Bigger and better?

I think we can safely boast that Australian Aviation is now bigger, but our aim has been to make it better too. A better design and better content. The decision taken some months back to move to a wider format for the January/ February 2013 issue has really allowed us to step back and look at the magazine’s strengths and build on them, and identify any weaknesses, and buttress those.

I am genuinely pleased with the results so far. We have a new design that takes advantage of the larger page size, with a crisp, clean aesthetic that is intended to showcase our quality writing and photography rather than distract (or detract) from them. To me that is the sign of a great magazine and that is what we have aspired to achieve.

Why change? It is part of our response to what is a pretty tumultuous media market – it is my firm belief that we should take full advantage of the strength of the print format in creating a tactile, physical product that offers engaging content. So that means the wider format, the increased page count, the new design, and more focused content, to create a more immersive magazine.

Conversely it means too we address what are the weaknesses of a monthly print magazine in the Twitter age. And that is driving our biggest content change. With this issue we farewell our old Newsdesk column and introduce in its place ‘Preflight’, where we move away from news reportage and instead start to cover news issues with a bit more depth and context. News is a commodity, freely and widely available on the internet. So with Preflight we continue our evolution away from a news coverage section focused on breadth to a section more focused on specific stories explored in greater depth. That will mean Preflight will much better complement our daily news on our australianaviation. com. au website.

The evolution of Newsdesk into Preflight aside, the greatest content changes come with the addition of three new regular columnists to our magazine covering professional pilot issues, the passenger experience and aviation in Asia. We will be using a small stable of anonymous contributors for our airline pilot column, but one man who is far from anonymous in aviation media in Australia, Tom Ballantyne joins Australian Aviation with a monthly column to commentate on aviation issues in Asia and how they may have an impact in Australia. Tom, a former National Aviation Press Club Journalist of the Year, is chief correspondent for Hong Kong-based Orient Aviation magazine and so is a heavyweight addition to the AA stable.

Our other new columnist is John Walton. John, staff journalist with Australian Business Traveller (check out ausbt. com. au), will bring his dry wit to write about aviation issues from the passenger’s perspective, and how product (not just inflight, but lounges and frequent flyer schemes) drives airline strategies, and vice versa.

Also this issue we are pleased to launch a media partnership with the Australian Airports Association, which will see the AAA (not to be confused with the AAAA or A/AA!) write a monthly column in AA! Building on AA’s existing strengths, the new columns, the restyled news pages, a new format, and a new design, will, we hope, combine to make the magazine even more engaging. Because if I had to summarise Australian Aviation with a single word it would be ‘engaging’ – our aim is for an engaging magazine for people engaged in, or engaged by, aviation in Australia.

Well deserved

To sign off with this issue, a quick congratulations to the winners at the National Aviation Press Club’s Aviation Journalist of the Year awards. The Australian Financial Review’s Andrew Clearly was a well deserved winner of the top gong, while Australian Business Traveller’s David Flying (John Walton’s boss) took out the best online submission.

But I am particularly proud that Australian Aviation took out four other categories, including Photographer of the Year (Seth Jaworski), Military Story (Andrew McLaughlin) and Feature Story (Michael Gisick). It is some well deserved recognition for three key contributors to Australian Aviation.