Jefferson Hack magazine looks to future melding digital and print

The first magazine with a moving, high-definition video cover will be launched by Jefferson Hack today in an attempt to meld the worlds of print and digital publishing.

The creation of the limited edition AnOther Magazine is the result of a four month collaboration between Mr Hack's Dazed group and PCH, the supply chain management company.

Dazed and PCH are limiting the print run to 1,000 copies of the magazine, which will be sold globally and launched at Paris Fashion Week today. It features a two minute video of the singer Rihanna on its cover.

"I wanted to be able to see Rihanna winking at me when I looked at it on a shelf," Mr Hack, the co-founder of Dazed & Confused magazine, told the FT. "Magazines aren't supposed to move, but this one does."

Dazed is billing the limited edition, which includes a tribute to the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, as a collectors' item. Its $125 price tag, which reflects the LED screen technology and built-in MP3 player may put it beyond the reach of a casual magazine buyer but if the sale goes well it could spur larger publishers to investigate the mass-market potential of video-screen magazines.

Magazines, like newspapers, have been hit by declining circulation while customised tablet editions have failed to become the panacea the industry had hoped for, with advertising revenues continuing to fall.

Mass-market titles have been among the worst hit, with US news-stand magazine sales falling 11 per cent in 2014, according to data from MagNet, a research group. But high-end publishers able to command higher premiums for advertising sales have not fared as badly and continue to attract investor interest: Tyler Brule, the FT columnist, recently sold a minority stake in his Monocle magazine to Nikkei Inc, the Japanese newspaper publisher. The deal valued Monocle at about $115m.

Meanwhile, Vice Media, which started as an anarchic music magazine but evolved into a digital media group, was recently valued at $2.5bn following an investment from A&E Networks, the US cable television group, and Technology Crossover Ventures, the Silicon Valley investment firm.

Mr Hack and Mr Casey, the chief executive of PCH, have a patent pending on the technology they have designed, which wraps the pages of the magazine in a hard-cover similar to a tablet computer screen.

Mr Casey, known as "Mr China" for Shenzhen-based PCH's success in winning clients such as Apple, said the magazine could have a broader impact on the publishing industry. "It's going to get the attention of the large magazine groups who will look at it and ask if it can be done on a greater scale," he said.

Mr Hack said the venture could be a "window into the future" for publishing. "It would need aggressive research and development to bring the cost down." The cost of LED screen technology is falling, he added. "If the industry sees potential it that could be the way to go . . . but it's not going to happen overnight."

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