Popular kids' magazine Highlights makes big push to mobile

Trisha Thadani | USA TODAY

Highlights, the quintessential children's magazine, is finally making a major push toward digital.

Highlights has served as a popular children's magazine for nearly 7 decades, offering interactive puzzles, poetry, and pictures. Highlights announced today that it is taking its interactive games past the crayons and colored pencils, and onto tablets and mobile devices with the help of San Francisco startup, Fingerprint.

Highlights Editor-in-Chief Christine French Cully said the magazine is "almost an American icon," given the amount of generations it has transcended. Moving to mobile, she said, is a necessary move and one that the magazine has eagerly embraced.

"As kids spend more and more time on their devices, it becomes increasingly important to parents that their kids are doing something useful with that time," Cully said. "Parents trust us ... Many of them read Highlights when they were younger, and want to pass it on their kids."

Fingerprint is a mobile education and entertainment platform for kids that is led by former LeapFrog executive, Nancy MacIntyre. This startup is backed by $20 million in funding from investors such as, DreamWorks, Corus Entertainment, and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

The fleet of free, paid, and subscription-based apps and games will be available around the holiday time in quarter four.

For the past 69 years, Highlights' magazines have often been associated with the waiting rooms of dentists and doctors. As kids today are offered a swath of distractions — ranging from iPhones to YouTube and Netflix — it seems the younger generations would regard magazines as an archaic past time.

Although the company has seen a steady decline in its circulation numbers over the past few years, Cully said Highlights still boasts a circulation of 2 million copies a month. That number makes its footprint nearly double than that of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.

Highlights will not discontinue its magazine subscriptions, but rather re-imagine and supplement its popular features on the digital platforms, Cully said.

"We would not want to disappoint all the kids who look forward to getting the magazine every week," she said. "There is something still very tactile and novel about getting a magazine.

This is not the first time Highlights has attempted to go digital. The company launched a series of apps in 2010, however they failed to gain significant traction against the competition. Cully said pairing with Fingerprints' expertise will help transition the brand and elevate their content.

MacIntyre, CEO of Fingerprint, said among the millions of apps out there — thousands of which are dedicated to children's education — the quality and familiarity of Highlights' content will help it stand out among the competition, despite the fact that it is launching into the digital sphere later in the game.

"Like everybody else, many of us grew up with Highlights, so we love the content from a historical and family perspective," MacIntyre said. "When we really looked at the content, from the combination of games, puzzles, activities, and stories, we thought there was tremendous opportunity to bring them into the digital world."

Follow USA TODAY reporter Trisha Thadani on Twitter: @TrishaThadani