Casino Enterprise Management

Next month, Casino Enterprise Management will have been in the business of bringing you, our esteemed reader, timely news reporting, quality content and gaming industry insight worthy of your investment in time for nine years. Many things have changed in the gaming industry since we first hit the street, and many things have changed in the way we cover the news and, most importantly, how we deliver it to you.

Publishing is the process of dissemination of literature or information—generally making content available to the public or a specified group, such as gaming industry management in our case. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works, but with the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, publishing has expanded to include electronic resources, such as the electronic versions of books and periodicals, as well as websites, video, Internet talk radio and the like.

Technology in digital publishing has improved drastically since we came into being. That in itself is a big factor, but more was needed to create a tectonic plate shift in the information delivery business. Technology alone could not be the sole catalyst. But today that has changed, and there are many factors that have brought this change about, such as:

1. Today, the consumers of information are much more conscious of the environmental impact of traditional print publishing. Environmentalists have referred to print publishing as the “dead-tree media” for many years, citing that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and petroleum used to deliver publications to each destination. While our printers have incorporated the use of recycled paper to appease the environmentally conscious, we believe the Internet remains the preferred eco-friendly choice.
2. Today, consumers have expectations that their information will be delivered with a much higher degree of immediacy. Print publishing has an inescapable lag time over electronic publishing. News on paper will almost always be weeks, if not a full month, behind digital content.
3. Today’s people are on the go. Mobile technology has bridged the gap between having a magazine in hand versus sitting at a desktop computer. Mobile devices and wireless connectivity using the iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle and various tablet devices allow individuals to take their electronic content wherever they go.
4. It’s been a darn tough economy over the past three years, and in these challenging economic times, organizations are practicing austerity. This means advertising—the life blood of B2B publishing—is down. On the other side of the coin, the publishing industry is no exception when it comes to practicing austerity measures. Paper and ink prices have risen drastically since our first year in print. Distribution of magazines through the mail has skyrocketed in price in that same time. All publishers are looking for ways to reduce costs and develop new revenue streams. Some publishers reduce the page count of their magazines or opted for lower quality paper stock. The latter is not exactly a solution based on long-term vision. We instead believe that it is imperative to provide a bigger, better, faster and more exciting alternative.

Here at CEM, we embrace technology for what it can do for you as well as for us. We are constantly looking for new and better ways to deliver content by enhancing our capabilities. In fact, it’s become our mantra and the driving force behind everything we do. Here, content will always be king, and with our new tools, our readers and advertisers have a lot to gain. 

If you haven’t visited CEM’s website(s) recently, you really should. They are designed with you in mind. Our digital edition has now been optimized for portable devices. This also includes our entire multi-year digital archive. We offer MP3 articles ready for downloading. Our extremely popular Internet talk radio, CEM Audio Edge, offers listeners live and on-demand programming. CEM Video Edge delivers interviews with some of the greatest thought leaders in gaming. There’s a lot more, too. It’s your resource free for the taking (and many of your colleagues are). Just four years ago, the CEM website was lucky to have several thousand visitors a month. Today, we frequently have several thousand unique visitors per day. In October, we had 13,141 unique visitors to our main site. That number is fast approaching our print circulation, and I have no doubt that it will surpass it in 2012.

Please check us out at www.aceme.org.


Peter E. Mead
Publisher,
Casino Enterprise Management