Print vs. digital news

Printed magazines are chronologically challenged. While we here at HPC expend great effort on in-depth, technical exploration of the design, tooling and manufacturing of complex composite structures, timely delivery of the latest news is not possible in a bi-monthly magazine. By the time you receive HPC, it’s likely that you’ve already gotten wind of many of the news tidbits that trickle out of this industry: Plant expansions, new hires, project launches, milestones, mergers and acquisitions, etc.

Still, since the launch of HPC, we’ve dutifully devoted several pages of each issue to a summary of the major news of the last two months, focusing on activity in the end-use markets that make use of advanced composites. When HPC was started 18 years ago, this made more sense than it does now. Today, an abundance of digital news delivery services makes the latest news instantly knowable.

Given the shift in the way our readers receive their news, we’re in the midst of a change that makes more sense today: We are letting the magazine do what it does best — in-depth coverage of the news behind the breaking news — and letting our digital products do what they do best — provide speedy delivery of industry news as it breaks.

Over the next several issues, our printed news section will migrate away from providing a number of relatively short news stories to provide fewer but longer articles, each offering analysis and perspective on a select subject beyond the short, easy-to-digest version you likely will have seen elsewhere. This will enable us to focus in some depth on the biggest stories of the past two months, presenting you, the reader, with fresh data that will give you a more thorough understanding of significant events and their impact on the high-performance composites market.

For breaking news, we’ll direct you to two alternatives: The CompositesWorld Weekly e-newsletter and the CompositesWorld Web site’s Home Page.

The CW Weekly, distributed every Tuesday, provides a collection of the previous week’s news. There you’ll get all the news pertinent to advanced composites markets. It’s already e-mailed, for their convenience, to more than 25,000 composites professionals and is a reliable source for week-to-week developments in this community. (If you’re not a subscriber, visit www.compositesworld.com and click “Subscribe.”)

As the printed version of HPC evolves to cover news events in greater depth, the CompositesWorld Home Page will similarly evolve to feature each days’ breaking news, before it is collected into the CW Weekly. So you’ll want to bookmark that page to keep breaking events just one click away.

Going forward, then, those who want to stay current with industry news can click in to our Web site for what’s breaking, receive the Weekly via e-mail for the once-a-week recap and await the arrival of HPC to reflect on the implications the big news has for the markets you serve. And if you’re so inclined, I encourage you to find us on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Thanks for your interest. And keep in mind that no matter where you fall in the advanced composites food chain, remember you can help us report the same news you like to follow: Send word of your company’s location change, expansion, acquisition, new product release, technical innovation, contract award, or other notable happenings to us at pr@compositesworld.com.