Huffington Post to Release Weekly iPad Magazine

The Huffington Post will soon be available in a weekly magazine version for the iPad, president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington confirmed at a media summit in Toronto.

It "will be a weekly magazine version with the best of the original reporting and the best of blogs and the best of video that we produce," Huffington said Thursday, adding the magazine would launch next month.

Huffington was speaking at the Digital Media Summit, a two-day social media and marketing conference where the rise of the tablet was a theme that popped up again and again.

The Huffington Post iPad weekly will feature everything from original reporting to satirical blogs.

"It's just going to be in terms of what is considered the best quality stuff we had that week, not necessarily the most popular stuff we had that week," Huffington said.

The Huffington Post announcement capped off two days of panels and speeches about digital and social media trends in which the tablet device emerged as a winner, trailed closely by social and interactive television.

"The tablet is more about consumption. I keep saying it's getting rid of the computer more than it's encroaching on the smart phone," Daniel Odio, the chief executive of Socialize, Inc. said during a panel.

"The tablet is the new hub, the new computer."

Mobile Roadie CEO Michael Schneider, whose company will release a music iPad app on Monday, said he hoped to bank on the trend of tablet users buying more products than their desktop counterparts.

"Having that immersive experience really makes a difference in terms of what people are willing to spend on their tablets," he said.

The larger screen size of a tablet was touted as the biggest reason for the device's win over smartphones.

"The iPad and tablets in general are a really great medium for creation," explained Thom Cummings of Soundcloud, a web program that allows users to create and upload sound files for other users to stream, download and share.

"The tablet allows you to create something in a minute and make it valuable and make it something you can share with the rest of the world," he said.

Tablets are also more closely associated with leisure, further boosting their popularity.

"One of the most interesting insights about tablet use is that people use their tablets while they're watching television. So now we're looking across multiple screens," said Neil Shankman, of Google Canada.

Marketers at the summit were eager to hear about new ways to engage television viewers by having them use devices to interact with their television, the other hot topic at the summit.

"This is blurring the lines between traditional lean-back experience TV and lean-forward kind of things, being able to interact with a show," Justin Baird, of Aegis Media Pacific, told Agence France Presse.

Baird described a poll he ran on a breakfast show in Australia using a media platform called iPowow that allowed viewers to vote for which political leader they thought should head the country.

"Lots of times you might see some Twitter feed at the bottom of the show, the host doesn't even look at it. Why even put it there?" he said.

"That's not interactive TV. That's just giving people the ability to put their opinion on the TV show."