New look for SNEWS® coming at you, your survey input helped loads – thanks!

The teams at SNEWS® and its new parent company, Active Interest Media, have been busy in the last few months — looking at strategy, planning the future, surveying many hundreds of loyal subscribers and readers for editorial and navigation input and, yes, leaping into a redesign with both feet.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to and what you’ll be seeing:

Magazines

The first of our redesign efforts is now landing in mailboxes all over North America, and we are really proud of its powerful look.

Our seasonal magazines, known as GearTrends® since our first one hit the streets in January 2003, have been rebranded SNEWS. After realizing our daily contact with all of you is via our SNEWS website and emails (referred to as “S-News” by many) and most of you now know us as that, it seemed time for our family of key news sources to carry the same name. We are now SNEWS, whether online or in print. We certainly won’t lose the GearTrends trademark we own. Look for that great brand to pop up in other places as we progress.

Meanwhile, the annual fitness magazine – now SNEWS Fitness magazine — is this week landing in mailboxes, and that’s where you’ll truly experience the powerful, clean, modern look we have adopted. We’ve organized stories within the magazines by categories and generally made it easier to navigate – not to mention more fun to read and look at. We loved the look with which we kicked off our little company in late 2002, but after six years, it was time for an update. We hope you feel the same and like what our teams came up with.

The outdoor magazine, to appear in July, will follow the same look and feel, becoming the SNEWS Summer Outdoor or SNEWS Winter Outdoor magazine.

The design team at Active Interest Media has worked miracles for us to pull off this new look in just a couple of months, and we have our new team members to thank for the support.

Website and logo

With a new logo now unveiled and a new, cleaner look, you can imagine the next beast we will tame is our SNEWS website. We are working feverishly on a redesign that will make it a lot easier to find what you need and want, will incorporate more community, and generally be easier to navigate. Look for that in the fall and we’ll keep you posted as it progresses.

Our bold new logo gives us the opportunity to truly stand out, as well as the chance to let you know with the tag underneath what, of our areas, we are emphasizing. That tag may have the URL, www.outsidebusinessjournal.com; the outdoor tag; or the fitness tag — or nothing. All you have to know is to look for those great big bold SNEWS letters and you’ll know you’re being connected to the industry information pipeline.

Survey feedback

Many of you – and we do mean many hundreds – took the time to participate in an editorial design and satisfaction survey we did in April – referred to as the “War & Peace of surveys” by more than a few of you because of its length. We thank you so much for that investment of your time to help us know what you liked, didn’t like, wanted and didn’t want! We were stunned at the numbers who dove into the survey that, with both parts, could have taken someone 20-30 minutes to complete. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

We in fact gave away three $100 American Express gift cards in a random drawing of those who had completed both parts. We wish we could tell you who won but that would violate our promise not to tell anybody who participated in our survey. In fact, we at SNEWS don’t even know since only our research gurus have the participant and winners’ names.

We are already implementing some of the opinions you offered us. Of course, we can’t tell you everything we learned. We can say that our readers and subscribers definitely know what they want and don’t, and that we were told of all the news and information sources out there, we’re the industry favorite by a long shot. Thanks for that affirmation!

We would like to say thanks for your continued confidence. It seems that many of you definitely respect our industry standing, truth, integrity and reporting. We also discovered that you look to us first for news about products, insights, industry trends and news.

Stay tuned to SNEWS as we move into our next year. The ride promises all kinds of thrills. We hope you’ll hang around for more along with us.

If you have any comments or questions, please do not hesitate to email us at snewsbox@snewsnet.com.