Twelve years ago in October, the first issue of City Magazine was published. Following the example of foreign freebies, it began its journey through the city streets and thus became a fixture in our favorite urban cafes, bars and restaurants, shopping centers, libraries, cinemas, airports, cultural institutions and on the street where I myself first held City in my hands. We've been in touch ever since. I am a reader, a fan and now a creator.
We monitor each other's development and complement each other. 12 years it's a long time, and if you had a time machine, you'd discover some other world in 2004. A world without smartphones. A world without Facebook. And also a world without City. But we are not sorry that the world is taking on such a different image and is changing at such an incredible speed. We eagerly await the development, because it creates the substance on which our records are created. It is the basic building block – if you will – of the DNA of the medium we create. Oriented towards the future, trends and innovations that inspire. That is why we leave the past behind and do not fear change because it is part of our basic being. Part of our mission. In twelve years, we have experienced many metamorphoses together with you, our readers, and with your help and encouragement we have created 213 of free editions with more than 11,000 content pages. On the website citymagazine.si, we published over 18,000 news items and became the leading portal for the urban population, reaching on average as many as 100,000 different Slovenian internet users per month. They visit our website as many as 450,000 times a month and view a total of around 3,000,000 online documents. The statistics… otherwise boring, but we still find them so very exciting. Also because it shows another dimension of our medium, a dimension by which we can measure and compare ourselves. During the years of the economic crisis, we managed to develop and, despite the reluctance to optimize costs, maintain the right direction and vision for the future. For post-crisis times. The edition before you proves that the press is by no means dead, as many evil tongues of analysts claim. And that print media can also keep up with development and, more importantly, survive with the synergy of digitization and new forms of print advertising. But it is necessary to be progressive, different and innovative.
Small and agile, but above all with the mindset of a fearless researcher and innovator. Such are the times. And such is the media landscape, which changes as user habits change. Millennials are fleeing TV to YouTube. From print media to the web. But not everything is so black and white. Somewhere in between are shades that are simply so different that they can cross the boundaries of categories. And this is where City are looking for their chance. It is accessible because it is free, and this is precisely why it exceeds the category of print in which media experts place it. At the same time, it is also an original that, despite followers and imitators, is able to transcend time in a different and above all original way.
Finally, I would like to thank our advertisers. The latter are the ones that fully enable the creation of a freeware such as City Magazine. In this issue, we can boast that there are three advertisers with us who also worked with us in the first issue back in October 2004. And this is exactly what makes us believe that we can do it together. Here's to many more years to come!
