Miningweekly.com wins digital publishing award

The MiningWeekly.com website was judged to have the best content offering of South Africa’s business-news websites.

Editor of MiningWeekly.com, Martin Creamer, is heartened by the award, commenting that “it is testament to the value that MiningWeekly.com’s reporters place on reporting hard news as it happens about one of the world’s most exciting industries”.

Introduced by Marketing Mix, the awards focus on recognising those traditional media houses (such as radio, TV, magazines and newspapers) which “have really embraced digital and made it work for them”.

Marketing Mix explains that in order to ensure that the awards were far reaching and included as many criteria of digital publishing as possible, a number of ‘elimination’ stages were activated.

In the first stage all of the 2010 Nielsen the Digital Media and Marketing Association (DMMA) figures for each website were evaluated. The websites   which showed improvement or remained constant over the year in terms of unique users and page impressions were included in the initial shortlist.

The second stage assessed the digital properties of the shortlist, for which points were allocated.

Thereafter the final shortlist of 28 websites were judged by some of South Africa’s top digital gurus. These included Marketing Mix editor Michelle Sturman, DMMA chairperson Nikki Cockcroft, Digital Warrior founder Joanne Scholtz, Native CEO Jason Xenopoulos, Habari founder Adrian Hewlett and Silverstone CIS CEO Raymond Buckle.

The judges were tasked with selecting the most deserving winners in a number of categories, including best content offering in business, sport, travel, food and home, general interest, youth, women, men and celebrity and entertainment.

The judges scored each entry in terms of its website, mobisite, iPhone application and social media. Each of these components was then judged according to four different criteria, namely design and layout, accessibility, content and integration.

The judges revealed that miningweekly.com won the business category as a result of its high scores for content and its interactive components, which are all accessible from its website.

Bonus points were awarded for online reputation management and exceptional customer service.

Another comment was that the brand had integrated across many digital platforms, offering its loyal readers content appropriately and efficiently.

Creamer Media CEO Kenneth Creamer says it is great to be recognised for its contribution to digital publishing in the business-to-business space.

“We take a lot of pride in the judges’ comments with regards to the improvements we have made to the website over the years. It has been an incremental process of adopting new technologies, growing our readership and investing additional resources in the website, which is the winning formula if you wish to survive in the digital content arena,” says Creamer.

“Advances in Internet and mobile technology have allowed content to be accessed over multiple channels as people change their reading habits, whether it be via magazine, email, the web and mobile devices. We offer mining-related news and information across all these channels and our win in the business category demonstrates that the mining sector touches so many other industries,” says Creamer.

The magazine and online versions of Mining Weekly enjoy a weekly combined readership of just over 90 000. The magazine-only readership makes up the slight majority at 44 300 readers, with website-only readership at 38 300, while readers who make use of both print and online number around 7 800.

“There is significant integration between our digital and print offerings as we aim to ensure our readers obtain maximum benefit from the wealth of news and information we have at our disposal,” says Creamer.

In this regard Creamer Media has launched an e-commerce facility whereby detailed sector-specific research reports can be purchased online.

“We are taking news publishing to a higher level by packaging our content and research into reports on industries, such as the gold and platinum sector, for example, which can be bought and accessed online. The response to this development had been extremely positive and we anticipate that this offering will become even more popular in the coming months,” says Creamer.

Miningweekly.com was one of the first South African websites to introduce an iPhone application and a significant focus in the past year has been on creating high-quality video reports to accompany its news reports, including a weekly video roundup of the week’s most noteworthy items.

And in order to add even further subscriber value, an upgraded iPhone application – which will allow for in-application content purchases – will be introduced before the end of 2011.

“We will continue to embrace the full potential of digital publishing to ensure our readers have the most up-to-date and insightful mining news and information,” says Creamer.