Weekly current affairs magazine NewsNow /NuusNou might only have launched late last year, but it’s hardly let the ink dry before forging ahead with a free digital download of the magazine for subscribers to the print edition.
The thinking, says editor Waldimar Pelser, is that many readers are travelling and this way, they’ll receive the digital edition on Thursday mornings, a full day before the print edition is distributed to subscribers.
Pelser says the magazine has been “well received” by advertisers, with big names – Vodacom, BMW, British Airways and TOYOTA – coming on board. At the same time, Pelser and his team have developed an interesting multimedia add-on to the magazine: the NewsNow weekly briefing.
“The weekly news briefing is an informal video chat about some of the week’s biggest stories. We took some inspiration from The Daily Beast in New York and other inline news sites and aim to keep it light but informative, while tying in with the week’s print offering,” Pelser says.
The magazine’s website is also kept fresh with daily news. “We try to differentiate the weekly and daily content to a large extent. The website is used more for marketing than for hard news but does post fantastic content very often which touches on the print edition and ties into it but is not limited to what we do in print. For exampIe, great viral videos, Twitter roundups and more feature online,” he says.
NewsNow hasn’t yet released its first ABCs, but Pelser says these will be declared “soon”.
“We have waited for our footprint to stabilise, which is a mammoth task so early in a product’s lifetime. Watch this space for some very exciting marketing initiatives during March.”
Pelser says readers have given them positive feedback. “Readers love NewsNow and NuusNou. Teachers have told us they find it very useful in class; execs who don’t have time to read the papers lap it up; many readers tell us it takes the edge off staying up to date,” he says. “They like the brevity, the fact that we don’t take ourselves too seriously while sticking to high-quality content, and the South African flavour of our content.”
The digital edition of NewsNow is for sale on Media24’s digital portal MySubs, as it has been since the magazine launched September 2011. Readers are able to subscribe at www.mysubs.co.za.
It can be read on a computer, laptop, tablets like the iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab and smartphones.
