Ok seeing as its up for discussion (again
), please sift out the facts from the various lines of vitriol below.
As I was editor for over 4 years I feel I can give some insight.
Please don't look at the Mag with rose coloured spectacles, see it for what it was, expensive and a ball ache to produce, with almost no one wanting to submit articles and no thanks either.
1. Once a year or 10 times a year, editing the mag was a hateful, soul destroying shit of a job, it wasn’t unusual for people to occasionally (yeah right) submit work on slate, 8 inch floppy disc, camel hide or anything they could get their hands on, rather than do it right, usually in English so poor, a spotty text speaking adolescent would be ashamed and when you spent 100 hours re writing it, they got the arse because you missed out the bit about aunty Hilda and her begonias. I once had to transcribe 18 A4 pages which were hand written and made no sense what so ever, Plus NO ONE cuts you any slack. I have travelled hundreds and hundreds of miles, spent many £'s of my own money and many hundreds of hours of my own time for what amounts to an arse kicking when its a few days late or god forbid you spelt something wrong or in a font to small for some 80 year old to read, I remember once we used a graphic with colours similar to a well known car manual and all hell broke lose, with a threat of legal action from them, worse thing was we actually sent it to them in the first place and even worse we took it seriously.
2. Who then decides what goes in the mag, I used to have ultimate say (yeah right) but once or twice was overruled (for political reasons) on one occasion I had one submitter get quiet irate that I had dared bump his article.....an article I was expected to write from a few camera phone pictures btw.
3. Postage costs, these will go up as the bulk increases, the postage costs alone used to be in the £hundreds,
4. Advertising revenue, we can't even get people to pay for trade subscriptions (other than the one or two regulars) I rang countless traders and they just weren’t interested as we are a tiny little itsy bitsy car marque, potential revenue was marginal.
5. Amount of pages, how many do you think we should have bearing in mind you have to work in pairs.... so that’s cover, contents, calendar, say three car articles, write ups for the previous years events, some coverage of sporting Z's and events, drag challenge, financial report, membership report....hey presto you very quickly have 26 pages, often Jak and I would drop articles to keep it down to this. I would guess that an annual mag would need more than this.
as for a cost saving, the big cost is in creation and postage, actual page count doesn’t increase this massively.
6. Yes we could have someone knock up a few pages in word pad or whatever and get it printed on a John Bull printing kit but it just doesn’t cut it, Jak used to do the artwork for us and as many hours as I spent editing, Jak would spend tweaking the artwork and creating something from nothing.
As you can tell the 4 years on the job has left me mentally scarred and needing tablets twice a day.
Now stop talking about the hateful thing and move along, nothing to see here
.