National Geographic is one of the best-adapted magazines (to the blogosphere). They have plenty of web content to supplement what they put in their magazine, and the print magazine itself reminds me of a blog.

Their articles are very blog-like, in writing style, and in the way they grab your attention. The articles open with a couple introductory paragraphs that immediately grab your interest, and convince you to keep reading, much like the way bloggers do. There are also a lot of pictures, that, again, help to grab your attention, and to break-up the blocks of text. Surely you’ve seen blog posts that kick-off with a big attention-grabbing image? Yes, there definitely are a few similarities between blog posts and NG’s articles.  Luckily, though, the articles are not full of bulleted lists and “bolded” text! (more…)

Newspapers and magazines are slowly starting to make use of the web. A lot of them have websites now, but they don’t seem to know what the heck they’re doing.

My major complaints are:

• No comments. I often disagree with articles (or find errors), and I like to leave a note. “Dead-tree” publications rarely allow you to post comments on their sites, and in the rare cases when they do they tend to be heavily moderated.
• Bad design. The web is not paper. You can’t treat a website like a newspaper/magazine. That means no “between-page” ads, and no newspaper-style front pages. Print design is not the same as web design; so if your publication is going online, hire someone who knows how to design for the web.
• Subscription content. You’re not going to get very far online if you make people pay a subscription to view your content.
• Lack of links. When “traditional” publications sites mention websites, they pretty much never link to the actual sites. Often they don’t even list the URL. Hoarding PageRank is just stupid.