A lot to celebrate

Some milestones were reached with our magazine over the summer. First off, we have a new publisher in Jim Petsis. You can read a bit more about him in our Business Briefs column on page 9. We’re glad to welcome him on board and are already finding his enthusiasm and positive outlook to be a boost for all of us.

This issue also marks a couple of 15-year anniversaries on the magazine. Ellie Robinson, our stellar, award-winning art director, started doing design and layout for us back in 1998, and she has done a wonderful job of making our content look interesting, compelling and easy to read. That same year, Montreal-based Carroll McCormick started writing for us. He originally was assigned a one-off article, but we were so impressed with his work, we wanted more. As it turns out, we soon made him our senior contributing editor, and he has provided case studies and feature stories – many of them award-winners – in almost every issue over the past 15 years.

Speaking of awards, we were very happy to receive a Grand Award this year in the international APEX Awards for Publication Excellence. We’ve won seven APEX awards in the past, but not at this level until now. I’d like to share with you the judges’ comments: “Makes excellent use of the small newspaper format. A bold headline schedule, clear, legible type, imaginative use of captioned photo layouts, sidebars, subheads and bulleted and numbered text – all combine to create an appealing backdrop to the editorial well, where crisply written, interesting features keep readers involved and up-to-date on current trends.”

There’s more. We also were nominated for a Canadian Business Press Kenneth R. Wilson Memorial Award for editorial excellence in the Best Industrial/Technical Article category, thanks to the excellent writing of Carroll
McCormick. The fact is, his articles are nominated pretty much every year, and he has taken home several Gold and
Silver awards on our behalf.

Another thing we’re truly pleased about is the great reader reaction we’re getting to our website. Not only do we post digital editions of each of our issues online, we regularly update the site with exclusive feature articles as well as industry news, links to relevant industry events, and more. The latest analysis of visitors to our site showed more than 32,000 ‘unique’ visitors stopped by for a read last month. Also, more than 16,000 readers have subscribed to our weekly e-newsletter, which summarizes the new features, news items and events posted on our website in the previous week (if you want it too, it’s easy to sign up at mromagazine.com/subscribe).

You’ll be seeing some of our new ideas being implemented in the months ahead, and we’re also working on a new project we’ll sure many of you will find interesting and useful. We’ll have details on that soon.  

Bill Roebuck, Editor & Associate Publisher