Perhaps no ‘published-on-paper’ magazine has reached deeper into the digital pocket than Esquire in its attempt to broaden its reach and influence beyond print boundaries.

Yes, there are e-papers and e-magazines worth a look (and we will)… but these products are finding their unique audience entirely on the web. It has been the printed-on-paper magazines and newspapers that have been struggling to hold an audience that is smitten with digital magic. No medium wants to become passé or irrelevant to a trend.

Esquire’s 700,000-plus monthly readers are predominantly “well educated, urbane and affluent men,” it says, with a median age of 43.6 years. Will they always read (and pay for) printed-on-paper words or will the digital ‘sirens’ call’ bleed that number ever lower? Newspapers’ struggles have painted a fearful picture of declining readership… and there is reason for concern as upcoming prospective readers have not ‘cut their teeth’ on non-digital news and entertainment.

David Granger, Esquire’s Editor In Chief, says the magazine “has been doing a lot of experimenting with the way magazines are made. We’ve been messing with the basic elements of a magazine—paper and ink—and we’ve been using newer technologies to enhance what magazines are capable of.”

For the magazine’s 75^th anniversary issue… yes, that many… Esquire’s cover was printed on electronic paper (technology similar to the Kindle and other e-readers) that allowed for a section of the cover to ‘blink’ “The 21^st Century Begins Now” message to every perspective newsstand buyer. The industry called it a ‘silly gimmick’ but applauded the forward thinking.

Esquire followed up with two issues featuring origami-like doors on the cover that opened to multiple images of George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Barack Obama. Yep… still experimenting.

The latest experiment, the piece de resistance to date, is the December ’09 AR (Augmented Reality) issue featuring scanable codes that bring the magazine ‘live’ to your computer. (Reader has to download a small, free ‘app’ first.) The cover, for example, showed Robert Downey Jr. sitting on a black and white ‘cube’ which, when put in front of your web-cam, had Downey talking directly to you about the delights of this digital effort.

The cover ‘blurb’ read: “…A LIVING, BREATHING, MOVING, TALKING MAGAZINE? For instructions on how to use that thing Downey’s sitting on, see pg. 21 and visit Esquire.com/AR”.

There were scanables throughout the magazine that opened other digital windows, including a regular feature, ‘Funny Jokes from a Beautiful Woman’ where the model tells a favorite joke… and, if you repeat this action after midnight, she tells another. There was a clever fashion feature, a photo feature, a jazz article and yes, a scan for an advertiser, Lexus. Can you imagine how impactful that ad, featuring its new hybrid, was? Papa John’s Pizza used the issue but put the scan on its pizza boxes. Now there is another dimension… and a win-win-win… advertiser to buyer to prospective new reader.

Esquire is a ‘with-it’ product… good features and sidebars, tongue-in-cheek humor, great graphics and enough balance of interests to appeal to its reader base.

According to Granger, “For the last fifteen years, all the hype has been about laying new pipe to facilitate the dissemination of ideas. We’ve watched, awestruck and credulous, as AOL, and then Google, and then YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have given us new ways to move information from one place to another on all sorts of new machines. These are the technicians of the new media world. These are the pressmen. It’s the equivalent of Gutenberg’s press that’s had us mesmerized, rather than the words and ideas that were suddenly given life because of it…

“We’re enthusiasts, and this is the most exciting time to be in creative media. As technology changes, we intend to harness that change to augment and expand this paper-and-ink creation. But what you are holding in your hand is not incidental to the Esquire experience; it is essential.”

It almost goes without saying that Esquire has a monthly downloadable ‘app’ in both free and $2.99 versions… the free gives a good preview of the issue, the paid puts the whole issue-plus extra material on your iPhone.

Esquire is a Hearst Magazine product and within the last month, Hearst has committed itself to the development of ‘apps’ for today’s digital media… lots of ‘apps’… more than 1,000 and counting.

Everything changes, and if publications on paper can’t adapt, they will wither. Many, however, are proving ‘up for the challenge.’ And while they may be the old guard in the new world, they have a distinct advantage… they have been providing reader-desired content for a long time. Not a lot of new media have that experience or depth… yet!

Jerry Constantino, March 30, 2010

Jerry Constantino was President and Publisher of PJS Publications, a group of 20 special interest magazines owned by VS&A Venture Capital and later, Primedia. He now writes fiction and blogs irrelevantly at itsnutsoutthere.blogspot.com.

Note: Post not sponsored.