Shufflegazine, the UAE's newest tech publication,
got a write up in The National this weekend. The "Apple lifestyle" magazine is the love child of Dubai's most prominent Apple fanatic, Magnus Nystedt, who also runs the Apple discussion board,
Emirates Mac, and is pretty much synonymous with the Apple community here in the UAE.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that spraying ink on dead trees and shipping the end result to news stands and corner stores is not a long term money maker, but Shufflegazine is quite different.
It is equal parts
website,
blog,
twitterer and
discussion forum, with the printed product just the latest member of the family.
While most magazines and newspapers now have a whole bunch of digital
add-ons, this is basically the reverse - a website that got itself a
print magazine version. It is interesting, and probably not the last
time we'll see such a model: attract a big base of readers through a
low-cost online product, and then once you have a nice,
advertising-friendly reader base, launch a premium print product to
generate some cash.
Anyway,
the article is a good read
- among other things, it says Shufflegazine will be on sale across the
GCC by next month, with a print run of up to 20,000. Pretty impressive
numbers for a new kid on a supposedly dying block.
Thanks for the mention guys :-)