By James Pringle

---

James is a freelance editor, writer and sub-editor who has seen corporate publishing from the inside at Prudential and Nestlé as well spending eight years at the Chandler Gooding agency (now known as CG Business Communications). His career has encompassed book publishing and radio, as well as editing the weekly newspaper Fish Trader and senior editorial roles at Saga, Choice and 50-Forward magazines.

---

The printed company magazine is still very much alive but online newsletters are now a serious option – whether they take the place of printed journals or run in tandem with them.

You can choose from an assortment of permutations. Cost and speed of delivery are prime considerations, and you must decide what approach best suits your audience and your communications agenda.

Printed publications may offer a longer shelf life. An employee may pick up a publication a number of times to read parts of it, or may read it at leisure at home, where other members of the family can also see it. A printed magazine can be sent to the organisation’s customers, or picked up in reception by them and other visitors to company premises.

An emailed newsletter or an intranet section or link may be viewed only once by each reader, or ignored entirely. The printed journal’s front page may grab the attention before it can be binned.

We are all bombarded with information and have to be able to skim-read but we are much more likely to do it on-screen. With emails constantly pinging in – not to mention the clamouring attractions of the internet – it is easy to be lured away from an online article. And it is physically more tiring to read from a screen, where a mish-mash of flickering dots simulate the substance of a printed page.

Printing may be more than five centuries old but it still has a lot going for it. However, the digital revolution has opened up great new possibilities.

It’s fast, it’s thrifty - but is it effective?

If your communication budget is really tight, electronic media will spare you the expense of repro and print – and even design, if you go for the cheapest option, which is an emailed newsletter. The speed of production means this is a way to get news out fast - but will people read it? In-boxes are full of emails; and documents that are purely text can only do a limited amount to grab people’s attention.

A magazine available through an intranet is a more sophisticated proposition. It might be a pdf of a print publication but much better is something custom-built for the screen. Design can follow a simple template or be as adventurous as you like, with flamboyant visuals, animation and sound.  For special events, you might even include video clips or perhaps a preview of the company’s new TV commercial.

Just like a public website, an intranet can be a huge information resource. In fact, restricted to an internal audience, it is likely to be an even greater resource – offering anything from archives of company announcements, through picture libraries, centre of excellence reports and contacts to supply chain data, HR and IT guidelines and internal telephone directories.  The fact that the information remains on tap can be particularly useful for new staff.

The home page on employees’ screens or email alerts can be circulated to draw attention to news appearing on the online magazine. New issues can appear at planned regular intervals but content can be continually refreshed to meet the needs of the business. Increasingly popular is the weblog, or blog to its friends. The online journal may include new material daily, or even more often, and has great scope for interactivity, with a message board element.

Then there is the wiki, the site any visitor can edit; but that may be too uncontrollable for the tastes of communications managers.

What’s best for your organisation?

Communications managers must take an informed approach to presenting the message. The typical age of employees may come into the equation. Younger people may well prefer electronic media, while older ones are happier with conventional magazines or papers.

If the audience is a manufacturing or retail workforce, where only the white collar staff have access to computers at work, the decision is out of your hands. You must print if you want to communicate with all of them. A magazine can be distributed to them at work or at home - and they may read it at home - but they will not be able to log onto the intranet and will be unlikely to pay regular visits to the company website.

Will you be a star of the screen?

An intranet can contain as much material as you like, without the production costs rising proportionately, as they would with a printed publication. Sections and links can cater for specific departments, locations or regions, and management can have their own password-protected section or even a separate intranet.

The speed of the process means that topicality is no problem. Picture quality is not as critical as in printing. Lower-resolution digital pictures – even from mobile phones or scanners – can be acceptable.

Immediacy is the strength of the medium but production values should not go out the window. A company may have someone in the IT department who knows how to upload material onto a site but it is worth calling in the professionals to design the site.  Some communications agencies specialise in online work, while others may have new media departments or designers whose expertise includes site design. 

Why not cover all bases?

Do you remember those predictions that we would soon be reading our books in electronic form? Travel on the train and you will not see much evidence of that. There will be people wearing headphones and staring into space, talking on their mobile or using it for electronic games but they are still heavily outnumbered by passengers with good old-fashioned books, newspapers and magazines.

If you are at your desk, there is a fair chance you will be tempted to look at material available online – especially if it is right upto-the-minute. If you are travelling with your laptop, you might do some work or check your emails but, for leisurely reading, you are likely to save your battery and your eyes by closing the laptop and getting some other reading matter out of your briefcase. Similarly, if you want something to read while you eat your breakfast or lunch, it is almost certain to be in print form.

The physical presence of a printed publication has perceived value – even more so if each individual receives their own copy.

Just as radio never replaced newspapers, and television never replaced either, print and online publications will coexist for the foreseeable future. Many newspapers and magazines now offer a digest of their content in online form, and a Dutch blogging service is promoting itself by launching a print newspaper with content from the blogs it hosts.

Electronic media can offer headline news that may be later fleshed out by features in print publications, or the traffic can go the other way. The print journal can offer news in snappy tabloid form which includes intranet links for people who want to read about subjects in greater detail.

The same team who produce internal news for print can also generate material for an online service, and both strands can display brand values and play important parts in the corporate identity.

Whether the solution you choose is print, online or a combination of the two, how the publication is presented will say a lot about the image and professionalism of your organisation.

 

 

 Create your own business wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS