Medio Multimedia Inc., the CD-ROM company that brought the Zapruder film and grassy knoll to disc - JFK Assassination: A Visual Investigation (see Wired 1.6, page 27) - are here with Medio Magazine, a magazine in the same medium. The question is, What can a CD-ROM magazine give you that a printed one or one delivered online can't?
Online's advantages are in publishing costs and schedules. Print's are in graphics and resolution. What CD-ROM can do is indexing, and Medio has done this well enough that you can get caught up in searching the disc. But Medio seems absolutely packed and bulging with words and images, many of dubious value when presented on a video screen, such as the entire text of the Wizard of Oz, along with the art from the first edition of the book. The image quality and text resolution are not as good, of course, as that of a printed magazine, and the news stories - most of them off The Associated Press wire - are months old.
What Medio presents most intriguingly is a set of video clips - movie trailers. There's something intriguing, if only for its novelty (which wears off quickly), about seeing the trailer you saw at the local bijou in a box on your screen.
Medio does not answer the question of whether a "discazine" or "magadisc" makes sense. Yes, the editors have steam shoveled vast quantities of news wire material onto their disc, but so in effect do the rewrite desks of print magazines.
Newsweek offers a CD-ROM version of its issues, and more discazines/ magadiscs are cropping up. And while Medio's effort seems aimed largely at promoting its CD-ROM products, it's not a bad start for a medium that will surely evolve.
Medio for Windows: 12-issue subscription: US$59.95. Medio Multimedia, Inc.: (800) 788 3866, +1 (206) 867 5500.
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