Magazines rock, but most of them are doing about as well financially as a drunk at a Vegas craps table. Which is indirectly leading to interesting new digital media experiments like (*ahem*) Longshot magazine and tons of tablet publications.
The newest to enter the fray is Aol Editions. It launches tomorrow. It’s sort of like The Daily meets Flipboard. It’s conceptually laid out like a magazine, but really it’s more of a news reader with a pretty face, aggregating material from many different sources. (Including traditional magazines!)
It delivers a new issue to you every day based on your location and news preferences you set up when you first launch it. You can define individual sections (like local news, technology news, or entertainment) and select sources for them. You can also connect it to Twitter and Facebook and AIM, set your zipcode, and enter some colour preferences for a more personalised experience.
But while you can add sources to sections, I’m not sure you can take them out. For example, my local news section is full of garbage from Business Insider and the (AOL-owned) Huffington Post, and I can’t figure out how to get it out of there. If there’s one thing I never want to see in a magazine format, it’s the Huffington Post. Come to think of it, I pretty much don’t want to see the Huffington Post in any format.
But mostly it’s good! It gives you some clever-ish customisations, like the address label printed on the front, meant to mirror the one on a print magazine. It shows your friends birthdays and other calendar events on the first page you see.
The back page even has horoscopes, for those of you who enjoy reading fiction.