Launched in September of last year, Esquire Weekly is an exclusive to tablet publication, featuring original content that you won’t find in the flagship monthly magazine.
While many of their competitors will simply reproduce a PDF of the print magazine and sell it as a tablet edition, Esquire Weekly can be seen as the attempt truly to harness the potential of the platform.
I caught up with Esquire Weekly’s editor, Dan Davies, to find out the motivations behind the project as well as the considerations of an editor working exclusively for tablet platforms.
Prior to Esquire Weekly you worked on the editorial for print publications such as the Mail on Sunday. What are the differences between editing for a print and for tablet editions?
In terms of deadlines and the schedule, it’s not a lot different. But, in terms of what you can produce, it’s very different. Print is a one-dimensional format and now we’ve got so much more scope to incorporate video. We are able to make the whole experience a bit more immersive, tactile and deeper.
For me, it’s a marriage of the two; taking what I did before in terms of what you perceive to be good content and what you perceive to be content that fits your market, but then really trying to play to the strengths of the device that you’re delivering it on.
One thing that struck me about Esquire Weekly is that your content nearly always asks users to touch, listen and watch as well as just read.
Absolutely. When we started this process of launching Esquire Weekly we had three priorities:
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The first and foremost was to produce a product that was in keeping with the ethos of Esquire; something that was well written, beautifully produced, nicely designed and also spoke to a smart, sophisticated male audience.
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The second was to do something, as a weekly publication, that feels like it has topical currency for the week ahead and the time in which it’s published. Being a weekly enables you to edit and produce the issue right up until the moment you publish it – it allows you a lot more flexibility than the long lead times on a monthly print magazine.
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- Cover of Esquire Weekly for Winter Sports
The third priority was to make a product that really played to the strengths of the device. We were doing something pretty unique; we were the first mainstream monthly magazine brand to produce a weekly iPad edition that was made specifically for the iPad. It wasn’t the monthly magazine simply being repurposed for the iPad, it was a whole new product made for that device. We wanted to be able to capitalize on the things the iPad is great for; images look fantastic, video etc. We can also tap into when people read it. We knew people would be reading it in the evenings and weekend mornings. We wanted to produce something that was a pleasurable experience to read and interact with.
So would you say that the attitude of many of your competitors, of simply dumping the magazine in its same format onto the iPad, is a lazy approach?
I think it’s important you deliver a product that fits the device; otherwise, it’s a mismatch. I always cite the example of National Geographic, which is obviously a great magazine with a fantastic history, but it almost felt that it was waiting for the iPad to realise its potential. Now you see National Geographic on that device and it comes to life in a way that, even though it was a great print magazine and still is a great print magazine, was way and beyond what it was before with the video, audio, interactive graphics. It’s an ability to bring stories to life in a different way.
But some people might say it’s possible to do all of that online. What makes a specific iPad edition any different?
I think it’s the difference between what you use your phone for and what you use your tablet for. I don’t think, at the moment, although people will look for news and links through Twitter and social media on their phone, it’s not somewhere necessarily where you’re going to be enjoying a magazine or staying within the environment of one title. I think the iPad is much more of a “lean back” experience and smartphones are more “lean forward”: it’s much more immediate.
Devices serve different functions. The daily website, which is very successful at Esquire, has five, seven, maybe even more stories a day. It’s very much more of an immediate reaction to what’s going on, whereas the weekly iPad edition is more of a midway between the website and the monthly magazine. It also gives people a reason to come into the Esquire app more than once a month.
Do you liaise with Alex Bilmes (editor of Esquire) and members of the other editorial teams? Or are you completely independent?
I sit next to the deputy editor of the magazine and next to the editor of the website. It’s not such a big office that we don’t talk to each other. We know what’s going in the magazine, on the website and we tell them what we do on the weekly.
Of course, there are some things that cross over between the platforms. For example, London Fashion Week had breaking, day-by-day stories covered on the website, while we do a more considered piece that the monthly magazine wouldn’t be able to do because it would be so far out of date by the time they printed it.
It’s still early in the process but we do talk to each other a lot and it’s the beginning of a brave new world for Esquire, I suppose; the ability to interact with it on a daily basis, a weekly basis and a monthly basis.
While Esquire Weekly exists within the established brand, the covers on the Weekly edition do take a different style to the magazine – there are fewer girls on there, for one thing – is that a conscious thing?
Well if you were to go into the Esquire app, and we were doing covers exactly like the monthly magazine, where would the definition be between the two? And, again, as a weekly edition we’re reacting, where possible. For example, this week we did a Transfer Window Deadline special, setting people up for the last week of the transfer window. That would never be a cover story on the monthly magazine. Yes, they do look slightly different, even though they’re drawn from the same design and editorial DNA, but it’s important that there is a distinction between the weekly and the monthly in the Esquire app; otherwise, I think people would be confused. We are meant to be a nice, fulfilling snack between the main course of the monthly.
Is what you’re doing the future for magazine brands like Esquire? Or is it just one path into it?
I think it’s just one path into it. I certainly hope there’s always going to be a market for great writing. That’s what Esquire has been built on, from the outset of the magazine in 1930s America all the way through to the near 25 years we’ve been publishing in the UK. You look at the print magazine now and you’ve got people like A.A. Gill, Will Self, Giles Coren, David Thompson and all sorts of great writers in it. I think there will always be an appetite for that. I certainly hope there will be. I’d hope the reading public isn’t so driven down the road of Buzzfeed that everything has to be a list and two sentences long.
It’s an interesting time for print at the moment. I think Esquire as a whole is now trying to find and look at different ways to reach its audience and reach them on a different frequency to just a monthly magazine.
Do you think that once the Buzzfeed “listicle” becomes the norm we’ll see an increased hunger for longform journalism?
Hopefully. I’m an avid reader of the New Yorker and there’s a fairly robust-sized audience for that. You’re talking about 6,000 or 7,000 word pieces that lots of people are reading and talking about. And then you look at the success of things like Flipboard where you can read longform features and people are now increasingly doing that on mobiles.
I think, simply, if the content’s good, people will react to it. So I’m not criticizing what Buzzfeed do – they’ve been hugely successful. But I think you can’t compare what we provide our readers with what Buzzfeed provide. They are very different publications. It’s not that all we do is longform, we mix it up on all our platforms, but we are catering to a sophisticated, well-educated, smart man. We’d like to think that man would want to invest his time and intelligence in some great writing and some interesting subject matter.