Dear valued reader,

Those of you who receive the physical Engineering News & Mining Weekly magazine will no doubt have noticed already that we have made a fairly dramatic change to our paper.

Owing to global supply chain disruptions and difficulties in securing our regular paper, we have transitioned to a 70 grams per square metre (gsm) bond paper that is manufactured locally and is used widely.

The new paper is heavier than the 52 gsm paper that we have been using for a number of years. It is also whiter in appearance and carries colour printing very well.

We have been informed by our printer that this bond paper is made from recycled inputs and makes use of fewer chemicals than the gloss paper options that we also considered.

We believe this new paper will work well for both our readers and our advertisers.

This change in material does not signal a change to our core mission or to our content, however.

We will continue to strive to offer fact-rich and accurate news on developments in the South African economy and across multiple business sectors.

We will also seek to continue to provide fair and balanced insight and commentary on these developments.

This mission, we believe, remains critical in the current difficult context, where it has become increasingly challenging to discern fact from fabrication and where the free flow of information is being dislocated not only by social media and partisan media platforms, but even the rise of so-called ‘troll factories’.

As is the case with most business sectors, the media is being disrupted by both technological innovation and shifting commercial realities.

Nevertheless, we continue to believe that publishing success and longevity depend on remaining true to the fundamental journalistic principles of accuracy, credibility and balance, while also being ready to embrace change and technology.

Increasingly, therefore, this magazine is being complemented by our digital platforms of Engineering News, Mining Weekly, Polity and Research Channel Africa, which have also been fully integrated with smartphones and wearables.

This physical-digital integration has allowed us to broaden our content offering to include video and audio reports, while deepening our coverage of the core real economy sectors of industry, energy, and mining.

Our reach and readership has also grown massively, with 100 000 people now reading our magazines and online publications each week.

We thank you, our valued reader, for your continued loyalty, which we hope to reward on an ongoing basis with up-to-the-minute ‘news you can use’.