Earlier this week, I dispatched a letter to our subscribers explaining that we will no longer be offering Anthill Magazine as a subscription title.
Instead, we will be releasing ad hoc editions to reflect milestones and important developments. Naturally, we will be increasing our online activities and building on our award programs and events.
Why are we doing this?
Let me start be saying that it has been an exciting journey taking Anthill from the seed of a concept in September 2003 to its current incarnation as a leading business magazine and even larger online community for Australian innovators and entrepreneurs.
(There’s a clue here in the latter end of that statement.)
Over this time, we have been applauded, derided, praised, berated and even physically threatened thanks to our unconventional stance on a range of issues and our continuing desire to challenge existing business conventions.
In 2006, we launched an initiative designed to lampoon the overwhelming swamp of business indexes and unexpectedly created our own – the Cool Company Awards.
In 2007, we offered to buy The Bulletin for one dollar and accidentally discovered how effective blogs can be at mobilising our readers, prompting our own satirical alternative, The Bullantin.
In 2008, we announced our plans to create the world’s first ‘reader-generated’ business magazine and used online crowd-sourcing techniques to publish the spoils of your toils as our ‘Magazine 2.0 Experiment’, opening many eyes to the power of two-way reader engagement.
This year, our ‘evolution’ has continued, heavily influenced by the state of the economy and reader migration online – forcing us to question our identity and plans for the future.
Anthill has always prided itself on its ability to embrace change – we are advocates of change – despite the hardship, cynicism, criticism and just plain confusion that change causes.
This is one of those occasions.
Of course, we also can guess what you’re thinking. (Particularly after it was announced this week that McGraw-Hill’s BusinessWeek is for sale.)
No, we cannot deny that economic factors have played a role in our decision.
But we also have a larger vision for the future of Anthill, as part of our ongoing desire to support and promote innovation and entrepreneurship in Australia, and this has required an adjustment of our priorities.
We love print magazines.
But change is in our nature.
To all our print subscribers, I hope that you will greet this news not as sad tidings but with the optimism we feel embarking on our next chapter and that you will help us continue to pursue the goals we were founded on: To promote and support innovation and entrepreneurship in Australia (irrespective of the channel).
