Flip Through New Magazines With A Mouse

Put your finger on the words of your favorite entertainment magazine. Press your finger to the pages. Nothing happens. Sorry about the ink smudge.

Now press your finger on a computer mouse and try the same thing on a CD-ROM entertainment magazine. You can access full-length commercials, film trailers, sound bites and many megabytes of text.

Multimedia entertainment magazines, with titles such as Launch, Blender and Go, began appearing on newsstands, in record stores and in computer software stores about a year ago at retail prices of $8 to $15. There are at least a half-dozen on the market, with more being conceived as you read this.

They appeal to the “new media generation,” the 18- to 34-year-old segment often called Generation X, says Ken Schramm of Baker/Winokur/Ryder, the public relations firm that handles Blender.

And though the current crop of magazines emphasizes style and a hip veneer over useful information, it is difficult to deny the potential of a medium that not only describes a music group, movie or computer game but presents it as well.

“When I read a print review, it’s funny, because how do you describe music?” says Cindy Linnick, spokeswoman for California-based Multimedia, which produces Go Digital Interactive Magazine.

If you were an editor at Launch, you’d provide a cyber room called The Hang and deck the walls with icons of stars such as Alanis Morissette and Matthew Sweet.

These icons can be clicked on for live concert footage, snippets of songs from their new albums, and video interviews (though at a space-saving 15 frames per second, they are less fluid than the typical 24 frames per second for video).

These are not basement operations for cyberpunks. Major advertisers such as Reebok, Dewar’s and Levi’s have designed ads that are sold not by the page but by the megabyte.

Launch claims circulation of 170,000. Go expects to ship more than 60,000 copies of its second issue. And Blender, a relative old-timer, is shipping 50,000 copies of its sixth issue.

These figures don’t include “bundling,” packaging with software packages and print magazines, which can increase the number of people who view the CD-ROM magazines.

CD-ROMs have been widely hailed in the computer industry for their storage capacity. A single CD-ROM can hold up to 650 megabytes of information, which translates to thousands of pages of text.

This storage potential, combined with innovative techniques for displaying stories, has catalyzed the growth of the CD-ROM magazine industry.

The formats of entertainment CD-ROM magazines are unlike those of print magazines.

Launch sends readers into a dark, sinisterlooking Times Squareish domain, where they enter various departments by clicking on icons that form billboards on the landscape.

Go Digital Interactive Magazine presents manon-the-street reported stories that are fairly comprehensive (most stories have several sources) and use multimedia to accentuate them.

Blender is the Details of CD-ROM magazines, steeped in cynicism and alternative sentiment. An icon for “mainstream alternative” record reviews shows a hilariously decked-out alternachick, and a cover feature skewers Courtney Love’s Internet rantings.

The content of the magazines doesn’t approach the critical judgment and connectedness of, say, Rolling Stone, Spin or other major print entertainment magazines. Subjects can reek of random inclusion, and critics sometimes bend over backward in boosterism.

But this is more likely smart business than touchy-feeliness; no new company wants to come out of the gate throwing knives.

Magazine producers expect public acceptance to pick up as more homes get CD-ROM players and technology improves.

So does this mean that print media are on the way out?

Even multimedia cheerleaders say it won’t happen.

“I don’t think print is dead at all,” says Go editor Larry Miller, citing the portability of the print medium and the expense of the CD-ROM magazines.

“This is an opportunity for people who want to get their information in a different way, and I think a more effective way, but one doesn’t preclude the other from existing,” he says.