Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Navy News
Serving Her Majesty’s Fleet Worldwide
Navy News, a monthly magazine, has served members of the Royal
Navy and other service personnel all over the world since 1954 with
news, feature articles, and photos from Royal Navy fleets and bases.
Articles and features cover the exploits of Her Majesty’s ships and
senior Navy personnel, and the places they go.
Navy News is the official newspaper of the Royal Naval Association
and Sea Cadets and is governed by the Royal Navy. At the same
time, it is a commercial publication that accepts advertising and
generally must stand on its own two feet financially. Service
personnel enjoy free print subscriptions to Navy News; non-service personnel must pay
for their subscriptions, and service personnel who wish extra copies must pay for them,
as well. About 65 percent of printed copies are sold rather than given away.
YUDU Media (www.yudu.com) delivers state-of-the-art
interactive digital editions that enhance the reader's experience
with rich media, allowing clients to effortlessly create digital
magazines, digital brochures, digital newspapers, digital catalogs, digital directories, e-
books, and more.
The Challenge
Navy News wanted to be able to reach service personnel all over the world without
incurring postage costs and making subscribers wait for print editions to be shipped to
them. They also wanted to decrease their carbon footprint.
Navy News has a Web site (www.navynews.co.uk), but it does not have much magazine
content on it, just one main story per day — hard news that may not be appropriate for
a monthly magazine — along with some archive content and historical information
about the Royal Navy.
Meeting the Challenge
Navy News decided to launch a digital edition, which would enable them to offer the
existing publication with advertising with minimal incremental effort. The decision to
use YUDU Publishing as the platform was made by the Ministry of Defence, in
consultation with Navy News’s Marketing Manager, Liz Parker. They felt it was
attractive for its simple production process and the ease of integrating rich media
advertising. They launched the Navy News e-edition in April 2007. The initial idea was
to transition print subscribers to the digital edition rather than attract new subscribers.
The Navy News e-edition is offered for free to anyone and is a faithful replica of the
print publication. Navy News sends complete, print-ready PDF files to YUDU for
processing, along with any rich media content to go with ads.
83
©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com