Is crowdsourcing the new outsourcing? Some say it's going to transform the creative services industry. In this issue of Engage, Lisa Junker, editor in chief of Associations Now magazine, talks about her experience crowdsourcing an entire magazine issue. Take a look at our video interview and the new Engage blog for even more. If you get even one idea, we'd like to think Engage is worth reading and watching!

industry buzz

Your Magazine, In Augmented Reality

Magazines are dreaming up creative ways to sell cover space without getting into the American Society of Magazine Editors' bad graces. Popular Science's July issue has a 3-D cover displaying "Flash-based imagery" revealing a GE ad. This "augmented reality" encourages readers to interact with advertisements.

Culinary Magazine Publishes Largest Issue Ever

Saveur's new issue tastes like success; it's the largest June/July edition in the publication's 15-year history. The issue has 22% more ad pages and 14 new advertisers compared to last year, bringing the magazine's ad pages up 11% to date. Why such great ROI? The increase is attributed to the magazine's alliance with Virtuoso, an international network of luxury travel agencies.

Research Firms Launch New Studies

Mediamark Research and Intelligence (M.R.I.) and Affinity (Vista) are both introducing new studies, and becoming more competitive in the process. Vista is introducing the American Magazine Study, which will add readership data to its ad ratings. M.R.I. will launch AdMeasure, a system that will allow advertisers to estimate how many Americans saw and reacted to a magazine ad.

Hearst Magazines' ROI Strategies

Food Network magazine is already becoming one of the biggest success stories of 2009, with paid circulation at 900,000 and counting. Hearst's other magazines include giants such as O the Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping. How have they found such great return on investment during an industry-wide recession? The execs explain in this New York Times article.

New Digital Content Distribution Channel

The release of the iPhone 3GS this month opened up a new content channel for magazine publishers. Now instead of selling one-off apps, continuous upgrades and new content can be added for additional fees. Men's Health magazine jumped first, offering a workout app that sells for $1.99, with 99 cent workout additions.

Disclaimer: Access to some sites may require registration.

diamond in the rough

Publishing Feels the Roar of the Crowd

If many hands make light work, as the saying goes, they also make it more collaborative, creative, and valuable, too. That's what happened when the editors at ASAE's Associations Now magazine decided to crowdsource its May issue, essentially handing over the reins of an entire issue to be created and written by its readers.

Sound like an editors' nightmare? The crowdsourced issue, or "Readers Pick The Stories Issue," as ASAE called it, was "actually a lot of fun," says the magazine's editor in chief, Lisa Junker.

It was also successful. In just a month, the magazine received more than 80 ideas, which readers then voted on and provided sources for. This reader engagement "strengthened the network of readers," says Junker, and brought in new talent and fresh, creative ideas.

Watch Lisa Junker talk about how ASAE crowdsourced Associations Now.

It might be a hot new buzzword, but crowdsourcing in publications is not a new concept—editors have always asked for reader input. It's new Internet tools that have allowed media to tap into a much larger, global community for citizen journalism and user-generated content, opening up a new world of crowdsourcing possibilities. And with the economy the way it is, publishers are loving the effect crowdsourcing is having on creative services—making tasks such as research and gathering art much more efficient.

Take, for instance, The Guardian. When the British newspaper recently put the expense reports of Members of Parliament online and asked readers to sift through them and flag anything worthy of investigation, they had 323 people reviewing the documents within 10 minutes of being posted. Within one hour, more than 2,000 pages had been reviewed—beating out competitor The Daily Telegraph, whose team of 25 researchers was still sifting through the project days later. In this instance, crowdsourcing didn't just quickly reveal politicians' expense flubs, it fostered a sense of collaboration and ownership with those who helped contribute to the project.

When Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" in a 2006 Wired magazine article, he was drawing from the reporting in a Wired News project called Assignment Zero, where readers submitted research, stories, essays and interviews in an "open-source, pro-am journalism" experiment, hosted by custom software that created a "virtual newsroom." The result of the early experiment was seven original essays and 80 interviews on the topic of crowdsourcing—"using the phenomenon to cover the phenomenon itself" as The New York Times' David Carr described it.

But did that many cooks in the kitchen really create an edible media meal? The Assignment Zero experiment was not deemed a complete success, but it did teach some valuable crowdsourcing lessons early on, such as the need for reliable moderators and a no-frill channel for communication. Now media companies are using those lessons to successfully channel crowds, like Associations Now and The Guardian did recently. The result is an efficient, collaborative form of publishing, and "it's a chance for your members or your readers to engage in an entirely different way," says Junker.

Ready to give it a shot?

Best Practices: The Six Rs for Marketing to the Blogosphere

Share your tips...