iMaverick, Africa’s first tablet-only daily news publication, is going weekly as of 1 July. The move is in response to reader requirements with the first weekly edition of the tablet newspaper being published on Wednesday.
“The weekly will be approximately the same but most likely a little meatier to accommodate the weekly format and roundup. It will depend on how newsy the week is too,” says CEO Styli Charalambous. “We chose Wednesday as publication day it is an ideal day to be able to reflect on the past week and be able to look forward as well. And also allow our readers to take a breather from the start of a new workweek. We will be including more photo diaries, like the week in pictures and looking to add more multi media content.”
At the time of launch, iMaverick was the third tablet-only daily ‘newspaper’ in the world that wasn’t underpinned by a physical paper edition.
“iMaverick is characterised by high quality feature pieces and a magazine-style layout that complimented the visual and multi-media features that tablets and smartphones have to offer. But in a world where thinking people are inundated with information and there is massive demands on our audience’s time, we’ve decided to make iMaverick a weekly” says iMaverick and Daily Maverick editor, Branko Brkic.
Of course, the migration to a weekly format will impact on current subscribers and advertisers. “Existing subscribers will have their subscriptions amended to so that still receive the same number of editions, just over an extended period. Current subscribers will also have purchased at rates up to 50% less than the new weekly subscription rates,” says Charalambous.
“Advertising rates will be increased too reflect the reduced amount of inventory, but already booked clients will have benefit of launch rates and daily rates which are also significantly lower,” he says. Rates will change, too. “We need to accommodate redact we now have one fifth of the inventory we had before.”
Charalambous says advertising is looking good. “We have had some big name brands come on board, and expect the new format to appeal to more advertisers as they become accustomed to the medium as an alternative to print,” he says.
iMaverick is characterised by a strong team who create content for Daily Maverick, a game-changing news and analysis site that has achieved phenomenal growth since its launch some two years ago.
The stable of journalists, authors and photographers include Kevin Bloom whose first book, Ways of Staying, won the 2010 South African Literary Award for literary journalism, and was shortlisted for the Alan Paton Award; Greg Marinovich a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and co-author of The Bang Bang Club; and Richard Poplak author of Ja, No, Man which was long listed for the Alan Paton Non-Fiction prize, shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Literary Award and voted one of the Top-10 books of 2007 by Now Magazine.
“We will continue to provide the analysis and opinion iMaverick has become known for amongst influential people and we’re working hard on the existing format to accommodate the weekly frequency,” says Brkic.
“We’ve listened to our audience, who are mainly decision-makers in business, government and hard core entrepreneurs and realised that amongst all the daily deluge of RSS feeds, Twitter, websites and news apps, a weekly publication for download would help them filter out the all the noise and present the hard-hitting issues in a magazine format that is an unparalleled experience to devour.”
Charalambous says the change will bring a different dimension to the Daily Maverick – iMaverick offering. “We always intended for iMaverick to be a lean-back reading experience in a world of 24-7 news coverage, and we realised that the daily volume of iMaverick was just too much for our time-constrained audience.”
Charalambous says iMaverick will be launching individual issue sales at $1.99 and three, six and twelve month subs both in-app and out of app.
3 months – R159.99 (12 editions)
6 months – R289.99 (25 editions)
12 months – R489.99 (50 editions)
