We were shocked to hear that a professional NZ accounting magazine is stopping its print edition and going digital only has combined with its Australian counterpart. The Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia (ICAA) and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants are joining forces and as a result will be moving their regular publication “Charter Magazine” to digital only a new brand known as the “Acuity” magazine.

Additions by Andy Mclean, Publisher of Acuity magazine:

1) Contrary to what your article says, we are continuing to publish our member magazine in print.

2) Our new trans-Tasman magazine is not called Charter – it is called Acuity.

I think where you have got confused is that – having joined forces with NZICA – we have decided to stop producing Charter magazine and replace it with a brand new trans-Tasman magazine named Acuity. But there is no intention to stop printing magazines for our members. Hard copy magazines are still very popular with our members.

Just to clarify – Charter magazine had existed in print, online and as a tablet app for the past two years. Acuity will also exist in print, online and as a tablet app. There is no change in channels for our member magazine; it’s business as usual.

So what does this mean for accounting in the Australasian region? What does it say about future practices and success factors? We believe it says that accounting could benefit from going digital in a broad manner. Digital gives easier access to articles because they can be read on handheld devices as well as being found through online search. We’re hoping that, by making an accounting magazine available primarily online, it will help accounting firms visit the online space more and get familiar with it so to start using it in their own firm’s marketing. The move to digital for print magazines opens up other questions.

Is your newsletter digital?

If you’re thinking of moving your newsletter to digital, you’ll want to answer these questions first:

• Will the newsletter/ magazine be readable from a mobile device (in terms of both the file being sent and the amount of content on such small screens)?
• Does it fall in line with your firm’s practices and customers?
• Do subscribers get email notifications when a new edition is published?

If you have a printed newsletter and want to move it to digital, answer the questions above or even get in touch with us to help you out.

Read RSS on Kindle

If you’re looking at building a blog for the website of your accounting firm, you’ll be pleased to hear that Amazon Kindle now allows Kindle editions of blog posts as well! They build directly from RSS feeds, so you’ve got another way to keep your blog readers up to date. The digital space is certainly moving in directions that accommodate marketing which are ready for any and all accounting firms to use and enhance their reach to prospects. Let us know how you feel about the change to digital for Charter Magazine, and what your Accounting firm is doing to become digitally enabled.

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