Keeping the news alive

As a result, we at The Motorship are far more news-conscious than previously. With a monthly printed magazine, news was always very much secondary to the in-depth feature coverage.

Although features in print still form our main thrust, digital media has crept up on us. The Motorship has had a website for many years, but only over the past three years or so has it developed to become an important news source for our target readership of marine engineers. Rather than a monthly news round-up, we now, via www.motorship.com, offer our readers a news resource updated every working day with carefully selected stories, written with our particular readership in mind.

We believe we are different from similar websites, in that we neither offer an online clone of the printed product, nor a stream of unedited corporate press releases. And www.motorship.com, like all the sister Mercator Media sites, recognises that users read the site via different media. Therefore the system detects whether the page is being read on a PC or Mac, a tablet, or a mobile phone – or an on-board satellite system – and tailors the layout and graphics accordingly, though the stories remain unchanged.

This of course has involved a lot of work behind the scenes, and this work continues to make the sites, and their interaction with the printed media and related events, better still. And this is where the news-makers, i.e. the shipbuilders, shipowners, designers, classification societies and the suppliers of machinery and equipment, can help us ensure their news gets out as quickly as possible. An RSS feed will ensure that we receive, and can act on, news items. Painfully few companies in our industry seem to have embraced this concept – there seems almost a fear of distributing information too widely, a fear that competitors will gain an advantage from reading it.

And there is of course social media. Here we need only to point to the Maersk group, for many years one of the most secretive in the industry as far as dealings with the press went. Maersk has recently, and very successfully, embraced Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and other media such as Instagram and Pinterest, drawing in the general public as well as the industry.

We know your news is out there; we need you to help us find it.