which are formatted at a 16:9 ratio. Editors view the issues both on the devices themselves and using simulation software on the Mac, checking each button and function for potential bugs.
The same crew gathers again around 4 p.m. for the final review. The completed issue, once approved by Director of Imaging Geoffrey Michaud, is shipped to Apple’s and HP’s respective app stores around midnight.
At noon on Wednesday, the team runs through the weekly edition for two Android tablets, the Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom. Although the devices are different sizes, they run apps at the same 4:3 ratio, so there’s no need to format separate versions. The final run-through for Android occurs at 3 p.m. The completed issue hits the Android app store around midnight.
Design Workflow
Although Sports Illustrated‘s editorial team had to adjust to meet the magazine’s new digital demands, Kanell says the biggest adjustments occurred in the design department.
Designers must now reformat the issue in two different orientations — horizontal and vertical — for the iPad, plus a version for Android. (The iPad’s vertical layout is also used for the HP TouchPad.)
Sports Illustrated uses a software program called WoodWing, which allows designers to lay out the issue in multiple formats (both print and tablets) simultaneously. If a change to the copy is made in the print version, for instance, those changes will be automatically replicated in the different tablet versions.
Side by side: The same elements rendered for print (left), iPad (center) and Galaxy Tab (right).
“Everything still starts with print,” says Hercik, who has worked in the creative department of the Sports Illustrated Group for nearly a decade. “You work from scratch on every [layout] you do. There’s few layouts where it feels like you plug in images and text.”
Those problems are felt across the department. “Nothing that we do converts easily one from the next,” Senior Editor Stephen Cannella explains. “Even after the iPad, you have to tackle a whole different aspect ratio with the Galaxy and Xoom,” noting that tablet layouts also have to accommodate multimedia add-ons.
The design team is always conscious of file size when including additional images, videos and audio in the issue. Larger file sizes will take readers more time to download and will occupy a larger portion of their device’s storage space.
“If an add-on is really important to the experience, like a video cover, we’ll embed it,” says Hercik, but otherwise the team will opt to stream large files, like video, to minimize the issue size.
Hercik says the tablet versions are complete when they achieve a certain flow. “You want to interact on every page or every other page. If you go through a story and you haven’t had any interaction, you feel something is missing.”
Room for Improvement
Although Sports Illustrated‘s tablet editions are strong by design and engagement standards, the editors have not yet examined any reader usage data.
Examining usage statistics would enable them to understand, for the first time, which weekly sections and stories are most popular, how long readers spend reading certain articles compared to others, and what multimedia additions get the most attention. For now, editors have depended on a mix of feedback from focus groups and the comments left in various app stores to help them improve their tablet editions.
Going Forward
Sports Illustrated has emerged as a leader among magazine publications because it doesn’t think of itself as a magazine, but as a sports media company. “We don’t compete with magazines, we compete with networks,” says McDonell.
It’s sentiment shared by Mark Ford, president of Sports Illustrated Group. “We think of ourselves as a sports media company, number one,” he says. “We believe that we have got to reach our audiences and our fans wherever and whenever they’re consuming content on sports, and that means making content available on whatever device they use. Hopefully that extends to TV at some point.”
In fact, Sports Illustrated‘s video operation has already proved profitable, bringing in $3 million in incremental revenue in its first six months, says McDonell.
It’s a mindset that other magazines would do well do emulate. Any publication, whether its roots are in the web, on TV, in print or even on tablets, is truly a media company. Any platform their audience is using should be treated as a crucial distribution outlet.
And that means dissolving those sideline digital departments and refiguring digital — and every other medium — as a priority on par with print.
More About: android, galaxy tab, hearst, hp touchpad, iOS, ipad, magazines, media, motorola xoom, Sports illustrated, Tablet, terry mcdonell, webOS
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