US publishers sign up to social magazine app Flipboard

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ABC News and the Washington Post Magazine are two of eight news outlets now testing the new personalised social magazine Flipboard as a distribution platform. Flipboard is an iPad app that creates a magazine-style package of news, features, videos and images circulating within a user's social networks. According to a press release , when selected stories from the publishers involved in the trial are shared on Twitter or Facebook, a Flipboard user will be able to double-tap the excerpt to get a magazine-style reading experience.

The eight publishers testing Flipboard, which was launched on the iPad in July, are: ABC News, the Wall Street Journal-owned All Things Digital, Conde Nast's Bon Appetit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle website, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

The app was masterminded by Mike McCue, former CEO of mobile service Tellme Networks, and Evan Doll, a former senior iPhone engineer at Apple.

"We believe that the timeless principles of print can enhance the social media experience, not only to make content more discoverable but also to make it easier to read," McCue says in the release.

"Now, working with publishers, we can re-imagine webpages as magazine articles, connecting readers more deeply with the publisher's brand, while opening up entirely new advertising possibilities."

Flipboard says it has worked with individual publishers to design layouts that "make reading their existing online stories more visually attractive and immersive".

"To expand this capability to the broader community of publishers, the company has developed Flipboard Pages, an HTML5-based framework that automatically converts web content into full-page, paginated reading experiences when browsing content with Flipboard," it says.

"In the future, Flipboard intends to make Flipboard Pages available to other publishers and content creators so any socially shared web story can be optionally read in a magazine format."