In yesterday's  Mobile Insider column, Steve Smith addressed in an interesting question:

PUTTING A MAGAZINE BRAND ON phones seems a bit redundant. Aren't magazines portable already?

He elaborates this point, stating that "it may not be clear to many magazine readers, however, why they would want or need their brands on a handset, since few magazine traffic in breaking news even on the Web. How pressing is my need for Vanity Fair "on the go?"

Nevertheless, some magazines have already built successful (and not coincidently, useful) mobile presences:

Consumer Reports managed a good translation of its brand, but that was a no-brainer. Bringing CR guides to the point of purchase on a phone just replicated the common practice of tearing relevant pages from the magazine to carry into the store.
...

Car and Driver got it right by recognizing how much its enthusiast audience loves car images. Yes, the reviews are all here -- but so are the huge and fairly high-res images on every page. And C&D limits its TOC to a few key elements and then lets the user drill into the archive with excellent search tools.

And last but not least, Maxim, the popular lad-mag, has an extremely popular WAP site:

...in this case it takes the mobile snack approach and gives users a new nibble of each every day. The lads who remain brand loyalists can cherry-pick the items they like most about Maxim and get satisfied daily. The Maxim WAP site has only been up since late last year and it already gets between 500,000 and 1 million monthly page views. The advertising is already there, and it can get pretty sophisticated. On my most recent visit, the site ran an ad for a mobile content firm that identified and mentioned my handset model in the text link itself.

Read the rest of the article, including an innovative fee-based application from InStyle @ Media Post's Mobile Insider.