Soldier Magazine

SOLDIER Magazine, the official monthly publication of the British Army, is produced by an in-house team and published by the Ministry of Defence. It strives to offer an effective means of communication aimed primarily at junior ranks but also of interest to all ranks of the British Army, cadets and the wider military community, including veterans and members of the public with an interest in militaria.

Its objectives include providing a channel of welfare information; promoting the British Army's image internally and externally; and contributing to the upkeep of morale within the Service.

Tri-annual independent readership research of its core audience has produced strong evidence that most officers and soldiers read some of the magazine and that some officers and soldiers read most of the magazine. The publication's robust and oversubscribed correspondence pages, which allow serving personnel to air grievances, criticise procedure and raise areas of concern, further indicate that the readership is genuinely engaged with the magazine.

The magazine is distributed free to serving personnel (70,000 copies), but paid-for subscriptions - an unusual requirement for a government-sponsored publication - have risen year on year, most recently by 2 per cent. SOLDIER subscribers number 2,627 (latest figures December 2007), with an additional 4,514 copies sold through newsagents in the UK. About 15,000 visitors from 85 countries read the magazine online each month, taking away a positive impression of the British Army.

On 1 January 2008, a free-access digital edition of SOLDIER was launched on the World Wide Web via http://www.soldiermagazine.co.uk/

The range of coverage includes news sections; features; celebrity interviews; sport; music, book and games reviews; and, crucially, a controversial warts-and-all correspondence section, in which military personnel are invited to have their say. After some initial misgivings about "washing dirty linen in public" the Army's chain of command is now fully signed up to the section, regarding it both as a valuable pressure valve for serving personnel with grievances and confirmation of issues flagged up by the MOD's independent Continuous Attitude Surveys and the Chief of the General Staff's Briefing Team.

Tapes and CDs of the magazine produced by the Talking Newspapers organisation are used for English language tutoring of Gurkha recruits and the magazine is extensively used as a language learning aid by British Council teachers instructing former Soviet Bloc military personnel under the British Government's Partnership for Peace initiative.