A Wow Factor Moment for Special Interest Print

For many magazine media brands, digital is great for engaging an audience looking for that “wow” moment. And Kalmbach Media has been doing just that with their Discover magazine content.

The problem, of course, is that digital media has a curation problem, and those short bursts of attention don’t often attract the long-term reader. Kalmbach has found a way to fix that, according to Kayleigh Barber writing in Folio:.

“Kalmbach Media’s Discover, a consumer-facing science magazine, is producing its first digital-to-print special interest publication (SIP), called Strange Science, which will feature 52 unusual, yet true, science stories, curated from some of Discover’s more popular digital articles,” Barber writes.

“Wanting to reach an audience beyond its typical subscriber, the SIP is attempting to lean into the ‘wow factor’ by highlighting fact-backed topics such as which reptiles’ bones glow in the dark and hunting for gold in the galaxy,” Barber continues.

According to Kalmbach’s Stephen George, it’s all about reaching a new audience.

“We saw an opportunity to broaden our audience beyond those who may have simply seen a quick tweet about any one of these stories or who may not ordinarily engage with much science content at all,” said George, Kalmbach’s VP of content and the Science Group editorial director.

I love this. And I really love their approach to editorial integrity. For many brands, it’s too tempting to get that wow factor through some shady headlines and sensationalized news bits. Not at Kalmbach, as George explains.

“We’re one of the few brands that still has a robust fact-checking process and in the case of content like this,” he says. “We took care to ensure that the stories are all based on valid scientific research, something you just can’t take for granted today.”

This kind of attention to quality is neither cheap nor easy, but it will pay off in terms of reader trust – perhaps the most important quality for any media publisher in this day and age. And putting it all into print – the most trusted source for news – is an excellent way to grow a loyal, trusting reader base.

It’s a fantastic example of a brand that has called a truce between print and digital, and is instead focusing on their readers – both current and future – to deliver results.

That’s the kind of wow factor we love to talk about.