Publishing’s Paradigm Shift: FADER Co-Founder Rob Stone Eyes Print’s Place in the Digital Revolution
While almost all relevant, high-circulation print operations today offer companion Web properties, offering a smattering of exclusive online tidbits here and there, most have not capitalized on the digital age quite like the FADER has.
Founded in the late 90s by Rob Stone and Jon Cohen, who now serve as co-presidents of the magazine’s parent company Cornerstone, the FADER crew took a big leap for publishing and made big waves recently by signing up with their buddies at Apple to release the mag’s 39th issue in .PDF format through iTunes.
FADER, whose focus lies in music, style and culture, has continued this practice with its 40th issue. So as FADER 40 hits stands both offline and online, the timing couldn’t be better to share an engaging chat with Stone, who openly shares his views on the state of the print industry today, its future, and how FADER naturally transitioned into an integrated entity.
From The FADER perspective, what does your deal with iTunes mean?
As with anything we’ve done, we always love being in a position where we’re creating something or going into areas where people haven’t been. The fact that we did the iTunes deal, and we were the first magazine to do that, was exciting to us and exciting to our readers, which is the most important, and also to our advertisers.
So the response from them made us realize we were in a fortunate position because there are a lot of magazines that have a different economic scale that they’re not able to do that. For whatever reason, we’re able to still maintain our newsstand and go to iTunes and expand our audience. Something we’ve always talked about is creating a FADER community, whether it’s a print medium, whether it’s FADER films and there’s people who go see our films, if it’s our online properties and they read the FADER blog, or they subscribe now through iTunes and download the full readable PDF which is now live.
I haven’t seen the “live” issue yet, but it’s a pretty cool innovation.
There are subtle differences, but there’s definitely a difference in going to a website and downloading a PDF that you now own, and you’re in this world that can link you to anything we want to direct you to. It’s the choice of the reader, of the subscriber. So even the things that I find fun, and I figure I’m kind of a regular person, if I find it fun, other people will find it fun. But just by scanning the contents page and [seeing] an article I like, I can click on that and it takes me right to page 83 as opposed to flipping through the mag, but you can do that also. But you can flip through the PDF.
In reading the article, say if it was on [Miami hip-hop artist] Rick Ross or even in this [40th] issue [My Morning Jacket frontman] Jim James, having the ability to click on the article or a picture and that picture becomes streaming video or takes you to a website where you can watch the interview or live performance, I think to me, that’s how I feel. There are a lot of times I’m reading the print issue and I want to hear the music that accompanies.
It’s like imagining the sounds while reading.
Yeah, so it’s different experiences, but I think they’re both really valuable to the reader and again to our advertisers. I think it’s a great way for our advertiser to experience the magazine and know that the reader is experiencing their ads come to life in there. We’ve had Puma and Southern Comfort sponsor the online PDF. We’re now talking to advertisers about tying into our music podcast that accompanies each issue. We love being in a position where we’re creating things as we go. It’s sort of building the bridge to the other side.
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