The Boat Broker is a specialty publication focusing on outdoor recreation, hunting, fishing and boating in Southeast Alaska. It was purchased by the CCW in 1986.
Beginning in October, the Boat Broker will be integrated into the CCW as weekly outdoors pages.
September's Boat Broker Outdoors, a publication of the Capital City Weekly, will be distributed Thursday for the last time as a separate publication. Starting in October, the CCW will begin featuring Outdoors pages each week. Content will still focus on hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation in Southeast Alaska.
"The Boat Broker isn't going away, we've just decided to present the content differently," he said. "The Capital City Weekly has grown exponentially since it was purchased by Morris Communication in 2004 and we believe including an outdoors section to the CCW will benefit the publication as a whole."
Westmoreland said the advantage to weekly outdoors pages is more timely content and increased distribution and readership.
"One of the challenges to a monthly publication is a lot of the news that boaters and outdoors enthusiasts are interested in is out-of-date by the time we go to press," he said. "Since the Boat Broker and CCW end up on the same newspaper racks the merger will nearly double the circulation of our outdoors content."
Currently, 7,600 copies of the Boat Broker are distributed throughout Southeast Alaska from Skagway to Ketchikan. The CCW reaches more communities in the region but with 14,500 copies in circulation.
"People aren't always fond of change, and this will certainly be a big transition in format from what everyone is used to, but I am optimistic that readers and advertisers alike will immediately take notice of the positive impact this will have," Westmoreland said. "We'll be able to offer all of Southeast Alaska more content in a more timely manner and advertisers will have twice as many readers to appeal to. This certainly has the opportunity to be a win-win situation for everyone."
