Magazines Still Don't Get the Web

"We don't hire editors anymore," says Meredith publishing president Jack Griffin. "We hire content strategists." As someone who gloried briefly as an official Content Strategist myself, I had to smile: it's one of those titles which anybody with an iota of irony simply cannot say with a straight face.

Still, you can see why Griffin is going there. Larry Dobrow says that "85% of magazine websites are way out of their depth when they turn their attention to video," while Choire Sicha this week does a great job of excoriating Rolling Stone for massively truncating their Britney Spears profile when they put it online.

All newsstand magazines should put all their content online for free the day the magazine gets distributed, if not before. Magazines like Rolling Stone and the Atlantic are shooting themselves in the foot by not doing so. It's just a pity they still need a "content strategist" to make such decisions, well over ten years since most magazine websites first went live. If you can't get that one right, the chances of doing something like video well are minimal.