IU grads launch online magazine hub

Music has iTunes. Video has Hulu. And now, thanks to two Kelley grads, magazines have Maggwire.

Maggwire.com is a Web site that catalogues hundreds of free magazine articles. The idea first started when Jian Chai, a University of Michigan graduate and Deutsche Bank employee, was working to create for magazines what the video and music industry already had – a  central online hub.

He asked his coworkers, 2007 IU graduates Steve DeWald and Ryan Klenovich, to be a part of his team.

The site, which launched in July, currently offers articles from 650 magazines, providing 10,000 articles weekly – and that number is climbing.

“It is a single place online to browse all the publicly available magazine content on the internet,” DeWald said. “Finding good content online can sometimes be challenging.”

“Sites like Digg and Google News implement popularity ranking systems, but what is popular isn’t necessarily what you or I are interested in. Maggwire addresses this problem differently. We organize content by publication, and order them in a way that makes sense for the user.”

Through syndication and Web crawling technologies, Maggwire is able to follow what topic readers use and personalize their online experience by featuring articles on those topics first.

“Our belief for Maggwire and the future of the industry is content will be delivered HTML style as opposed to PDF style, because that way you can reformat for a three-and-a-half-inch screen on an iPhone, a 10-inch Apple tablet, or a 20-inch monitor,” Klenovich said.

Even though the Web site is just a few months old, Klenovich, DeWald and Chai are already looking a long way down the wire. They are working with top people in the industry to help create “channels,” or specific topics like college football or teen health, that people will be able to subscribe to.

“Let’s say your mother is diagnosed with arthritis and she’s going to want to know everything about arthritis that she can,” Klenovich said about the channels they hope to add in 2010. “She can come to Maggwire, subscribe to the arthritis channel and now she has the best of the best.”

David Haeberle, Kelley School of Business investment banking and entrepreneurial finance professor, has talked several times with DeWald and Klenovich about their innovative Web site. Haeberle said the Kelley grads are showing other alumni and current students that Maggwire is a good idea, and his previous students are proving that there is a need for the site.

“They’re showing that they are champions,” Haeberle said. “They did something in a year that it takes most students four or five years to do.”

Although Maggwire’s color scheme has a Hoosier pride feel of red and white, Klenovich said he had never thought about the connection.

“The lead graphic designer from mint.com actually came up with ours,” Klenovich said. “But, I’m the one who looked at it and thought ‘These are good colors.’”

The two Hoosiers and the Wolverine have pulled in top names to help them work on the site.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, a law firm based out of Palo Alto, California, who did Google’s IPO (initial public offering), Netflix’s and a bulk of Apple’s legal work, is backing Maggwire. The team also has meetings scheduled with key players in the magazine industry.

With major publishers like Conde Nast laying off workers and shutting down magazines, the industry is facing tough times. Much like newspapers, publishers have yet to find a way to make money from online content.

For now, Professor Haeberle offered the Maggwire team some advice on how to be successful entrepreneurs.  

“Be focused, be passionate and be relentless,” Haeberle said.

From here, none of the Maggwire junkies know exactly where the site will go, but DeWald hopes non-public content will be available as well. DeWald said he hopes that the ease of one credit card transaction at a single location will allure readers who would normally have to give out their information at every magazine site.

As a former Kelley student, DeWald understands the Sunday tests and I-Core semester it takes to make it into the business world. But DeWald offered advice to students both in Kelley and around campus that he said will help them once they leave the Bloomington campus.

“The connections you make with people at college will last forever,” he said. “Get in the habit of keeping in touch with your friends as you go your separate ways. There’s no place quite like college, where you have an opportunity to meet so many diverse people with different interests and passions.”