What's new?

2015 brought sweeping changes across the industry. The technology giants started elbowing each other for a slice of the publishing pie, ad-blocking went mainstream and a handful of large magazine titles shockingly kicked the bucket.

This year has brought monumental changes to the magazine and digital publishing industry, and we often work with publishers who are facing a variety of challenges.

Each publisher is different, but there are some issues that are facing almost all publishers. From a digital perspective, the following three points encapsulate the critical challenges facing magazine and digital publishing today:

As part of a 2015 redesign, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives have digitised their offering of the CILEx Journal, publishing in a fully-responsive HTML format.

The well-established Chartered Institute for Legal Executives has been offering access to legal careers for over 50 years and are "recognised as one of the three core regulators of the legal profession". Their monthly publication CILEx Journal gives members all the key updates and information in law practice.

Print magazines may be struggling, but producing second-rate digital offerings is not the answer. Here, we make the case for hurrying the demise of the replica edition.

Articles seem to be appearing at an alarming rate trumpeting the reasons why PDF replica editions are a good choice for publishers. Without pointing fingers, the most recent have forecast a long and happy life for replicas. Some of the most common reasons cited are easy conversion, lower costs and time effectiveness, but don't let that lull you into a false sense of security about the future of digital offerings.

We often get asked the question "Why should we make our magazine digital?" by membership organisations.

That is just what we aimed to address in our talk at the Memberwise conference yesterday, entitled 'Reinventing your membership magazine for the digital age'.