Dredging News Online celebrates 10th Anniversary

News - December 10, 2009

Dredging News Online is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year.

Originally started as part of the Marine Sand and Gravel Information Service or ‘MAGIS’ INFO 2000 programme from the European Union, Dredging News Online published a weekly newsletter for the first five years and became a daily service five years ago, long before some of its more recent competitors. The first articles were published on the site in May 1999 and can still be found by searching the site, as can news stories dating back a decade, providing users with an unparalleled resource on all aspects of the international dredging industry.

The objective of MAGIS was to create a web portal for the international marine sand and gravel industry, a portal that provides a range of services, partly on a subscription and partly with free access, including data on sand and gravel extraction licenses; dredging contract and tenders; sand and gravel geological and geophysical information; data on sand and gravel stocks, demand and availability; dredging companies and their vessels; dredging equipment manufacturers, suppliers and their products.

Nowadays, Dredging News Online is published by the world-renowned Clarkson Research Services Ltd (CRSL), part of Clarkson PLC, the world’s leading integrated shipping services group. Complementing the daily news service provided by Dredging News Online, CRSL also publishes Dredgers of the World, a well respected vessel register, now in its seventh edition – and the only publication of its type - compiled in association with the International Association of Dredging Contractors (IADC). Full details of this publication can be found at www.crsl.com.

Readers of Dredging News Online also benefit from access to Dredgeline, an on-line bibliographical reference database that provides easy access to a vast body of knowledge in the fields of dredging and dredged material management.

In recent years a number of publications have copied the Dredging News Online format, but unlike some dredging news services, Dredging News Online has never relied purely on stories culled from newspapers, drawing on contacts in the worldwide dredging industry developed over the last 10 years for original news stories.

Dredging News Online also remains the only dredging publication to publish regular Tenders & Contracts information from the US, Europe and elsewhere and has a searchable archive of such information dating back a decade.

Unlike some other publications, Dredging News Online does not dilute its coverage of the worldwide dredging industry with coverage of other, unrelated sectors or use un-edited news stories with little relevance to the dredging market, and is produced by a team led by an editor with 15 years of experience writing about the dredging industry and more than 20 years of experience writing about the marine, shipping and ports industries as a whole.

News from Dredging News Online appears on a near-daily basis in Google News Alerts, thus vastly enhancing the number of times our stories are read worldwide, in addition to an ever-growing number of hits on the site and subscribers to the newsletter.