Reuters magazine part of broad consumer push

Joe Pompeo and Tom McGevern of Capital New York write Thursday about how the prototype Reuters magazine is part of a broader push by the news organization to reach consumers.

Pompeo and McGevern write, “At 64 pages, Reuters has all the meat of a mainstream news magazine and none of the filler. (There are no ads, unless you count a few stray promotional placements for the company itself, which merged with Canadian information-services giant The Thomson Corporation in 2008.) The artistic side was helmed by veteran design duo Robert Priest and Grace Lee, both of whom had a hand in Condé Nast’s ill-fated business title, Portfolio — once employer to at least four Reuters contributors (including Impoco himself), by our count.

“The thick, heavily varnished stock is luxurious enough for Davos, but gives the thing a bit of the feel of an alumni magazine; the pages are too heavy a lift to encourage browsing, an essential element in any real commercial magazine. And the typefaces, while correct, are somewhat par for the course: More evidence of the worldwide supremacy of the typeface called Mercury (brought to you by the New York foundry Hoefler+Frere-Jones, which has become exceedingly dominant in setting type for magazines and newspapers as well as movie ads and the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama).

“Recognizable too are Andy Friedman’s author-profile illustrations; you’ve seen similar art in every new magazine project of the last two years (Newsweek, for instance).

“But to a nonspecialist the design is likely to make Reuters stand out in its competitive set. Most magazines these days can be defined by where they strike the balance between readability and zazz. Businessweek is beautiful, but quite sober in its decisions, really; Reuters seems to be putting itself in many of its pages more in the territory of Wired, with extravagant use of silver metallic ink and spot-varnish, ambitious infographics, crazily cropped and placed photography and lots of new ideas about leading and kerning.”

Read more here.