DIGITAL DRIVERThis is another in a series of exclusive interviews with magazine executives responsible for leveraging their brands on digital platforms.
Josh Jackson, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Paste
Paste (www.pastemagazine.com) has been chronicling music and entertainment since its launch as a quarterly in July 2002. With a tagline of “Signs of Life in Music, Film, and Culture,” technology has been key to the now monthly’s very existence as the way Americans experience the world of entertainment—and how journalists cover it—changes as new forms of technology are introduced. Josh Jackson, the editor-in-chief of the Georgia-based title, took a few minutes recently to explain what drives Paste digitally.
What are the most effective uses of technology for your publication?
Twitter and Facebook have been huge drivers for our keeping our audience informed, getting feedback and expanding our reach. We have more than 50,000 followers/fans, and we can push out every new article that we post.
What are the most effective ways you’ve found to present your publication as being technologically savvy and forward-thinking?
A big part of our vision is to help our audience experience the best of pop culture, so when we launched the magazine we included a CD in every issue and a DVD in several, so that our readers could hear the music we were writing about. Now we can also stream albums from the artists we highlight. We can share videos online of musicians who come through our music studio in Atlanta and incorporate video when discussing film and TV. We've even added an Audiobook sampler, where subscribers can listen to sample chapters of books we recommend. But we've always tried to stay ahead of the curve, launching clever apps like our Obamicon microsite that became an Internet phenomenon, and we have an Augmented Reality holiday greeting card that will be in our Dec/Jan issue.
Do you send content to mobile devices? If so, what’s worked well in that regard? What’s your advice to any company that is experimenting with this?
You can flip through our whole magazine on the iPhone directly through the browser by clicking the Digital Edition link on our homepage. We didn't want to fly out of the gate with another app that doesn't add anything to the thousands that are already out there, but when the right idea hits, we'll move forward there. We've also made a content-syndication deal to have Paste-branded music headlines appear on the new Motorola Blur Devices. But right now, most of our mobile communication with our audience is probably coming via Twitter. My only advice would be to make sure you have something that people are going to want before you spend the time and money putting it out there.
Is there a danger to the Most Watched, Most Listened, etc. phenonena? As cool as it is to let the viewers/listeners, etc., decide, isn’t the idea of an expertly curated list of videos or audio tracks or whatever the case may be more valuable? Which would an advertiser be more interested in promoting?
Absolutely. We take curation very seriously since it's a big differentiator for us. We don't necessarily cover the biggest albums and movies; we cover what we think our discerning audience will love. So we ignore news items about Britney Spears, even if they might bring random traffic that's not our audience. Still, many of our most-read stories are lists. We did a new Best of the Decade list every day in November—albums, movies, comedians, gadgets, graphic novels, even American breweries—and nearly doubled our traffic to 3.5 million/month. We love doing lists like these, but we just added weekly columnists for music, movies, TV, video games and books to balance them out with more thoughtful commentary. I think if advertisers are going after a particular audience, they're going to care that the content is really central to the website's mission.
Interview by Mark J. Miller
