by Herman Manson (@marklives) iMaverick, the ambitious daily tablet newspaper from the publishers of the popular website The Daily 
Maverick, is scaling back its frequency from daily to weekly. The news was announced to subscribers in an email earlier today.
Critics found the tablet paper overly long – it often ran well over a 100 pages. As much as 25% of these were short news items, billed as a roundup of the most important news, and made it a hassle to get to the in-depth business and political reporting the publisher has become known for.
According to Styli Charalambous, CEO of Daily Maverick and iMaverick, the team did discuss doing a shorter version of the daily, but decided this would compete directly with the website. “We always wanted iMaverick to compliment the website rather than compete with it,” says Charalambous. Initially we thought a daily on tablet would be a different reading experience and wouldn’t compete but we understand now that they were competing for time, along with all the other daily sources of news.”
Charalambous says he believes there is a room in the market for a quality local weekly with high quality analysis and opinion and he is probably right. “We can access great international titles but local titles simply don’t exist or don’t deliver the quality coverage they [readers] expect,” says Charalambous.
Charalambous says there won’t be any editorial cutbacks, “although the production process will obviously be scaled back from what needs to be subbed and how many pages we need to layout and design each week.”
The first weekly edition will appear on Wednesday 4 July and be published every Wednesday thereafter.
It would be interesting to see if the iMaverick team will be upping the design stakes on their new weekly product by giving it magazine quality lay-out – at the moment the daily looks (but, I reiterate, doesn’t read) like a terribly long and unimaginative PDF file.
Charalambous says the circulation has been closing in on 5000 but he hopes to announce “two massive deals this coming month where corporates have purchased several thousand subscriptions on behalf of their clients.” It has been a stated aim of the iMaverick team since its launch just over a year ago to find corporate sponsors willing to buy subscriptions in bulk.
Existing subscribers will receive the same number of issues they originally paid for so effectively their subscriptions will last longer.
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Often a nascent industry such as online multimedia news evolves on the back of mistakes made by pioneers – not unlike human evolution. One has to ask if there can be such a thing as a daily stand-alone news publication such as was originally envisaged for iMaverick? As chief subeditor at the time I thought so, but I too was wrong.
The short answer is probably not.
Charalambous is quite correct in talking about the need for a high-quality weekly, and TIME was initially a concept model for iMaverick, except daily and by subscription. The new weekly iMaverick probably makes a lot more sense, especially in the face of Old-Testament-sized flood of media today. Furthermore, with Daily Maverick covering the magazine-length 2,000-word feature bracket and Simon Williamson’s “First Thing” covering the breaking early morning hot news, a weekly product seems, with hindsight, eminently sensible.
iMaverick certainly started off well – a pioneering adventure with clear ideals, guidelines and the industry’s only comprehensive Editorial Style Guide. But it fell victim to media-besity. It rapidly became the fat kid in the playground and advertisers didn’t seem too keen to have it on their team. The tablet gimmick soon lost its app-eal (sorry) and, as has been the case with deadtree media since the first broadsheet rolled off the presses, more and more became less and less.
However, being neither beef nor chicken left iMaverick, as a daily online news source (originally with a FREE iPad and A+ income pricing) in media limbo – too much duplication of what was free on the site, prolix “borathons” (as some readers labelled them), too much curated stuff from other news sources… And it began showing, slowly at first, as editorial standards, consistent identifiable “house style” and quality control began slipping. Any subeditor worth his or her salt will tell you, this is fatal. There is a limit to the amount of spelling, grammar and vocabulary mistakes even the online reader can take. The report above proving the point – too many errors, Herman!
And, sadly, this is where the Maverick stable still suffers. With flashing-neon exceptions, output, while well-presented (including some outstanding headlines), stimulating, thought-provoking and (despite political overload) reasonably diverse, remains riddled with high-school newspaper errors and unacceptable inconsistencies. That this is not uncommon in online media (as above) makes it no less offensive to discerning readers. Charalambous is quite correct in saying: “local titles simply don’t exist or don’t deliver the quality coverage they [readers] expect,” (though I suspect we’re talking about different manifestations of “quality”).
His next remark is very worrying though. “Charalambous says there won’t be any editorial cutbacks (there have already been in anticipation of this development), ‘although the production process will obviously be scaled back from what needs to be subbed and how many pages we need to layout and design each week.’” It’s specifically his remarks about subbing that scare people like me and experienced editors from Auckland to Anchorage. If iMaverick is to appear tomorrow, 4 July, as a weekly, it needs to set itself higher standards of editorial quality control, gatekeeping and subbing, (including knowing when to use “compliment” and when “complement”). Using a rugby metaphor: the forwards are winning all the ball the team needs, but the backline is not getting the QUALITY ball to make it count.
I for one sincerely wish it well and will download the first edition with eager anticipation. I also hope the new iMaverick can regain its status and become a benchmark in every possible way. Lord knows, the South African consumer of online news media deserves uncompromising and total quality.