Inside and out

   To many readers, American Shipper is like that classic piece of furniture found inside your office or home.
   The publication for many years has had a finish that set it apart from others and its sections have contained rich and useful content month after month, and year after year, for several generations of freight transportation and supply chain management executives.
   However, sometimes it’s good to give that prized furniture a new coat of polish and rearrange and update the contents in the drawers. And that’s what we’ve done to American Shipper magazine, starting with this issue.
   The most obvious change is to the front cover. We have done away with the white border. Some readers may recall when American Shipper first implemented this cover design—January 1992. With only a few subtle tweaks along the way, the white border has remained a staple of the publication’s presentation to the shipping industry. Our editorial and design teams have decided it was time to break out of the white border and return to a full-bleed cover image, a move that we believe many of our readers will find visually appealing.
   On the inside, you will discover that we have made substantive changes to how we organize and present industry content. First, we have eliminated the former, transport mode-by-mode page headers and combined them collectively under a single “Transportation” head since so much of our in-depth freight coverage involves a cross-section of transportation modes. We removed the “Forwarding/NVOs” header and replaced it with the more encompassing descriptor, “Logistics,” and added several new, more relevant headers, including “Trade/Finance,” “Infrastructure,” “Regulatory,” “Technology,” and “Supply Chain.” Each change was carefully considered, keeping in mind the rapidly changing world facing the freight transportation and supply chain executive.
   You will continue to find the same insightful columns by our editorial team and selectively picked outside contributors, although some of the titles of the staff-generated columns have changed to reflect new and future realities of the market place.
   We will also incorporate more data into our shipping industry coverage through internal sources, such as BlueWater Reporting and American Shipper research, as well as from reputable third-party sources.
   Most importantly, the new layout is designed to make the magazine a more pleasant and enlightening experience for our business readers.
   Like the furniture in your office or home, we want to be that piece that you look upon pleasingly and continue to use as an indispensable resource for your day-to-day business decision-making.

This editorial was published in the November 2015 issue of American Shipper.