A lengthy piece in the ‘City of Sound’ blog by Dan Hill, Director of Web & Broadcast for Monocle between 2007-2008, describes his approach at integrating the web into the publishing process while retaining high quality standards.
Monocle was conceived as a multi-platform brand from the start….We wanted to make Monocle a journalism brand that you had a weekly relationship with via the internet, as well as the monthly relationship via the magazine. Ultimately, this should be daily, if aspirations come to fruition. This weekly relationship would be through a form of broadcast media, using the internet’s ability for distributing video – something enabled only in the last couple of years, effectively – and thus conveying the sense of a Monocle broadcast news element, complementing the ‘book’. The challenge was to create a working environment that would produce it, and then an online environment that could distribute it.
Monocle worried about lowering editorial quality online and the rapid rise of video. Hill describes how they decided to go with professional video crews to create video-podcast reports than rely on journalists submitting video-phone reports. He also gives insight into the speed and quantity of articles published:
In terms of rhythm of updates, we deliberately decided less is more, and flying in the face of conventional wisdom (if you can have wisdom in a medium only a decade old) we produced editorial at a steady rate – essentially a well-made film or two per week – rather than bombarding the user with content. Deciding to filter, reflect and craft rather than immerse the user in a constant flow of data in lieu of information. Again, this was difficult for some to get their heads around, and we certainly have aspirations to increase the frequency to include a snappy daily bulletin, but this sense of quiet calm exuding from Monocle was another important statement: that you don’t have to clutter websites with every possible bit of information you can. And that – particularly for the busy people that enjoy Monocle – information overload is not something we wished to contribute to.
I made quick straightforward decisions around findability – breaking a page of 4 or 5 briefing items into those 4 or 5 small individual stories, rather than combining them all onto one webpage, preferring instead these basic atoms. This ensures every page (even subscriber-only content) could be linked to externally, and would contain enough HTML text to be indexed by search engines whilst hinting at the strong graphical element of the brand.
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
