tchop is a wonderful platform for traditional specialty publishers who want to serve a specific topic or target audience with very good content across channels. One new customer we are particularly pleased about is Flying Mag from the USA.
As a print magazine, the brand has been around since 1927, and is the largest magazine for pilots and “aviation” in the US. A great title with a great story, exciting distribution and really stunning content (especially visually of course!).
The leading aviation community
As part of the planned relaunch, the publisher’s management was quickly convinced of the potential of its own mobile community in the form of true native apps. It is hard to imagine a more “mobile” target group. However, a special requirement for us arose from the comprehensive archive of old but also new ePapers, i.e. magazines in PDF form. The content of the magazines often cannot be found online and is subject to its own process, as is the case with many publishers.
Until now, Flying Mag was a customer of the large US platform Zinio, which specializes in ePaper apps and applications. The goal of the new app: to combine fast news, a community and the ePaper in one app! It’s a good thing that we already have a special integration for PDFs since last year (see here for more). Nevertheless, the requirements of this ePaper integration were particularly interesting because, as far as the magazine is concerned, it should not just remain a PDF.
In the following, we will explain how this works and why this is also exciting for many other publishers and companies.
Division of content in the app
At the beginning, we considered how to structure the content from news, magazine and archive in a sensible way within the given possibilities of the platform. Of course, one quickly comes to the point of “topicality”.
In order to display the current content from news, which is available on the FLYING website, and the monthly magazine (print/ePaper) together as prominently as possible, we decided to set up a channel with news and the current magazine and another channel with the historical issues.
The individual news sections are displayed in the app using the familiar mix structure, and the news itself is aggregated as web cards in the newsfeed.
For the magazine content, we decided to use the pinned mix and map the content natively in a stream. The native article cards are used for this purpose. If there are several images in the article, of course also as an image gallery.
As mentioned above, FLYING Magazine has a long tradition and is now several hundred issues old and, as is the case with passion topics such as flying, the historical content is of course worth its weight in gold and must be offered in an easily readable structure.
Here we have decided to give the historical content or the archive its own channel.
Users can easily switch to the “Archive” channel via the channel switcher in the app header and look up the individual issues of the current year in their own mix as native articles via the mix structure.
All issues older than one year are offered for reading in one mix per year as a PDF version. This gives FLYING fans quick and easy access to the exciting stories of the past. Of course, any article, no matter how old the issue, can also be found in no time via the in-app search in the app’s header.
As we all know, apps are a “living entity” that is constantly evolving and changing to meet the ever-growing demands of the readership as well as the needs of the editorial team.
The FLYING app is no different, and shortly after its launch we are already working on the first further developments.
In essence, the aim is to offer the user experience of an ePaper, which charmingly regulates the reading of PDF magazines on a smartphone or tablet, to the users of the FLYING app as well.
Specifically, an additional navigation element is to be integrated into the app so that readers of the FLYING magazine can also enjoy the full convenience here.
In conclusion, all we can say is: if you are interested in flying or if you are in the aviation industry yourself, take a look at FLYING Magazine!