The current issue of Symphony Magazine contains a comprehensive article on whether or not arts journalism can exist on the web.
I would link to it, but the full article is not available online.
What publication web edition in the WORLD asks readers to DOWNLOAD
their articles? If Symphony dot com can include a two-sentence teaser in the body of a web
page, why can’t it include the entire article? I do not understand. And this particular article not-surprisingly cites over a dozen blogs and bloggers; wouldn’t it be nice to actually link to those pages in the online version?
If you take the time to download the thing, you’ll see that the piece’s tagline is, “As newspapers accelerate their assault on classical music coverage, critics and arts reporters are rising to the challenge and establishing new outlets online. Can arts journalism successfully make the switch?”
I think they successfully answered their own question.
Spot on with this one.
I can think of only two reasons why a magazine publisher might want to post a print article as a pdf and not directly on the site.
1. For copyright reasons: a “protected” pdf won’t allow you to select and copy the text, which means a would-be plagiaristneeds to exert themselves a little more in order to steal the content. (It’s a pretty limited protection, I agree, more like a discouragement.) That’s not the case here, as the text can be copied.
2. When the published presentation is so dependent on a particular graphic and/or typographic presentation that it can’t be easily replicated in html and a “picture” wouldn’t be satisfactory either. That’s certainly not the case for this article.
3. If the publication is for members of an organization only, which I believe Symphony is, for the League of American Orchestras. In which case, provide members with a password to read the articles online. -AA