By Paul Heney

I’m pleased to announce the launch of TABPI’s third Design Challenge, a free competition that we launched in 2008. The Challenge is meant to reward graphic creativity in the B2B industry, as well as serve as an educational exercise for other artists. Best of all, the overall winner receives $250, and his/her solution is highlighted on the TABPI website. We also include other selected entries, to illustrate the range of creativity and ideas.

This Design Challenge revolves around the puzzle of creating back to back monthly covers for a magazine that are related to the same story. How do you make a “Part I” and “Part II” cover that work together, but also stand alone? Complete details are at the TABPI website, http://www.tabpi.org/. Please pass this information on to your favorite designer, to let them exercise some creative muscle in the New Year.

At the website, you can also see winners of the first two Design Challenges, along with last year’s inaugural Editorial Challenge. We also list judges’ comments (positive and negative) for the winner and the honorable mentions. It’s a pretty fascinating exercise. I highly recommend checking it out.

The deadline for submitting Design Challenge solutions is Friday, Feb. 12.

Paul is the president of TABPI and past president of the ASBPE.

Labels: Design, Paul Heney, TABPI

By Erin Erickson
ASBPE Chicago Chapter Vice President

I recently spoke with Sara Zailskas, Assistant Managing Editor of Housing Giants. The digital magazine recently won a National Gold Digital Azbee award for General Excellence in the digital magazine category.

Sara was able to speak about the process of converting a print magazine into a digital-only magazine. She spoke honestly about overcoming hurdles and the current status of the magazine:

How did you decide which magazine to convert to a digital-only magazine?

Our publisher and editorial director looked at what our audiences wanted and how those wants worked within our needs as a magazine. Going digital also allowed Reed Business Information to test new ways of working with digital publications, which we’d been using for some time in their simplest forms (converting PDFs to a flipbook, for example). It was a natural and exciting step, and other magazines within RBI have made the switch since.

What were the initial steps you took when preparing to convert the print magazine into digital?

We looked at all aspects of the magazine, from the production schedule to design, and asked a lot of questions: how much would our editorial production process have to change to publish a digital magazine? What needed to change about our design to make it reader-friendly on a computer screen? What type of content would we need to make the most of digital journalism capabilities?

And of course, none of this would have been addressed without examining the cost factor, too. If publishing a digital magazine were more expensive than a print publication, we likely wouldn’t have even considered it given the state of the economy at the time and our audience’s wants and needs. The benefits of digital capabilities extended to our advertisers, too. We heard that agencies were thrilled to be able to create multimedia ads.

What were the biggest roadblocks you faced during the conversion process?

Surprisingly, the things we thought would be a huge challenge weren’t: we successfully took our editorial production schedule from six publications a year to 23, and preparing our product for digital production was much easier than we anticipated. We knew the adjustment for our audience would be significant, but our feedback from readers told us we were doing the right thing. Don’t get me wrong; some people hated the conversion, but the majority contacted us in support.

The challenges came when silly, simple technology things wouldn’t work; for example, we’d submit a file in the right format but it wouldn’t play correctly. Those situations always worked out, but it sometimes took a lot more time than we would have liked.

The other main challenge – and I expected this – was to get writers to wrap their heads around digital storytelling. Considering audio and visuals – and Flash illustration possibilities and such – truly is a new approach to planning an article that doesn’t always come naturally if you’ve been doing journalism a certain way for years. My advice would be to help writers brainstorm audio/visual opportunities, then follow up with them to make sure they come in with the final submission. And if they don’t, send ’em back out until audio/visual components are included.

Which processes needed to be changed and how when it came to acquiring and using the digital media?

On the editorial side, we budgeted extra time for planning multimedia components with our writers as well as preparing those components for inclusion. We have an editing department, but it still takes time to select how you want something edited, write up supporting text to accompany it for the publication, etc.

We also had a couple days built into our production schedule to test and review the final product. We essentially had a traditional “to printer” deadline, which is when our files were due to our digital publication vendor, and a “blast” deadline, which is when all the wrinkles had to be worked out of the digital magazine after it was put together by our vendor and then made live.

What is the status of the magazine now?

I like to think of our status as taking Gold in the first Digital Azbees, which our staff is really proud of. But unfortunately we published our last issue in April. Housing Giants, which is for home-building industry executives, launched right when not only builders began going out of business, but a wave of manufacturers – our advertisers – began shuttering. The goal is to relaunch it in better economic conditions.

Labels: Azbee Awards, Design, Digital, Erin Erickson

By Warren Hersch
ASBPE President

BusinessWeek: Audience engagement boosts traffic

Digital journalism isn’t just about providing multimedia content. To be effective, that content has to actively engage readers, drawing them into discussions with B2B reporters and editors, and with each other. So said BusinessWeek.com Technology & Science Channel editor Tom Giles during the Web Site of the Year presentation at ASBPE’s Digital Symposium last month.

“Today, context is just as important as content,” said Giles.

At last count:

• Unique monthly visitors stood at 10.2 million, up from 6.4 million in 2006.
• Monthly page-views total 50.4 million, a 20.3 percent rise over the 41.9 million recorded in 2006.
• Most accessed links are video and pod­cast feeds, which nab, respectively more than 500,000 and 820,000 visitors a month.
• Page views driven by search engines are up 45 percent over the last four years.
• BusinessWeek.com's sister site, Business Exchange, now claims more than 32,000 registered users.
• The most active topic, social networking, boasted more than 2,051 new articles and 255 users on Nov. 25.

To encourage reader engagement, Business Exchange sports a “Featured User” box for the individual who has contributed the largest number of posts to a particular topic; and a “What’s Your Idea” section where readers can suggest stories for the magazine.

Note: A longer version of this article appears in the November/December 2009 ASBPE Editor’s Notes member newsletter; it is also available on the ASBPE web site.

Warren Hersch is the ASBPE national president and senior editor for National Underwriter Life & Health.

Labels: Awards, Azbee Awards, Design, Digital, Warren Hersch

By Paul J. Heney
ASBPE Past President
TABPI President

Last year, TABPI sponsored our first Design Challenge. The goal of this program was to show how much creativity and talent there is in the b2b design world. We asked b2b designers and art directors to design a cover for the fictional magazine “Concrete Times,” around some demands from the editor and publisher. We had a great response, and the variety of designs was fantastic. We awarded a $250 prize to the winner, and also published other honorable mention submissions at http://www.tabpi.org/designchallenge.htm. In fact, we had so much fun with the Challenge, that we repeated it earlier this year, with even better results and increased participation. In fact, the day we announced results in both 2008 and 2009, we recorded some of the largest number of unique visitors to our website ever!

In the spirit of bringing editors into the mix, we’ve just announced our first TABPI Editorial Challenge, at http://www.tabpi.org/editorialchallenge.htm. The $250 first place prize still applies, but now b2b editors are encouraged to write a headline, deck and lede for a story that only has so-so information. We provide you with a partial interview, a poorly written press release, and a bunch of dull quotes. Use your creative spark to turn this story—which has the potential to be a stinker—into something fresh. The deadline is May 4th, and we’d love to have your participation!

Labels: Design, Paul Heney, Tabbie Awards, TABPI

By Paul Heney

Labels: Design, Paul Heney, TABPI

By Thomas R. Temin
Media and Government Consulting

In judging for the ASBPE awards, consulting and just noodling around on the internet, I find some things that are just plain annoying.

Here are some of my pet peeves, and I’ll bet they are your readers’ pet peeves, too:

Pricing shell game: What does this research cost to download? How much do you charge for a subscription? Is there even a charge in the first place? Too often, we make visitors click deep into a chain of steps before revealing the price for a product or service offered online. If you are worried that putting a price tag up front will scare people away, then do a bang-up job of writing your sell language.

Take a page from the web site of Business Travel News. At the bottom of its home page the two classes of research available — free and premium or paid — are clearly marked.

Lack of news archive: A reader is thinking, “I know they had a story about XYZ in the last couple of weeks.” But we dish up disappointment, because our online archive of daily web postings only goes back a few days. Readers want a deeper archive, preferably with a robust search function. Heck, our own staff wants it. So why don’t more publications provide it?

Check out this example of a great archive from Government Executive.

Arcade game home page: Rotating lede stories, each with its own compelling illustration, has become popular. Yet some sites lack a way for the visitor to turn the carousel back a notch to a piece that went by before they could click on the link. If you’ve got five or six stories spinning by, each one taking seven or eight seconds, I guarantee you’ll have an impatient reader — presuming he or she sticks around to wait for the story to come around.

The Wall Street Journal figured out this one. Note the clear PREV and NEXT buttons under the rotating feature container.

Who pulled down that window shade? Without doubt, visitors hate what I call window shade ads. You click on a story and – whoops – an ad drapes down over the entire site. There’s a “skip this ad” or similar link, but what a way to frustrate readers! I know the ad climate is difficult, and often publishers lack the leverage they need to refuse this kind of visit-spoiling practice. But has anyone asked an advertiser, maybe they’ll get more clicks with a well positioned, well-written ad that doesn’t frustrate site visitors?

No point in linking to a site that does not have such ads, so root around the Washington Post site and sooner or later you’ll bump your nose into a window shade.

Help, get my sunglasses! As sites grow, they sometimes get cluttered. After a while, it’s time for a little pruning. Not because you are a neat freak, but because your identity and strong branding can get spoiled if the site’s appearance gets out of control.

The famous million dollar home page is the epitome of clutter. That’s what makes it unique and fun. But you don’t want your site to look like that. The trick is finding a balance between dull or generic, and too busy.

From the recent ASBPE contest, I found ALM’s law.com to strike that balance quite well. It’s loaded with information, yet manages to look organized, even dignified while conveying the excitement of new news.

Thomas R. Temin is a consultant with 30 years of publishing experience in media and information technology products and services. He is co-host of "The Federal Drive" with Tom Temin and Jane Norris, a weekday morning news and talk program on Federal News Radio AM 1050 in Washington D.C. You can see his weekly column on the op-ed page at www.federalnewsradio.com and contact him at tom.temin@gmail.com.

Labels: Design, Digital, Thomas R. Temin

By Paul Heney
ASBPE Cleveland Chapter Treasurer

As I recently posted on the ASBPE Cleveland blog, it's critical that b2b editors don't lose sight of how important design is to our magazines. It's an easy thing to forget in these increasingly crazy days of shorter deadlines, publishers shouting about reduced ad revenues, smaller staffs, increased competition, the move to online, etc., etc.

In that spirit, I mention that recently, winners were announced in the first ever TABPI Design Challenge, a competition that was developed to showcase some of the amazing talent that we have in our little world of b2b publications. The Challenge is also important in that it strives to get design professionals in our industry engaged in discussions about best practices.

This first challenge described an art director for the fictional Concrete Times magazine caught in a proverbial crossfire. The magazine's publisher demands that the focus of the April 2008 cover showcase the magazine's 40th anniversary. On the other hand, the editor-in-chief is more concerned with the main feature story, focusing on the first ever "Top 100 Leaders" ranking. That should be the focus. Of course, there is practically no art budget to speak of. So, what do you do? TABPI asked B2B design professionals across the globe to weigh in with their solutions to this dilemma by submitting their own cover proposal.

The results of the Challenge are quite interesting. You can see the overall winner, along with five honorable mentions at Design Challenge. There are also comments from the judges on both the positives and negatives that each solution brings. Take a look at the winners, forward the link to your art director or designer, and start a discussion as to how your team would have handled this issue. Which of the submitted solutions do you feel worked best? Would any of them have worked or not worked specifically for your magazine's audience?

Talking about design with your art director shouldn't be forgotten in these days of increased competition and shorter deadlines. Don't forget how crucial design is to a successful b2b magazine property.

You can also check out the Tabbie Awards to see past winners going back to 2004. That is another fascinating way to start some design discussions with your art director. Browse through the jpegs and pdfs of the winning cover and layout designs, and chances are you'll begin to brew some great ideas of your own.

Heney is president of Trade Association Business Publications International (TABPI), based in Cleveland; senior editor with Penton Media’s Hydraulics & Pneumatics; and former national president of ASBPE (1999-2003).

Labels: Design, Paul Heney, TABPI

Think you're creative? You have two days to prove it by entering the TABPI Design Challenge, sponsored by Trade Association Business Publications International. The challenge is to design a cover for a hypothetical issue of an imaginary magazine, Concrete Times. The reward is $250 for the overall winner. The challenge is open to all B2B art directors and designers.

The TABPI Design challenge deadline is this Friday, Feb. 29.

Also looming is the deadline for TABPI's Tabbie Awards. This international awards competition is open to trade, association and business magazines published at least four times per year, completely or partially in English. Magazines must accept paid advertising. This year TABPI has added a new web category, Online Feature. (Online entries don't need an associated print publication, but they must be b2b-oriented and accept advertising.)

Entries for the Tabbies must be submitted by Wednesday, March 5.

Labels: Design, Editing, International Media, Martha Spizziri, Media Industry Awards, Tabbie Awards, TABPI