By Emerson Schwartzkopf

If there’s anything I loathe in an editor’s column, it’s the concept of telling you all about what’s new in the magazine, and how it’s all here to serve you, the reader.

So, let’s get the out of the way right now. Stone Update Magazine is completely new. And, yes, it’s all here to serve you, the reader.

And, those are more than words.

SU Magazine is an original and exclusively online publication. It’s not a replica of a print magazine. In fact, we don’t offer an option to print out any or all of the pages. We’re fully digital.

It’s there, in the cloud, for you to access 24/7, wherever you are, with a ‘Net-connected computer, tablet or smartphone. I’ve had a few people say, when they’ve seen a preview, that it looks like a magazine of the future.

Nope. It’s the magazine of right now.

All of our businesses become more online-oriented by the day. It’s not just having a website or doing an email blast; consider your billing, your payments, your payroll, your job measurements, your shop workflow.

You’re moving more electrons than pieces of paper every day. Shouldn’t your business publication do the same?

Like it or not, the world of business – and just about everything else – is flowing through ever-more-sophisticated mobile phones. I’ve seen it here with the Stone Update websites, where more than a third of the visits come from Apple and Android phones.

For more than a decade – even when I edited Stone Business, a magazine that fell victim to the Great Recession – I wanted to do something online with a magazine concept. I’ve looked through dozens of technological packages.

The obstacle came with smartphones; most platforms offered a flip-the-pages facsimile of a standard print magazine, and trying to read these with an iPhone (or even an iPad) proved to be frustrating, if not impossible. Reducing an 8 ½” X 11” format to show up legibly on a 2” X 3 ¾” screen kills the effectiveness of a full-page layout (or a full-page ad), and trying to enlarge bits-and-pieces of pages to read the content is anything but reader-friendly.

SU Magazine uses a cloud-based platform that reconfigures the magazine for different-sized displays. It goes beyond the simple responsive resizing – something we started doing on our websites nearly five years ago – to make reading on a smartphone just as easy as using a large desktop-computer display.

You also get that magazine feeling online, with the organized flow of features, departments and everything else that print publications offer (except for paper cuts). And pictures … more than print magazines can deliver, filling the display of your device with colorful, intricate detail.

There’s plenty more gee-whiz technology, but there’s one other thing that’s important: Our focus. While you’ll see lineups of industry awards (two this issue, in fact) and plenty of other stunning images, not everything you’ll see comes from top-tier projects. (Or, as some readers wryly put it, “the museum pieces.”)

You’ll also see the nitty-gritty of fabrication, maintenance, renewal, repair … what I call, very respectfully, the dirty-fingernail stuff.

We’re doing this magazine for the fabrication crowd in the shop and on the jobsite. Designers, architects, specifiers and others can come along for the ride – they’ll enjoy it – but we make no bones about our bread-and-butter audience.

Enough talking about us. Turn the page – without that annoying fake paper-curling sound that invaded too many digital publications – and take it all in. It’s yours.■