#WattsWhat: Are Digital Editions of Fashion Magazines missing the point?

As a self professed glossy magazine addict, it appears that the time I give over to reading fashion magazines is on the wane, or my attention span is no longer what it once was. This is rather apparent from the piles of unread magazine titles on my kitchen table slash home-office.

I guess many of us consider ourselves time-poor but yet within the world of fashion we crave the new or more accurately we crave knowing about it first. I never believed the day would come when sitting down to read an actual magazine would be a burden, but alas it has!

As digital consumers, we now want to edit, cherry-pick and discard anything we want, and most importantly when we want to. This brings to mind a question I have been pondering about the digital editions of fashion magazines: "Why do digital editions of consumer facing titles only post articles from Monday to Friday, 9.30- 6.00pm?".  One might even begin to suggest that digital fashion editors would appear to keep Bankers' hours. In spite of promising myself not to be parked in front of the computer or iTablet on the weekends, I still find myself searching out news and updates in the heady world that is fashion.

I have long since been a reader of Vogue magazine and Vogue.com, its digital sibling, does give regular soundbites of fashion industry news throughout the day. But as many can attest to, by 6pm on a Friday one is usually faced with a world devoid of fashion news until typically around 10.00am on the following Monday morning. I suggest the term ‘missing the point’ springs to mind.

Vogue.com is not the only digital platform guilty of this.  The world of cyberspace knows no constraints, so we are led to believe, therefore shouldn’t digital editions be chomping at the proverbial bit to get and rather keep our attention 24/7? There are so many opportunities that digital editions are missing out on, such as competitions, social media interaction - and just having a share to Facebook and Twitter button doesn’t cut it anymore in my view.

Customer engagement is key and the future is ‘digital’ but the future is also 'now'!  I also believe in true fashion tradition that somewhere in the world it’s cocktail hour, ergo somewhere in cyberspace it’s time to discard the redundant rationale that people only log-on from 9- 6pm!