Sited

Over the years, we’ve noticed that there’s another demographic with its own reading habits: the online reader. Mishpacha has hosted a website for many years, but now we’ve upgraded the site with a strategic revamp that aims to meet a different reading style.

One of our considerations when building the print magazine is the fact that it’s viewed by many readers as Shabbos fare. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re reading it on Shabbos, but it’s bought with Shabbos in mind. Sometimes, when weighing a cover story, we’ll ask ourselves: Would this cover belong on the coffee table on Shabbos? Is this something our readers would want to discuss during the seudah? Yes, people may follow a certain trend or story on their screens during the week — but is it what they’re looking for in their Shabbos reading?

On the website, the considerations are different. While the material is drawn from the print magazine and bears that classic Mishpacha imprint, the target demographic is not the Shabbos reader. Even a dedicated fan of frum publications reads differently, and seeks different things, when reading on a screen during the week. So the assumption is that they’re not looking for the physical magazine experience of a three-part package that you finger your way through, with a strong internal structure of op-eds at the beginning, features in the middle, and lighter material at the end.

Bearing that in mind, the site is organized differently. Instead of breaking down the material into “main magazine” versus “Family First” or “news” versus “community,” it allows readers to access the material by category, tapping the rich reservoirs of so many years of features, interviews, and stories by their shared themes. When I spent some time on the site seeing where my clicks took me (I clicked on the “shidduchim” category at the bottom of the home page), the experience felt very different from paging through a weekly magazine. It was fascinating to access a decade and a half of archives, and see the overlapping and intersecting layers of so many different styles of content complementing one another to round out a single topic.