Editorial: TNM switching to a biweekly print edition

As the new year gets underway, readers of The Northern Miner print edition will notice a momentous break from our shared past together: in 2017 we are switching from publishing a print edition every week — as we’ve done for the last 101 years — to printing a double issue every two weeks.

The first biweekly edition will be our Jan. 9–22, 2017 issue. It will go to our printer the evening of Jan. 3, and be designated Volume 103, Issue 1. (Previously the volume number changed over every March in accordance with our first edition being published in March 1915, but we thought with the changeover, we’d make a clean break and designate the first issue of each year No. 1.)

Going forward, there will be 26 print editions published in 2017, with a special feature section in every single issue — keeping our current pace of feature sections. The topics selected for our special sections in 2017 and the publication schedule are available in our media kit that’s downloadable at www.northernminer.com/advertise.

Newsstand availability of The Northern Miner at select locations across Canada (e.g., Indigo and Chapters bookstores) will remain unchanged.

The print edition remains almost as popular as ever with readers, even with some categories of advertising moving substantially online in recent years, for example to our www.northernminerjobs.com website.

(Indeed, as a side note, there’s plenty of evidence that comprehension and retention of stories read in print is materially better than achieved by reading off an electronic screen — a particularly critical consideration when making business or investment decisions.)

The good news for our print readers is that with the larger biweekly edition, there will be no actual reduction in the total amount of stories our editorial team puts out.

While these days we’ve typically produced a 16-page newspaper every week, under the new biweekly schedule, after the first 20-page paper coming out of the holiday period, we will strive to produce a 24-page newspaper every two weeks with almost the same amount of content that would go into two 16-page weekly papers of old.

And as usual, all the stories that appear in print can also be viewed at www.northernminer.com, with new stories posted online daily.

We want you to know we remain committed to the print edition, as evidenced by our complete redesign of the print product in October 2015 by a daily newspaper designer seconded from our parent company Glacier Media.

At the same time of the redesign, we also improved the overall print experience by upgrading the print quality. This allows our production editor David Perri to pack every issue with stunning photos of mining people and projects from around the world, generating a reader experience that can’t be duplicated online.

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement of The Northern Miner, our readers will also have noticed the complete overhaul of our website earlier this year, changing to an industry standard platform from our aging in-house design.

Now our editorial team has greater freedom and options to add multimedia to our stories, and we’re confident anyone visiting our website this year will have been delighted with the quantum improvement in visualizing information.

The Northern Miner’s Vancouver editorial team of Matthew Keevil and Lesley Stokes recording a podcast in our Vancouver studio. Credit: The Northern Miner.

The website is also now fully compatible with desktops, tablets and smartphones, so our readers can choose whatever platform they want to read and share our stories.

And so, in the new year, our print subscribers can look forward to a fatter Northern Miner showing up in the mailbox every two weeks instead of every week.

For any specific questions about the changeover or any other concerns, subscribers can contact our customer service department at info@northernminer.com or during regular business hours at 1 (888) 502-3456 (toll free in Canada and U.S.), or directly at 1 (416) 510-6789 ext. 43564.

As ever, we express our deep gratitude to our subscribers, advertisers, contributors and interview subjects who stick with us through the thick and thin of our cyclical mining industry and who, with their support, allow our team in Toronto and Vancouver to keep producing The Northern Miner we all love.