Editorial
Robin Carson | Editor, news&views
Update on a Digital news&views
Since I became editor of
news&views in 2011, I have
dearly wanted a digital edition
of our magazine. I love
magazines and used to recycle
huge stacks of them — or beg
people to take the old back
issues of my favourites. Today,
I mostly read my magazines
digitally on a tablet because
digital issues don’t require
recycling and have some truly
powerful features that cannot
be matched in a print edition.
We have had a pdf version
of news&views available for
a long time, but reading a
magazine in that form used to
print format. While that route
might be the right one in the
future, it isn’t anything we want
to commit to just now. Too many
of us, me included, still enjoy the
feel of a magazine in hand despite
the ease of a digital edition.
However, increasingly, our
members are familiar with things
digital and we are glad to be able
to explore formats that enable us
to make our magazine current
by breaking the static bonds that
print imposes. A newsletter or
newspaper provides information;
a traditional magazine can reflect
and analyze the news; a digital
magazine, well done, gives its
Joomag, an application available
on iTunes and Google Play.
The app enables you to read
our magazine on a variety of
‘personal devices,’ including
a tablet or even a smartphone
(if your eyes are good.) Since
then, two more issues have been
added, and we will continue to
make future issues available to
you in that format. It is a modest
beginning, but, as I have pointed
out before, it is a work in progress.
I must thank Tony Esteves,
ARTA’s Digital and Creative
Strategist, and Amanda Shaw,
ARTA’s Director of Marketing,
for this exciting step forward.
Links can take you to other related articles, or to interesting facts or illustrations
be extraordinarily difficult and
isn’t much better now. A pdf
isn’t ‘magazine-like’ in that you
cannot flip pages or even use a
table of contents very easily.
We have also looked into
producing news&views as a
standalone digital magazine such
as Maclean’s or Smithsonian,
but doing so would require what
would amount to the creation of a
totally new magazine, if we were
to do the job right — as well as
possibly having to abandon our
reader a centre from which news
can be explored and considered.
A click on an item in the table of
contents takes you to the article;
a simple click on a link in the
article can define an unfamiliar
word or take you to a website or
even open an email to the writer.
Links can take you to other
related articles, or to interesting
facts or illustrations that would
bloat the article if it were in print.
In 2018, as a trial, we posted the
autumn issue of news&views on
They have made possible the
digital future of our magazine
and have done so in a reader-
friendly way. Elsewhere in this
issue, Tony has both a short
article and a small cartoon about
how to subscribe to our Joomag
version of news&views, and I
really hope that you will give it
a try!
Oh. And please let us know
what you think. And with the
Joomag app, you can do that
with a simple click! ●
news&views SUMMER 2019 | 9