Texas Monthly turns 40

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Texas Monthly magazine is celebrating their 40th anniversary and re-launching their website, TexasMonthly.com, which will be more dynamic in terms of daily content.

KXAN's Sally Hernandez sat down with the editor of Texas Monthly, Jake Silverstein.

Sally:
We know that KXAN.com is important for you as you get out the door, maybe so you can take your news with you.  And it's also important for publications out there like Texas Monthly.com.  Jake Silverstein is here to talk about how you are really trying to get a new push out there when it comes to your website, right?

• Texas Monthly covers from the past 40 years

Jake Silverstein/Texas Monthly Editor:
We're actually re-launching our website - TexasMonthly.com - February 1st, this Friday.

The occasion is our 40th anniversary.  The magazine that's on the newsstand right now is the 40th anniversary issue.

Sally:
We've talked about how things have really changed in the last 40 years and how we get our information. What can we expect with this new website?

Jake:
The site is going to be a lot more dynamic in terms of daily content.

Stories from the legislature, things like football and travel and food - things our readers really care about.   There will be a lot more of that stuff for people to read.

About a year ago, we launched the TM Daily Post, which was our foray into daily news aggregation.  It built a lot of audience over the last year and one of the things that we're going to do is fold that into our main site. Really provide this full spectrum of types of stories.

So you might be able to read a long form magazine story that we've published in the current issue or in the past - our archives will be on major display in this new site - or a lot of news from the day, coverage from the legislature, etc.

Sally:
Have you seen throughout the years that there's a big push for people wanting to have that source of information on their phone or their PDA, something, as opposed to just the hard copy?

Jake:
Absolutely. Everybody watching understands that the way we get information, the way we consume information has just been transformed in the last 10-15 years. And those transformations aren't even complete - who knows what kind of devices we'll be getting our news on in 5 more years.

For a publication like Texas Monthly - we're in a different boat than newspapers - we don't publish news, we publish stories. And the appetite for those stories in print is pretty sturdy - but we see an opportunity to blend the enthusiasm that our readers have for long form non-fiction, storytelling, political and cultural reporting that we do in the monthly magazine with a daily presence in folks lives - an ability to interact with people, an ability to start conversations and to take those conversations all over the place.

We're very committed to social media - we've been building an audience on Twitter and Facebook that is very, very large right now. We're on there every day chatting with people, tweeting at people being a little provocative when we need to be - and not just our own stories. We're often pointing people to the other great media institutions in Texas.

So what all of the various platforms that we now have access to have allowed us to do - and every other media organization - is just reach people in so many new ways. That's exciting. What we're trying to do is add all those new ways to reach people to our existing, more traditional form of storytelling, which we also think is really vital and important in this sort of media ecosystem that's evolving.