The big tweet

It’s 150 words – enough to fill a cellphone screen. To those reared on Twitter’s 140-character messages that might seem like a tome, but it’s the average length of a story in Media24’s weekly news magazine NewsNow, being launched 2 September. The only “long” features will be a cover story spread, comprising a main report and sidebars, and one 1 200-word “read of the week” selected for its excellent writing.

Unlike anything else of its type, this is the ultimate quick-scan product, geared for the time-starved young executive or professional on the move who needs to catch up with the week’s news so he can participate intelligently in dinner party chitchat. Indeed, urban legend has it the genre was invented in Britain, when its founder was asked by his wife on their way to a dinner party to give her a quick news update so she could do just that.

Incidentally, the foregoing is what 150 words looks like.

Launching a new magazine – any magazine – in a market under siege as circulations plunge and advertising dwindles might lead you to conclude the venerable bosses of Media24 have flipped their lids. But let’s think about this. It wouldn’t be the first time someone has made a fortune by going against the flow.

Even in the face of economic disaster, opportunities lurk. Magazines are closing because they no longer appeal to their traditional markets – which means the market wants something else. And that something else is… another opportunity!

A circulation of 25 000 is targeted within a year, selling for R20/copy. Ad rates will be “competitive,” says editor Waldimar Pelser, a Stellenbosch graduate in law and journalism and former Beeld news editor. The target market is at the upper end of the scale, but broadly based, from LSM7 to LSM12.