Next Issue relaunches as Texture
A joint venture from publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc., Next Issue launched more than three years ago. It raised US$50m from KKR at the end of 2014, and CEO John Loughlin said “a big chunk” of that money has gone toward a new product and a new brand.
The initial version of Next Issue was basically “an electronic newsstand,” he said. With Texture, the company is trying to present a more “multi-layered, multi-dimensional experience,” with a new name to match those goals.
Put another way, Next Issue allowed users to read their favorite magazines, like Bloomberg Businessweek, Rolling Stone and Wired. You didn’t have to carry around physical copies, but in many other ways, it was still a pretty traditional experience. With Texture, you can still do that, but it offers other ways to explore the content on an article level, incorporating more digital-only features.
For example, there’s now a New & Noteworthy section highlighting the latest and hottest articles. The Texture editorial team, led by Maggie Murphy (formerly Executive Editor at People Magazine and Editorial Director at Parade Magazine), is creating Collections of articles where readers can explore a particular topic or theme in more depth. Readers can also search the articles in the Texture library on their own and save them to create their own Collections. And they can share individual articles via email (moving those articles out from behind the paywall), with plans for social media sharing to come.
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