Beer West's Strange New Adventure

For Christmas Eve, I offer you two posts--the old and the new. The new involves a technology the magazine Beer Northwest plans to deploy when it restyles itself Beer West. Developed by the Beaverton-based tech company Digimarc, it allows you to scan print matter with your smart phone and trigger web-based content.

With Digimarc, you can bring the interactivity and enhanced content from either images or text and use what readers are familiar with in the digital world on the printed page. By inserting a digital watermark behind text, publishers can create a hyperlink from articles to related content online. Readers simply hold their smart phone over the link and are instantly connected.

I think it would work like this. You're reading an article about Russian River, say (now that the mag covers the West Coast), and you scan the article with your phone. On your phone, up pops a video interview with brewer Vinnie Cilurzo. Or--and this is where I think the tech could really be handy--up pops a list of bottle shops selling Consecration, the beer they're discussing.

Now, technology of itself is no virtue. This is a tool of communication, and it will be up to Beer West to harness it. And, despite the fact that publisher/editor Megan Flynn is about 19 years old (I kid), Beer Northwest has had a decidedly traditional approach to publishing, with little to no web presence or social networking component. So Megan and Co. will have to step up their game and make sure the back end is loaded with cool features and info.

In any case, it will be an interesting experiment.

New Mag: Beer Northwest

When I stuck my head into the Green Dragon last week, I copped a free copy of the new high-end magazine Beer Northwest. (How's that for cheap--I don't stay for a pint, but I make off with print matter. I'll make it up to the Green Dragon, though--promise.) I finally had a chance to read it and was both surprised and intrigued.

Print publications are, as you probably know, dying off. People read less hard-copy content as we move online, and magazines are expensive to produce and deliver. The recent postal increase on small mags will only worsen the problem. So into this environment comes Beer Northwest, a magazine targeted at a fairly small niche audience (beer geeks) made smaller still by regional focus. When I met the two principles at this summer's OBF, I wasn't really sure what they'd come up with. Generally, to save money, beer publications have had to go for lots of ads and cheap newsprint or a black-and-white format (or both). In terms of content, they've had to go general, trying to reach a broader readership but inadvertently alienating their core, geeky base.

Beer Northwest has taken the opposite approach. From the design side, it's beautiful--full-color, clean, inviting. The content is even better. There is useful info on events and new openings (relevant, because the mag is local). But it's the features that are the big winner. Two in particular, on Higgins' beer steward Warren Steenson and native African beer, are wonderful for both newbies and serious geeks. It may not be possible for the mag to keep this level of content up, but they're clearly headed in the right direction.

(The website, alas, needs some attention. It has little info, even about the contents of the debut issue, and the "blogs" are actually posts by one of the contributors and a promise that Megan Flynn, the editor, will start one soon.)

Are there enough readers to keep the mag afloat? Time will tell. It's worth tracking down a copy of the first edition (it's free, but subsequent issues won't be). I'll be watching, and I wish them well. It's a fine debut.