Magazines biting the dust

R/C Report is one of my favorite magazines. Not only honest, but fun.

Good flying, desmobob

One of the reasons that I no longer buy magazines of any type is because of the small print. A backlit computer screen makes reading so much easier that there really is no competition from printed media these days.

I too like Gordon and the crew at R/C Report.

I do not miss RCM. Their stodgy form of glorified infomercial articles finally tore it with me. Ditto other model magazines.

It is sad to see such institutions fading into the past, but such is life.

Ed Cregger

Question for this group...

Sound off ! Do you think that "printed media" like R/C magazines is going by the way of the doe-doe-bird ?

If so...is "Car & Driver", "Fishing", "Field & Stream", etc., etc., etc. going to suffer the same fate ?

Thoughts ?

CJ

Younger folks with good vision will probably still buy printed media, albeit not as much as in the past. But, still in significant quantities.

I don't know how many senior citizens prefer computer ezines to print media. I can only judge by myself, but, as stated previously, magazines must offer something worth reading besides thinly disguised advertisements and they must address the issue of small print.

Ed Cregger

On Mon, 6 Feb 2006 07:20:50 -0500, "Ed Cregger" wrote in :

Yes, I subscribe to RCR, too.

I miss Clarence Lee.

Marty

Clarence Lee is now in MAN April 06 issue.

in

I hope not, otherwise I'm going to need to start hauling my notebook and a wireless adapter into the john so I've got something to read. :)

On Mon, 6 Feb 2006 08:08:22 -0700, "Larry Smith" wrote in :

That's good news!

Thanks for passing it on.

Marty

Kevin,

I did not think of that : ( .........ohhhhhhh nooooooooo !

Ok, if this happens....I guess we all need Ipaq's or tablet PC's in order to look at RcUniverse or RC Groups...

Would it be considered "bad form" to chat on one of these sites while you sit ????

CJ

"The OTHER Kev>

Nearly right..... RCM&E will still be available here in England. The publishers went into receivership with a whole bunch of magazine titles that were losing ooodles of $/£. Another company has quickly moved in and bought some of the hobby magazines, RCM&E being one of them.

It seems that there is a small number of hobby specific magazines that were making a tidy profit whereas all the more general (read rubbish) titles were losing money in a big way.

The company that has bought the successful hobby titles has also made a large amount of money available for further development and expansion of the hobby magazines... they did the sums and `cherry picked' a small number of profit making titles that they see further scope for.

Newspapers and magazines are becoming increasingly threatened by the internet. What newspaper can update news as fast as an internet site ? Most magazines are lightweight trash and unless they serve a dedicated group i.e modelmakers,wood/metal/craft workers or professional bodies,etc wil fold. How many `celebrity' based mags do you see on the shelves... all covering exactly the same things as each other ?

Reg

Interesting. Any guess what percentage of magazines, at least special interest ones, are sold through super market outlets vs. subscriptions?

Red S.

To those that say printed magazines will die, I offer the following -- When I take my already read model magazines out to the field to share; they are instantly scarfed up by whatever guys are on hand; never to be seen again. My conclusion: Those that say paper magazines are going out of style are simply too cheap to get their own subscription. Wait until E-zines start being offered on a paid-subscription basis only.

Cheers -- Lyman Slack

If you remember the magazines from the '60-70's, they mostly talked about modelers and their projects., now they mostly talk about companies and their products. They sort of cater to the purchaser rather than the modeler. Lots of flyers around but not too many modelers left.

Phil AMA609

The Hobby and market have changed . Any magazine's content directly reflects their audience's tastes. And the size of that audience. With the exception of Clarence Lee RCM was essentially content lite.

We see more ads today for products in magazines today( and thus less about building projects) because we have more fliers than builders. The number of ARF only modelers is growing. We should not look at that judgmentally, that is merely an observation of fact . The magazine editors know where their market and audience is and work to keep its content aligned with that audience.

ARFs as opposed to Kits is not the issue - there is a place for both . The current state of the hobby tells us that . Unfortunately the number of scratch builders and kit builders is declining , but that is the way it is and no one of use can change that fact .

My flying club , with 150 members , is by count , 85% ARF flyers. More interesting at the field on any given day it is rarely anything other than 100% ARFs flying.

Frank Schwartz wrote:

| To those that say printed magazines will die, I offer the following -- When | I take my already read model magazines out to the field to share; they are | instantly scarfed up by whatever guys are on hand; never to be seen again.

Ok, but this doesn't leave much of a business model for the magazine makers -- `people will buy your product, as long as you give it away for free'.

I guess they could try and make up for it in volume (oh wait, it's not

1999 anymore, sorry) or in advertising revenue, though considering that very few magazines of any sort or given away for free to just anybody, I'm guessing that this rarely works.

(Now, it's not hard to get free subscriptions to certain trade magazines, especially if you're in a position where you can influence the purchases of your firm, but Joe User can't usually get free subscriptions to stuff he'd actually want to read unless he's a bit ... creative in filling out his subscription form. And if everybody did this, the magazines would probably stop giving away freebees.)

| My conclusion: Those that say paper magazines are going out of style | are simply too cheap to get their own subscription.

Or perhaps people just need something to line their bird cage.

In any event, I've not noticed this. Leaving magazines (usually R/C related, but I've also brought up some others) at the club field, they tend to get picked over a little, but it's rare that they're scarfed up quickly.

| Wait until E-zines start being offered on a paid-subscription basis | only.

They already are in some cases. And generally, unless the `e-zine' is really something special, there are very few takers, because people can get the same stuff elsewhere for free.

Personally, I still subscribe to a few magazines, mostly R/C related, and I like them. But I don't get the paper anymore -- I just get my news online.

I do see the market for printed materials -- magazines, newspapers, books, etc. -- to decline in the future due to the Internet. Not go away entirely, but decline. For news, the slack is/will be taken up by sites like cnn.com. For R/C stuff, Usenet and the many forums out there. You get the idea.

Ultimately, there's lots of amateurs out there writing R/C related stuff (like I'm doing right here, sort of) and they don't mind giving it away for free. The professionals may write stuff that's better than average, but with so many amateurs out there, some of their stuff is going to statistically be even better than what the professionals put out.

How to make money from this? Well, the current thinking seems to be to set up yet another forum, probably concentrating on some specific aspect of the hobby to differentiate yourself from the rest, get people to use it (i.e. add (and view) content for free), and sell ads. (Though often the ads come later, after the site has grown to some critical size.) Capital outlay and time required to get started are relatively small (at least compared to a full fledged magazine) and so lots of people are trying it. Are they making good money at it? I've no idea, but I'll bet a few are, and I'll bet many (most?) of those making the most money aren't even doing lots of modelling stuff themselves.

I don't see why. Unless you tried to duplicate the "echo" you'd get in there if you were yapping on the phone instead... :)

For years, RCM&E was a more literate magazine than those we enjoyed here. There is one exception here and it is Quiet Flyer. It has good articles with technical discussion and information. There is more information in that magazine than what can be assimilated in any one reading...so it is archive worthy. It is a reference source. This is important. But Wil Byers, editor, is caught up in the graphic artist maelstrom that most magazines fall prey to. The magazine is just too danged hard to read. Dark text on dark background and a deliberate disregard for traditional magazine formatting. I know that the pages must look great on a monitor...that is emitted light, but on the page, it is hard to read...that is reflected light. Maybe they aren't doing the magazine for we readers but rather because they think it is fun to put out magazines. The problem with magazines is that no one is reading. The graphic artists and editor must not be reading their own magazines or they would see how hard it is read and understand. It is cute and overly clever with multiple fonts, clip-art, and the like, but they forget what the magazine was for. Simply put -- magazines are not interested in developing a "readership." They are only interested in "lookership."

The ads pay the freight and they can hardly pan an advertiser's product when they are buying inside cover space. Besides, people on the staff are getting free airplanes and the like...if I was on the receiving end, I would be pretty generous with my praise, too. I have only seen one good product review...Dave Thornburg critiquing the kitting of his own design, "Bird of Time." He was simply honest...gosh...it was so refreshing. And funny.

Frank, I especially like the "and suches"...like their old covers. They were worthy of matting and framing. Max Mills was so good. When I dumped all my RCMs, I made sure that I saved the covers. A lot of the younger modelers may not remember these. This was back in the day when most modelers were healthy males and the only thing prettier than a good looking model airplane was a good looking woman holding it. (Wash my mouth out with soap!) Then PC struck and we became a repressed society.

Frank, at our ages (I bet you wish you were only 71 again!), we can remember a bunch of this stuff. Many today have never handled an early Model Builder on a heavy, matte paper with each issue laid out the same so we could flip through a stack of them and only look for the full-size peanut plans...or just the section on sailplanes, or old timers. And there were pretty girls...and Bill Northrop wrote funny things about them. Modeling was more fun then. We never had side-bars in our articles...we knew how to write without the need of editorial asides. I have contributed to most of the magazines and I gave a good article to one of them for nothing because the magazine was so pretty and needed a little help ... now, I would have no pride having one of articles there. And one certainly doesn't do these things for the money. I was thinking the other day that I got paid for an article in

2000 was exactly what I got paid for one in 1977. Considering just inflation, the article in 2000 should have paid three times what it did in 1977 -- I bet the price has gone up near three times. I finally got rid of my magazine archive on eBay and I made a bunch of readers happy. That is "readers" -- not just "lookers."

Ken Cashion -- these are observations; not mere opinions.

Thank God the internet came along when it did. Now we can discuss our models in forums over which no one has control. But what do we do? We get into personalities and have slam parties. Of course, most of us that used to be interested in the technical aspects of modeling have grown old - the natural course of things.

My favorite period of model magazines was the sixties. Folks actually discussed aerodynamics from a lay persons perspective. A perspective which most modelers understood and with experiments that we could replicate.

Hal de Bolt, Joe Bridi, etc., were at the forefront of model aerodynamics, as far as I was concerned. Those whose names I have temporarily forgotten and did not post, please forgive me. It is not intentional.

Magazines used to provide the hobbyist with an education in various fields. Today's modeling magazines are mostly glorified infomercials.

Models have been relegated to the status of toys used to kill ones precious little spare time. It is our fault. We let it happen.

With the internet, we also have the means of returning to the dissemination of useful information. RCU does an excellent job, in my opinion, as do several other R/C specific sites/forums. These forums are why I no longer buy magazines. Because they are on the screen and because they contain the content that I wish to see, they get my time and attention.

I have lots of empathy for those few stragglers that remain in the paper magazine business. But that isn't sufficient reason to buy their mags.

Ed Cregger