With print media suffering terribly under the yoke of the recession, and examples of our colleague’s craft dropping off the radar seemingly every day, my partner Steve Allison and I decided that it was the ideal time to become a publisher, and started Combustion Publishing focussing exclusively on the Web as our platform looking ahead to a now-foreseeable future where paper-based communications will be irrelevant.

It all began with our flagship magazine, a motoring titles with a familiar name to all South African motoring aficionados older than 10, Drive Magazine. This brand had been languishing for two years without a publisher when we grabbed it and converted it into an exciting new, flip-format online magazine complete with all the design elements and editorial quality expected of a printed motoring magazine, without pulping up a single tree to offer all this great content to readers across the world for no cost whatsoever.

Supporting the magazine is an appealing blog front page which acts as a repository for our archived articles, including road tests, launch features, and opinion columns, as well as up-to-date motoring news feed for our subscribers.

Drive Magazine was accepted as well as can be expected, launching into a motoring sector ravaged by recession and the tightening belt of the consumer, particularly on luxuries like motor vehicles! But the title quickly set about growing at an exceptional pace, averaging a 35% monthly increase in readership to the milestone figures we achieved as we launched our sixth monthly edition in February 2010. 200 000 hits, 50 000 pages impressions, and some 6000 unique readers per month were being drawn to this new, free online publication, and the pace of growth continued unabated.

Although a well-known title, our new team, new models and new methods are now becoming well-established in the industry we serve, while readers have come to rely on Drive for a very rare flavour of bald-faced honesty when reviewing the cars enthusiasts are interested in driving, as enthusiasts are interested in driving them. Opinionated objectivity has readers coming back for more on a monthly basis, as the stunning photography, creative design, and innovative packaging and delivery methods have slowly won consumers over to the pleasures of reading magazines online.

If you’re a petrolhead and you haven’t already, head on over to www.drivemagazine.co.za to read or download the latest issue for yourself, or even browse through our issues archives just for the sake of catching up. You’ll discover a writing style as entertaining as it is truthful, galleries of superb motoring-oriented photography and a package which is perfect for human consumption while conserving our dwindling lumber supplies.

Russell Bennett is the editor of the title, Steve Allison the Bike Editor, and Kyle Stone our over-eager junior reporter who has to drive all the 1.3-litre and below cars. Together this collaboration encapsulates raw, boiling passion for the subject of motoring in every sphere, from trucking to trackdays.

A project like this after all, bringing the advantages of the latest tech to the SA motoring industry, has to be a labour of love to succeed. Drive Magazine is a product of pure passion.

Mac Action, the ultra-niche Apple-obsessed digital technology magazine, was in fact Combustion’s first product. The minute Mac market in the country and poor support from key players in the industry meant Mac Action delivered a crash course in the business of Web publishing, that’s for sure.

Still available at www.macaction.co.za, the title is currently being incorporated into a larger and far more famous local technology title, now also published by Combustion Publishing, SA Computer Magazine. Following the same model established from the beginning of the publishing house, MacAction is freely available to all interested readers online in a gorgeous, high-quality flip-format magazine, powered by Issuu.com.

The magazine delivered up to date reviews on Apple products, in-depth features on the technologies and personalities behind this famous ICT brand, and all the news Mac addicts were eager for in one easy to read, easy to digest package. The title also focussed heavily on training new and experienced Mac users in getting the most from their systems and installed software via detailed How To articles relating to a wide variety of Mac functions.

The more versatile nature and audience of the new SOHO-oriented technology magazine SACM lends itself perfectly to the incorporation of MacAction as the Apple-specific sub category, while expanding the reach of the publishing house into a sector Russell in particular knows intimately – ICT.

When it was announced that yet another well-established SA magazine brand was shutting its doors, Combustion saw the opportunity and snapped the title up, converting it to the online format preferred by this new-age publishing house. So SACM (SA Computer Magazine) made the leap from print to a purely online play as of March 2010.

In fact, we’re still feverishly busy with all of the planning and production of the first issue and managing the requirements of the technology industry as well as those of motoring. Technology is editor Russell Bennett’s first love and he has been in ICT journalism for 12 years in 2010, covering an extensive range of products and industry news pieces in this time. Russell is technically fluent and has a knack for picking up new technology quickly, and within the SACM platform is able to continue to refine and improve this art on a whole new delivery and revenue model.

Once again, the new SACM Online will be published monthly on Issuu and content fed to the front-end blog at www.sacm.co.za.

Look out for this exciting new title launching in April 2010!