A Look at the Innovative New Digital Magazine Platform

UCOMM’s newest digital media offering, available through our Enhanced News add-on, is the dynamic Digital Magazine platform. This platform affords creator’s the ability to arrange content in one easy to access space while providing a unique visual flair. Curating related content into a digital magazine can be a great way to create a multi-faceted narrative surrounding a central theme or time period. Pulling from stories that have already been published, or creating new ones from scratch, adding your stories into a Digital Magazine only takes a few clicks of the mouse. In our most recent collaboration with the Poole College of Management, you can take a look at just what is possible by perusing their most recent edition of Poole Business. Read further to take a look at some of the available features.

Features

New Covers and Story Headers

The cover of the magazine represents one of many entry points to your magazine’s content. Much like the cover of a print publication, this page displays the key elements of a curated collection of content: The magazine’s title, issue indicator (e.g. Spring 2021), pronounced display of a cover story, and a set of teasers to other stories within the issue.

All magazine covers are automatically generated based on the content contained within the cover story of the issue. This makes it extremely easy to publish new digital magazines simply by configuring which stories go within an issue and setting a small set of per-issue fields (cover story selection, story ordering, magazine teaser, etc…).

With assigning a cover, there are now three new cover header options available to be used. Check those out below:

Default Immersive Post Header

Media Banner Header

Side-by-side Header

New Blocks

In addition to the new cover options, publishers also have two new blocks available to them when building out their stories in posts.

Sandwich Narrative Block

While the main post content sets the stage and gives full details on a particular topic, the Sandwich Narrative block allows users to present a secondary, short-but-relevant story embedded directly within the original narrative that can add additional context, emphasize a point, or simply add more interest to the current story.

Longer content may be hidden behind a collapsible area so that users can choose to continue reading more if they want, but can also continue reading the main story without needing to scroll past a larger distraction.

Magazine Preview Block

The Magazine Preview block allow you to easily integrate a footprint for magazine issues within post content, as well as drive readers to other stories within the issue. Specially created for showcasing other content within a selected Magazine issue, this block is intended to facilitate greater reader retention.

Want to Learn More?

Interested in using our Digital Magazine platform? Contact UCOMM for more information on getting started with using our newest tool.