Do we know what ‘good’ looks like anymore?

Digital has moved the publishing goal posts, says Peter Houston, founder of Flipping Pages Media – so here are a few eternal truths that magazine publishers need to re-discover about good digital content.

When a stressed-out magazine staffer used to come to me to confess that a story didn’t quite measure up, I’d tell them not to worry, “you can’t break a magazine in one issue”. Actually you probably can, but it would take an act of outright sabotage or some seriously wilful negligence.

My real point was, we all knew what good looked like and if we fell short every now and then, the audience would forgive us so long as we delivered elsewhere.

Digital has moved the goal posts.

Print readers, especially subscribers, knew the magazine. They took it every month, they understood what it was about, they came to rely on it for information they cared about.

Google and Twitter have broken that relationship; readers are now coming in sideways through search and social, by-passing ‘About us’ pages and heading straight for the content. Digital audiences judge you on what they find and, if they don’t like it, they’re gone.

In print we knew what good looked like, literally. Page layout had rules to be followed and editors and designers followed them religiously for the most part – I still get twitchy when I see knocked out white on black any smaller than 12 point.

But what are the rules in digital design? Responsive designers have a stab at creating a multi-platform identity, but by the time content has made it from the web to mobile, and journeyed across dozens of iOS and Android form factors, does anyone have a clue what the reader sees anymore?

There are really good print magazines with a woeful online presence. There are really good magazines that do a great job on their websites, but have no social media profile; and magazines that are brilliant across print, the web and social, but haven’t made it to the tablet or the phone. Good got bigger.

So what is a well-meaning magazine publisher to do? How do they judge good digital content?

It’s interesting that the search for a definition of good content seems to be dominated by marketing folk in these days of digital. While magazine publishers mostly struggle with the issue in private, content marketers are forever telling each other what makes good content. Five elements, six things, nine principles – just Google ‘good content’.

Maybe magazine people don’t want to admit they’re not quite sure anymore. Maybe general marketers are just excited to tell the world that they have discovered content marketing. Most of what they’re talking about has been engrained in magazine making for decades. The difference is content marketing’s starting point is digital and magazine people could do worse than take the lessons being learned by their marketing colleagues back into their newsrooms and editorial planning meetings.

Here are a few eternal truths that magazine publishers need to re-discover about good digital content.

Good content is useful or entertaining

Always was, always will be. The difference with digital content is that the scope for useful or entertaining is much broader. Useful now encompasses apps and interactive tools that process user data; and entertaining is measured against Angry Birds as much as a good read.

Good content is credible

The provenance of so much digital content is dubious at best. Establish your credentials, get people to trust that you’re useful or entertaining, and you have half a chance of holding on to your audience. This is why the ‘hard sell’ is one of content marketing’s biggest ‘fails’ and why the native advertising naysayers are so vociferous in their opposition to sponsored content that isn’t clearly labelled as paid for.

Good content is accessible

The best content in the world is pretty pointless if no one sees it. This is about technology – design and formatting – but it’s also about multi-channel distribution. If all your readers are mad tweeters, then you better get on Twitter. If they’re YouTubers, start posting some video. If pinning images is their thing…you get the idea.

Good content is shareable

Magazine publishers have made such a big deal of pass-on readership in their media kits in the past, it’s a little bewildering why they don’t all immediately get the idea of the sharing economy. But making content easy to share is high on the list of ‘good content’ best practice these days.

When all the digital froth floats away, the good part of good content will mean what it’s always meant – effective. For a magazine publisher that means it keeps the audience coming back, either as paying customers (subscribers) or as willing participants in the advertising game where attention can be exchanged for cold hard cash.

The trick is to re-imagine content in a digital publishing landscape where there are so many ways to be good, and so many more to be bad.

Peter Houston is a media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages Media.

Twitter: @Flipping_Pages