When the economy croaked last year, our company decided to take a tough stance by continuing to publish every month and even took a leap of faith by running an e-magazine that shadows the printed edition. While everyone understands the printed edition, the biggest question we got about the e-magazine was: why spend more money when the economy doesn’t justify more expense?

 Based on surveys and website activity, we estimate 71 percent of our readers prefer paper over digital, 22 percent prefer digital, and 8 percent have signed up to receive both. I expect these numbers to change as people become familiar with the digital, older paper people retire, and the new digital people continue to enter the market.  There are a few reasons we do the e-magazine.

 The 22 percent who prefer digital often only use the computer for their news rather than reading a paper magazine.  The e-magazine has greatly increased our readership with the addition of these digital readers. 

  The e-magazines are held on our home page for one year.  Have you ever needed to do research on an article but you can’t find an older magazine, or it has coffee stains on it, or its worn from being very well read? Go to our webpage. Even after a year, they look as fresh as the day they first came out.

 Another important advantage is the ability to reforward an e-magazine by placing the link in your email and sending to whoever you want–wherever you want–whenever you want. Oh, I didn’t even mention that all ads in the e-magazine link directly to an advertiser’s website increasing the traffic to their sites–a really nice feature.

 We are now working on our Year-End Review/Holiday Issue.  We will see you then.