Print or Digital? It's the Package that Counts

#sxsw #ThePackage

Magazine people think media consumers want carefully prepared packages filled with stories and photographs: in other words, magazines. But newspaper owners and record label executives thought the same thing about their products, and it turned out what consumers really wanted was bits and pieces of content: the single, not the album. So does the magazine as a package have a future, or will glossies go the way of vinyl?

Presenters

Evan Ratliff

Co-Founder & Editor

Atavist

An award-winning journalist and contributing editor at Wired, Evan Ratliff has written for The New Yorker, Outside, National Geographic and many other publications. He is the co-author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" (HarperCollins, 2005), about innovation and counterterrorism. A former fellow at both the International Reporting Project and the Japan Foreign Press Center, he has reported from Russia, Cameroon, Brazil, Bangladesh and elsewhere on science and technology, the environment, politics and transnational crime.

Jake Silverstein

Editor-in-Chief

Texas Monthly

Jake Silverstein is the editor in chief of Texas Monthly. He attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and also received degrees from Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia, and the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin. In the late nineties, he worked as a reporter for the Big Bend Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Marfa. In 2005 he became a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, was published in 2010 by W.W. Norton. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Best American Travel Writing 2003 and Submersion Journalism (2008). He joined the staff of Texas Monthly as a senior editor in 2006. In 2008 he was named the fourth editor of the magazine. During his editorship, the magazine has been nominated for eleven National Magazine Awards (the industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and won two, for General Excellence and Feature Writing.

Mangesh Hattikudur

Co-Founder; Chief Creative Officer

Mental Floss LLC

Mangesh Hattikudur doesn't like to talk about himself. But if you asked HIS GRANDMOTHER about him, she'd talk your ear off. These are some things she might say:

-Mangesh co-founded Mental Floss as a junior at Duke. By his senior year, the magazine was on national newsstands.

-Today, Mentalfloss.com sees 11 million unique visitors a month.

-Over the years, Mental Floss has released 12 books, 6 board games, a t-shirt line, novelty products like "Law School in a Box" (The #1 Boxed Law School in the Country!) and a popular You Tube channel featuring YA author John Green. Mangesh has had a hand in all of these creative endeavors.

-Inc. Magazine named Mangesh to its 30 Under 30 list. Newsweek called him a "Titan of Trivia" and he's been on the cover of India Today (it's more meaningful to her, because she lives in India).

-In 2013, Mentalfloss.com won a Webby, a MIN award for best online store, and Time Magazine named it one of its Top 50 Websites and Top 140 Twitter feeds. The print magazine was also nominated for an ASME award.

And lots of other stuff. Also, she'd ask you why you haven't checked out his website yet. (It's at mentalfloss.com)