Messages from our sponsors...

A message from our Sponsors

RedShark has been published for a year and a half now and we thought you'd like to know a little bit more about how it works. We're also going to introduce a new type of content that's going to be good for us all

As many of you know, RedShark was at first closely associated with Editshare's Lightworks software. There's a simple reason for this: so many people signed up for the Lightworks downloads that the mailing list was the size of some newspaper circulations. (It's now approaching the biggest in the industry, and it's still growing fast!).

With such a resource, it seemed a waste not to put it to good use. So, rather than just selling it to the highest bidder, which some companies might have been tempted to do, we decided to set up a magazine for what we (still quite uniquely, we think) call the Moving Image Industries.

There are a lot of very good publications out there; some of them outstanding. But we wanted something that was more akin to a newspaper, and which would be good to read every day - and even, perhaps, several times a day. We quickly realised that RedShark had to be more than just a Lightworks Newsletter and, if anything, it's almost the opposite of that now, open to news and editorial from every sector of the industry. We do still cover Lightworks, but that's because it's newsworthy; not because we have to!

We wanted RedShark to be optimistic but realistic, with quality writing and a good design.

Most of all, we wanted lots of people to read it, to make it worthwhile, and to make it a viable business, which, we're happy to say, it definitely is.

We have a sensible budget for commissioning new articles, and now have around 1,700 pieces which are published and available in our archive. We have new articles every day, and sometimes we republish older ones which newer readers might not have seen or found.  

A new type of article

Over the next month or so you'll see a new type of article: Sponsored Content. This reverses our traditional way of getting articles, because the authors (mostly manufacturers and vendors) pay us to publish it. Essentially it's another type of advert. But it doesn't mean that it escapes our editorial standards or control.

We're doing this because it will mean we have more funds to commission more new articles, but also because manufacturers usually have a good story to tell - after all, they're the ones with the inside story of how and why they developed their products. We're starting with a look at a new type of screen that will revolutionise the editing experience for audio and video professionals.

We will have a few rules about sponsored content, designed to preserve the quality of your RedShark experience.

First, we will label each sponsored article to make it absolutely clear that it's paid for by someone other than RedShark.

Second, it will not "dilute" the RedShark experience: no sponsored article will take the place of the usual RedShark content. If there were going to be three articles in a day, then the sponsored article would be a fourth.

Third, each article will only make it into RedShark if it's informative, authoritative and accurate. In other words: it only gets in if it's going to be worth our readers' investment in time to look at it.

We're very proud of the way RedShark looks and reads. We have full-time developers and designers available to us to keep us at the front of design and web technology. We're pleased with this new development because it will help us grow and make your experiences with RedShark even better.

Thanks to everyone for reading RedShark and making it one of the most influential publications in the industry.