I must admit, when I first saw this story,
I was fairly sure it was some sort of April Fool. The idea of video within a
hard copy of a magazine seems incredibly futuristic. Of course, if you have
been converted to viewing your magazines on an iPad then you will be used to
moving images and interactive features. But in an actual printed magazine? It
sounds like the enchanted newspapers in Harry Potter and yet it is apparently a
first for women’s magazine, Marie Claire.
Several thousand copies of the October edition of
the magazine will apparently contain the 45-second advertisement for a
fragrance from Dolce and Gabbana, which will use a special chip embedded in the
paper to play both video and music when the page is opened.
So what does this sort of technology mean for
print media? Personally, I find it a really exciting development. It gets
incredibly wearing hearing the old ‘print is dead’ mantra being repeated and
this sort of technology has real potential to bring the experience of reading a
printed copy of a newspaper or magazine into the twenty-first century. Those championing digital media have often argued that print media is old-fashioned and out of touch with today's audiences. However, S.E. Bird claims that "the new digital environment has jolted traditional journalism out of its conservative complacency" and this development is a really interesting example of combining digital and print media to create a new reading experience. It has the potential to bring print media up to date.
Of course, as with any new technology, I can
imagine that there may be all sorts of teething problems with this technology.
It would obviously make the production cost (and I assume therefore the sales
cost) higher for print media which included such technology. However, since
people already seem happy to pay higher prices for (what they perceive to be)
higher quality publications – one just has to look at LOVE magazine, which is
popular despite its comparatively high cost of £6 per issue.
After producing a presentation for my Journalism
Practices module which concluded that it wasn't as simple as digital media
replacing print journalism, I really feel that this development helps to
support that argument. This is a perfect example of a way in which print
journalism can change and incorporate new technology to move with the times,
without giving up on the printing press altogether.
