The World Weekly: Offering 'a patchwork of information'

At the end of November last year a new, free news magazine was soft launched, which aims to bring together articles from titles across the world for a weekly "patchwork of information".

Managing director of The World Weekly, Rory O'grady, told Journalism.co.uk that the magazine "is a new journalistic experiment".

"What we're trying to do is create a weekly news magazine, that is able to speak for all and help the reader make sense of the world we live in."

He said the title "aims to be different" by offering "different perspectives", beyond just the Western viewpoint of international news.

"What we've done is decided to buy articles from each area and bring them together to create a kind of patchwork of information that is more representative of the different points of views on the same subject."

He added: "We're trying to be the first super-premium, quality free weekly magazine".

"Our target audience are key decision makers, so what we do is create lists of the top 100 law firms, top hedge funds, FTSE 100, top hotels, top airlines and then we approach them and we offer them a free subscription service, whereby they will receive every week a certain amount of copies based on what they believe the potential readership is. We're also present in airlines."

The magazine - the founding editor of which was former editor of Time magazine EMEA James Geary - will rely on premium product advertising revenue only, with plans to also "scale very quickly into Hong Kong and New York in a few months time".

"Our long-term plan is to be present in 45 of the world's leading cities, again targeting these key decision makers", he added.



Looking ahead and the title's ultimate objective is a next-generation digital platform that we dub the social network of high-quality information", O'grady said.

"What we're doing now is building the brand and trying to use the print to start driving traffic, and of course creating strong links with leading publishers and the big media agencies and in a year or a year and a half, we will be launching this platform."

The World Weekly is currently building a global network of stringers and translators, as well as using news translation services such as Worldcrunch.

O'grady added that "down the line we will be putting a very strong focus on content we translate ourselves, to make it even more exclusive".

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