Rogers Publishing releases a promising, but sloppy new tablet edition for its B2B magazine title 'Marketing'

The Canadian publishing firm Rogers Publishing Limited has launched its ninth magazine title into Apple's Newsstand this morning. Marketing, the ABC-audited B2B trade magazine for Canada's marketing industry, has a circulation of around 9K, but can has access to the growing audience for tablet editions.

Marketing Magazine is offering readers single issue downloads at $4.99 CAD, and the ability to sign up for an annual subscription at $64.99 CAD. Since magazine is published 18 times a year, this is a slight discount off the cover price, but not much of one.

The app is intriguing. In many ways it is a replica edition with enhancements. But at the same time it is clearly using a native design solution. The pages are laid out in a print format, complete with pictures that are cut off by the iPad's display – caused by the choice to offer portrait only reading.

Yet it is clear that there was plenty of production work done on the first issue available in the app. I suppose the cut off text (see below) and truncated two-page spreads can be chalked up to poor editing and design.

The app itself has promise, but the work here is less than first rate. If I were the publisher of Marketing I would be irate. But then again I always was a stickler for proper editing and design work.

Left: The single-sponsor ad from Metro pops up as the first page of the latest edition; Middle: the editor's column was, it seems, poorly edited – the text abruptly ends mid-sentence, something I have seen in other tablet editions lately; Right: the page looks like a replica edition with its first word hyphenated (1) until one seems the swiping navigation at the top (2). But the page layout philosophy is definitely replica as the picture is sliced in half (3) and the reader needs to move to the next page to see the rest of the layout.