Condé Nast vice president discusses e-magazines for iPad

The Nieman Journalism Lab is carrying an interview with Scott Dadich, vice president of digital magazine development for Condé Nast. Dadich discusses the importance of having magazines on the iPad, the controversy over whether to work directly with Apple or try to circumvent the app store, and how faithful an e-magazine adaptation should be to the print version.

Where some publishers balk at the 30% bite Apple takes out of their revenue, or Apple’s reluctance to share the sort of subscriber information they need to sell advertising, Dadich thinks that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. He feels that media companies should be trying to reinvent themselves rather than worry about revenue or information concerns.

Dadich also finds that individual magazines require different approaches in adaptation—some have to stay closer to the print version than others.

Most newspaper and magazine websites, and to an extent mobile apps, have little in common with their print counterparts. Conversely, The New Yorker and GQ, even with the addition of audio, video, and animation, still track fairly closely to their origins. Finding the right spot for your title, and determining how it meets up with your readers’ needs, is the big question, Dadich said.

Of course, the number of people with iPads is still just a fraction of the total number of magazine readers in the US (and not even all iPad owners will want to read magazines on them), so it’s still pretty early yet to tell what the future holds. Still, this is an interesting look at the opinions of the man in charge of iPad magazines for one of the biggest iPad magazine publishers.