macd
Active member
Re: Update
I've worked in magazine publishing for the past 25 years, and agree it's a bloody nonsense, but the mags feel trapped in their own self-generated time warp. Historically, one mag in a particular field would bring it's on-sale date forward (so the 'December' issue, for instance, came out on 20 November), in the hope of bagging a load of new readers. Then a competitor would bring their on-sale date forward another week, and so on. Absurdly, it sometimes gets to the point where mags appear on the shelves 2 months before their cover date.
Mind you, some punters don't help. A reader once explained why he bought a rival (non-boating) magazine rather than the one I happened to edit at the time: "they always have the news earlier". On closer inquiry it seemed that he actually believed that news and information was somehow created in discreet monthly chunks, so that a 'December' issue of Rocking Horse News appearing on 2 November would have access to precisely the same info as 'Rocking Horse Rider' appearing 10 days later. So why wait 10 days for the same stuff? Perhaps the most surprising thing was that he could read at all.
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I've worked in magazine publishing for the past 25 years, and agree it's a bloody nonsense, but the mags feel trapped in their own self-generated time warp. Historically, one mag in a particular field would bring it's on-sale date forward (so the 'December' issue, for instance, came out on 20 November), in the hope of bagging a load of new readers. Then a competitor would bring their on-sale date forward another week, and so on. Absurdly, it sometimes gets to the point where mags appear on the shelves 2 months before their cover date.
Mind you, some punters don't help. A reader once explained why he bought a rival (non-boating) magazine rather than the one I happened to edit at the time: "they always have the news earlier". On closer inquiry it seemed that he actually believed that news and information was somehow created in discreet monthly chunks, so that a 'December' issue of Rocking Horse News appearing on 2 November would have access to precisely the same info as 'Rocking Horse Rider' appearing 10 days later. So why wait 10 days for the same stuff? Perhaps the most surprising thing was that he could read at all.
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