Hearst Magazines is launching an “App Lab” at its New York offices, which, according to paidContent, will act as an an incubator space for the company’s marketers and ad agency workers before being opened up to customers to promote Hearst’s iPhone, iPad and tablet products.
The publisher offers 22 apps so far and has all of its magazines available as digital replicas through the e-edition service Zinio says the report.
Following on from Peter Kirwan’s Wired.co.uk article on the move away from journalism and journalists in business magazine publishing, TechCrunch reports on consumer mag publisher Hearst’s new site, LMK (or ‘Let Me Know’).
Using semantic filtering technology the site will aggregate and filter content to create curated topic pages – each with its own freelance editor and designers. The best sources for each topic, e.g. college football, are selected by the editing team and then the technology takes over.
So far, sports topics seem to be dominating the launch – can such semi-automated pages work for breaking news and other news areas?
Time Inc is reportedly at the front of an industry-wide plan to launch a digital store for magazines in 2010.
Talks have been held with Conde Nast and Hearst about the project, which could provide a new digital revenue stream for the groups, according to the FT.
The ‘digital storefront’, which could also feature other publications and newspapers, would take inspiration from online video service Hulu with the venture financed by its partners.
The service could offer more personalisation tools and additional content to resist merely replicating the title’s print editions.
Similar ventures have met with mixed fortunes: in the UK, digital magazine store Magazines On Demand closed in June. However, e-edition specialists Yudu Media launched its Yudu Store in August.
CJ talks to senior SEO analyst for Hearst, Dan Roberts, about how he helped grow online traffic to the publisher’s website by 150 per cent using SEO and Wordtracker.
Social media firm Pluck will supply technology to Hearst Digital’s uber-web portal Allaboutyou.com
It will provided blogs, discussion tools and media-sharing applications to the new community site for women, which combines content from six Natmag’s UK tiles.
The move is part of an ‘aggressive’ push of the business, says the Guardian.
For Hearst, it’s the second major partnership for its magazine websites after securing the services of Brightcove to supply its digital video hosting.