Welcome to Our 100thEdition. Holy Smoke!
By Peter A. Janssen
Welcome to the 100thedition of Cruising Odyssey, our dynamic weekly e-newsletter that helps owners of cruising boats live the dream under power. One hundred issues. Who’d have thought…
When my partners (George Day, our publisher, and Scott Akerman, our ad director) and I started thinking about creating Cruising Odyssey more than two years ago, we wanted to be at the forefront of the digital revolution. We are all veterans of traditional boating magazines, and we have a lot of issues – and a lot of nautical miles – under our belts. But we knew what was happening to traditional newspapers and magazines; history was turning the page on print. Nobody wanted to be the last person making buggy whips. We wanted to move to digital, to the age of mobile, instantaneous, worldwide communication and social media.
We started with our website, www.cruisingodyssey.com, that we keep updating constantly, and then added our Cruising Odyssey digital newsletter that we now email to about 20,000 readers every Friday morning. Filled with original and aggregated content, Cruising Odyssey is aimed at the growing power cruising community, and is driven by information you can trust and can act upon.
One of the major advantages of publishing on the internet is that it puts an exclamation point on the old adage that knowledge is power. The internet gives you the power to find out more at the click of a keystroke; it empowers you to dig for more, to drill down as far as you want. That power is central to our Search function, where you can find archived stories going back to our very first issue. That robust Search function guides you to stories that help you make smart cruising decisions for years to come.
Another game-changing advantage of the internet is that the instantaneous flow of information has no borders. If a new boat is launched in Düsseldorf, for example, you can find out about it in real time, whether you live next door in Germany or in Fort Lauderdale or Seattle.
So far, we’ve posted 1,290 items (but who’s counting). We are particularly proud of all the new boat reviews and tests we’ve published in the past 100 issues. We aggregate all these ourselves in our Boat Show Special Issues devoted to the major shows: Newport, Annapolis, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Palm Beach. See our Annapolis report this week that has our reviews of 32 new power cruising boats you can see there.
Some of our most popular stories are about people who are out there right now, living the dream, whether they’re in the middle of a circumnavigation or cruising down the Mississippi on the Great Loop. These real-life stories, about people with a wide variety of cruising experience and in a wide range of cruising boats, offer inspiration to us all.
Over the past 100 issues, we’ve been grateful for the support of our readers and many of the leaders of the power cruising community around the world. Our growth curve is definitely going in the right direction. We want to keep it going that way. If you have any comments about Cruising Odyssey, or suggestions about how we can do it better, you can always reach me at: peter@cruisingodyssey.com.
And thanks for reading.
