Foot Notes | Star voyagers

Foot Notes | Shamanth Rao

Today we review three travel publications on digital platforms that feature stories not only about places worth travelling to, but also about history, politics and culture. These feature long-form pieces, great design and stunning layouts.

Roads & Kingdoms

The Roads & Kingdoms (R&K) magazine is a free Web publication which originated because its founders, Nathan Thornburgh and Matt Goulding, realized that “travel writing around history, politics and awareness can be powerful”.

R&K has shied away from glossy lifestyle destinations—and has run stories from places like Pakistan, Georgia, Myanmar and Mongolia. “We feature writing that celebrates food, travel, music and culture,” says Thornburgh.

R&K started as a Tumblr, which encouraged easy sharing of articles. Word spread—with the result that it soon built a sizeable following.

Thornburgh acknowledges that having non-service-oriented content isn’t easy to sell to advertisers. They’re still figuring out their eventual revenue model, but they think it’s unlikely that banner advertising will figure in their monetization plans—and they are looking at alternatives like native advertising. They have a partnership with Time magazine, which features R&K’s pieces on its own site, giving R&K additional traffic and exposure.

http://roadsandkingdoms.com

With its big, clean user interface filled with large images and clear text, the Overnight Buses Travel Magazine (ONB) is a pleasure to read. ONB is a free tablet-only, quarterly magazine. With its image-heavy look and smooth flow between screens, it makes great use of the tablet as a medium.

Run by friends Jen Kuhn and Thomas Tegart, ONB features long-form pieces on travel. At this point, Kuhn and Tegart pay for its operations out of their savings. They have 3,000 downloads of their app, but see their download count growing over time.

Tegart says they have had no shortage of writers pitching to them—and they have received good feedback on their stories from readers. But as a two-member team with a limited budget, they face challenges in putting in complex functionalities in iPad app development.

But Tegart says they are prepared to wait it out. With the number of tablets in double-digit millions and growing, he believes it’s a matter of time before ONB sees wider adoption. Because the costs of producing an iPad magazine aren’t huge, Tegart says he shouldn’t have problems sticking it out.

www.overnightbuses.com

Nowhere Mag

Nowhere Mag is a quarterly magazine that contains travel stories and features. It was started by travel journalist Porter Fox in 2009 as a Webzine. It used to raise funds for its operations by throwing parties in Brooklyn, New York, US.

Last year though, Nowhere Mag launched a Kickstarter project to raise funds, raising more than $15,000 (around ₹ 8 lakh), twice their target of $7,500. Nowhere Mag donated the surplus money for relief after Hurricane Sandy hit the US east coast last year. More recently, Nowhere Mag entered into a partnership with the magazine-format aggregation platform Flipboard, where its stories get featured. It costs $4.99 per issue, or $17.99 for an annual subscription.

http://nowheremag.com