Word reaches us that Virgin’s virgin iPad-only magazine is Christened “Project” and is due to hit the tablet’s iTunes Store at this link with a launch by Richard Branson in New York on Tuesday; price unknown.
A new unit dubbed Virgin Digital Publishing has tapped Anthony Noguera, the former FHM UK editor-in-chief and editorial director of publisher Emap/Bauer’s mens division who left in 2009, to produce the mag.
Note the “magazine”‘s “cover” – the publisher tells us:: “We can’t think of any other mags whose front cover is a video.” In fact, there was at least one such mag in our rundown of nu-wave tablet magazines earlier this year, in which we said that introducing such non-standard features is likely to increase magazine production costs considerably. But then, Project is a totally new launch and will seemingly work this way from the get-go.
News of the mag emerged this summer. Though some onlookers have written about Project in the same breath as News Corp.’s upcoming The Daily tablet-only mag, the differences are clear – the latter’s a newsy, daily edition; the other’s a mostly-monthly, feature-led title focusing on “design, entertainment, technology, entrepreneurs”. In fact, Project seems to have more in common with GQ or Wired, the tech mag whose own iPad edition turned out less whizz-bang than Adobe’s initial demos, than with a News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). newspaper.
Says Virgin Digital Publishing: “Project is what we like to think of as a ‘living magazine’ – evolving and updating throughout the month and taking advantage of the iPad’s capabilities to deliver a really innovative reader experience. Unlike a regular magazine you won’t just read Project once and then forget about it. The idea is that Project will be something that readers treat as a daily destination, offering breaking news, reader polls and blogs. That, and it has all the interactivity, responsiveness and immersion you would expect from the iPad experience.” An accompanying blog is live at projectmag.com, prepopulated with several posts about fashion, internet, movies, games etc.