We made a mistake

We may be slow learners here but after eight months we have finally learnt that this magazine was more popular as WORK BOAT WORLD than in its more comprehensive guise as BAIRD MARITIME.

So, as of the March 2012 issue, we revert to the old name and format.

Both readers and advertisers have made it very clear to us that, on reflection, they much preferred the more focussed work boat magazine.

This has been interesting to learn. Obviously, before we made the initial change in July last year, we canvassed the opinions of both our advertisers and readers quite widely.

Anyway. The customer is always right so we will follow your wishes. We actually liked WORK BOAT WORLD better in any case.

We are sorry for disappointing you for the past eight issues and trust that you will appreciate our narrower focus. Your comments, however forthright, are always interesting and appreciated.

Meanwhile, for the growing numbers of cargo ship people, we will not neglect you. Our increasingly popular website www.bairdmaritime.com will continue to cover the whole wider maritime world better than ever.

A number of new features will be added to it throughout the year. Now that we seem to have put the more damaging of our well known hacking attacks behind us, we are ready to move onward.

Thank you for sticking with us through this aberrational diversion. Your continuing support is, as always, much appreciated!

After thirty-five years of SHIPS AND SHIPPING and its predecessors and almost thirty years of WORK BOAT WORLD regular readers had, of course, become used to those well established and popular magazines.

However, the world is changing. In fact it is changing very quickly. This change is both generational and technological. It is affecting almost all sectors of business and, most particularly, the maritime and publishing sectors with which we are most involved.

We know very well that most of our readers and all our advertisers have felt those changes. The wider maritime industry has experienced massive change over the past thirty years and most particularly in the last decade. There has been a significant blurring of sector distinctions and a drift to much greater homogeneity across the whole global industry.

The internet, obviously, has wrought enormous and dramatic changes across the whole global media industry. Like most of our media industry counterparts, we were not, at first, able to readily comprehend what was happening to our industry. As a result, many media outlets have fallen by the wayside. Others are struggling.

Most of us established websites with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Some are good, most ordinary and some hopeless. We believe that ours (www.bairdmaritime.com) is one of the best. It is also, somewhat unusually, free access.

We have worked hard developing it over the last few years. We have also spent a lot of money on it. We know that it is regarded seriously and appreciated by a very significant slice of the international maritime industry.

Simultaneously, we have been gradually reducing our focus on magazines. Fifteen years ago Baird Publications produced six monthly magazines. By an ongoing process of amalgamation and consolidation, there are now two. For the global maritime market we publish WORK BOAT WORLD magazine and BAIRD MARITIME online and for Australasia we still have AUSMARINE magazine.

Very obviously, the website bairdmaritime.com and WORK BOAT WORLD magazine are closely related and complementary. Together, they are designed and intended to provide readers, visitors, viewers or whatever with the best source of news, information and comment available to the overall international maritime industry. So, no matter whether you own, operate, design, build or supply to any kind of commercial or government vessel from tugs and trawlers to tankers, BAIRDMARITIME.com and WORK BOAT WORLD magazine is intended to serve you. We believe it provides readers with the best of both its previous worlds.

Thanks to the internet you can access BAIRD MARITIME.com daily. Our readers will, from this issue, be able to obtain their daily maritime news from the bairdmaritime.com website and their detailed work boat reviews, columns, company profiles and surveys from this single upgraded and expanded magazine.

We have, of course, discussed this development with many of our advertisers and readers who agreed unanimously with the changes. Indeed, many of our advertisers are now selling their products to all sectors of the market globally. For example, engine manufacturers tend to supply to everything from the above mentioned tugs and trawlers to tankers. The same applies to just about every kind of supplier to the global maritime industry from gearboxes to paints and lubricants.