Cowboys & Indians Magazine Aims to Corral New Readers With Newly Expanded Website

DALLAS, April 30 /PRNewswire/ -- After bucking current industry trends by scoring a significant circulation increase in 2008, Cowboys & Indians, The Premier Magazine of The West, has set out to wrangle even more readers with a redesigned and ambitiously expanded website.

The new and improved www.CowboysIndians.com offers a bountiful sampling of material from C&I's print edition - everything from personality profiles and Western fashion spreads to lifestyle features and real estate listings - along with content created especially for the web.

Visitors to the C&I website will be able to enjoy blog postings, downstreaming audio and video, up-to-date arts and entertainment coverage, and on-the-scene reports from events as diverse as the Nashville Film Festival, the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, and the Denver International Western/English Apparel & Equipment Market.

"As with the American West," says Cowboys & Indians publisher Gregory L. Brown, "the story of this magazine has been one of growth and expansion. Increasing and enhancing our on-line presence, to please long-time readers while introducing ourselves to new audiences, will enable us to reach more and more people who regard the West not merely as a geographic locale, but also as a state of mind and a way of life."

Christy Robinson, C&I's web managing editor, sees the revamped www.CowboysIndians.com site as the perfect balance of style and substance, tradition and innovation.

"As we built the new site," Robinson says, "we remained mindful of those topics that have always interested our readers -- ranch and Native life, fashion, adventure and travel, riding, art, music, film, food, home interiors, collecting, Old West history. Then we merged all of that with the sort of features that web users have come to expect, like photo slideshows, audio of Texas cowboy poet Red Steagall's weekly radio show, embedded video and listening stations, and the C&I Blog. We're also in the middle of developing other great offerings on the site, such as a Western recipe database, e-mail newsletters, and an events calendar that can be sorted by date."

According to Brandy Minick Hawkins, advertising director for Cowboys & Indians, the newly redesigned C&I website offers advertisers new opportunities "to be seen and appreciated by an even wider audience. They will now be part of a bigger, constantly growing picture." The long-range goal, adds C&I executive editor Margaret L. Brown, "is to drive traffic to the website with the magazine, and readers to the magazine with the website."

According to the magazine's Audit Bureau of Circulations Publisher's Statement for the six months ending Dec. 31, 2008, Cowboys & Indians posted an all-time high average total circulation of 158,407 last year. (When compared to the same period in 2007, this is a 7.5 percent increase in average total circulation.) Using the formula of 5.2 readers per copy, as determined by the Magazine Publishers of America, Cowboys & Indians now has an average of 823,716 readers for each issue.

The June issue of Cowboys & Indians, now available at newsstands everywhere, showcases publisher Gregory L. Brown's in-depth interview with Ted Turner, the maverick media entrepreneur who has accumulated enough acreage to qualify as the largest individual landowner in the United States. The July issue, due June 9, will pay tribute to the legendary John Wayne by celebrating four of the American icon's greatest Westerns - Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Bravo and True Grit - and collecting commentary from Wayne's children about The Duke's enduring legacy 30 years after his death.

SOURCE Cowboys & Indians Magazine