Not only can online and offline media products co-exist under the same brand, if positioned correctly both can offer value to a reader, according to Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel.
"What happens online are the things you need to know during the course of the day," Stengel said. The print product is used for reflection and analysis. "Online is for what, print is for why," he said, adding that news simply doesn’t break in print - or even on television - any more, given the immediacy of the Web.
The readership of each channel is different, Stengel noted. One prefers a portable medium, one that has high-quality paper and, when stories lend themselves to it, pages of poignant photographs. The other craves dynamically updated news content.
Which is not to say these products will have identical audiences shuttling between them. As Stengel noted, some readers who prefer the magazine don’t want to be told to go to Time.com "for more on this story."
"They say ‘Gee, I’m reading your flipping magazine. Why are you telling me to go onto the computer?’" Stengel said.
Stengel has made several changes to appeal to these two mediums’ audiences during his current stint as managing editor. He has emphasized putting out a premium publication, one that offers editorial insight accompanied by topnotch production values.
Additionally the magazine, which used to hit newsstands and mailboxes on Mondays, now is timed for Fridays.
"Magazines are something you read on weekends," he said, adding that often they are tossed on a pile for leisurely consumption. The new schedule lets readers "buy the bread when it is freshly baked," Stengel added.
As for the online channel, under Stengel’s tutelage it has moved from presenting each issue’s content to being a 24-hour dynamic news site.
He has also pushed the staffs of each, which had been separate, to merge and contribute across Time’s products. "I want [my best people] to be stars," he said, adding that he encouraged them to create their own brands.
Commenting on current events Stengel, a former political reporter, noted that he has been very impressed with the organizational skills evinced by senator Barack Obama’s campaign. These range from making sure technical details were in place to turning out crowds for events.
In contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s effort has seemed, at times, disorganized. "The Clintons should have [campaigning] down to a science," he noted.
Stengel has had first-hand experience with less-than-smooth election efforts. In 2000, he was retained to work for former senator Bill Bradley’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. He and the candidate were to meet at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The plan was for the two men to fly together to Crystal City, MO, where Stengel would research and write Bradley’s official biography.
"I asked how I would find him, and a campaign aide said ‘He’s the six-foot-five-inch guy running for president.’" But once at the airport, Stengel had difficulty locating Bradley, until he saw the candidate sitting at another gate, wearing a raincoat with the hood pulled up (it had been raining), hunched and engrossed in a copy of the New York Times.
"He’s going to have some trouble as a candidate," Stengel said to himself, presaging Bradley’s loss in the primaries to Vice President Gore.
Stengel spoke at an opening session during the DMA’s Circulation Day conference.
