iMaverick to launch South Africa’s first daily only-for iPad newspaper.

Management Today met with iMaverick CEO Styli Charalambous to talk about the new newspaper.

September 2011. Since the original idea was conceived late last

T

he Daily Maverick, South Africa’s favourite online daily news site, is launching its new iMaverick iPad 1

newspaper early

year by Editor Branko Brkic, whilst sitting on an aircraft playing with a rival online publsiher’s iPad during an international flight, the newspaper has been working around the clock to get its new premium product ready. The new format was first announced back in June, and has been eagerly anticipated by both the media world in general and the large percentage of the 140 000 loyal online readers of The Daily Maverick who already have iPads.

Today magazine, “we expect to see a large uptake for the iPad version from our existing online readers. We are very happy with the interest shown so far especially the number of subscriptions that people have paid for even before the launch date. One of the biggest things we were battling with was educating people into what the differences would be

10 Management Today | September 2011 CEO Styli Charalambous told Management

between iMaverick and the Daily Maverick and the easiest way to do that was to show people. We created a Beta version, PDFs that people could view it on their iPads. We wanted people to experience what will go into the hundred pages of iMaverick, so they could see what they will be getting before they made a financial commitment.”

experiences of reading other international iPad publications that a not-too-fussy style would work best. Once the novelty wears off, it’s good quality content that keeps people coming back. We are looking to convert people that are still subscribing to print newspapers, so we want to keep it as unintimidating as possible, easy to read and easy to use. You will not find a lot of gadgets, it will be a simple download, with the pages sliding left to right, no scrolling up and down, just the intuitive things. It was a combination of a number of things and trial and error until we came up with a style that we were happy would be the identity of iMaverick. We were fortunate that we had a blank canvas to start with.”

“In terms of the style, we saw from early