Digital News South Africa

iMaverick goes weekly

iMaverick will migrate to a weekly format from its current daily format in response to reader requirements. It will appear each Wednesday and is available on all iOS devices, such as iPads, iPhones and Android tablets and smartphones, as a subscription-only offering.

The publication is currently negotiating with current subscribers to convert their subs so that they are in no way compromised by the change.

Described as Africa's first tablet-only daily news publication, launched in October 2011, at the time of its launch, it was reportedly the third tablet-only daily 'newspaper' in the world that wasn't underpinned by a physical paper edition.

"The publication is characterised by high quality feature pieces and a magazine-style layout that complemented 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 it a weekly," says iMaverick and Daily Maverick editor, Branko Brkic.

"Listened to our audience"

It is an extensive news magazine, created by a stable of world-class journalists, authors and photographers. Contributors 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 it has become known for and we're working hard on the existing format to accommodate the weekly frequency. 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."

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