Update on Yachting Monthly and PBO

Indeed, it is also interesting watching boats being berthed with the male dominating at the wheel while the female scurries around doing the heavy stuff.

My crew is very much smaller than me, and we are rapidly moving to a situation where I do the heavy stuff and he does the steering. And why not?
 
Could it be that Magazines are now irrelevant these days?
The subjects that are of interest are debated on forums and people get information (good and bad) from them.
 
I see no females, although I must say I couldnt be bothered to read it all.
Stu


I'm sure we could borrow a few from the BBC, Woman's Hour team:

girls.jpg

;-)

On a serious note, Javelin is one of the more sensible and entertaining contributors here. If a tame Yacht Surveyor could be found for a similar, regular column that could be good. And perhaps a Broker as well, though they tend to be a rather tight lipped breed.
 
One of the things I like, are pilotage guides for British and foreign ports which can be repeated as and when there are major changes. Cruising info for Holland, Northern France giving lots of up to date sailing instructions would make useful "keep for that season" info.

Info on jury rig and temporary repairs to propulsion and electrics when in areas with little in the way of marine services would be helpful.

Get out there and talk to some of the people sailing either popular or unusual boats and how they get the most out of their recreational time.

Highlight yards and marinas going the extra mile to give proper customer service sadly lacking in a lot of the industry.

Try to be independent of advertisers so you become a trusted brand.
 
Could it be that Magazines are now irrelevant these days?
The subjects that are of interest are debated on forums and people get information (good and bad) from them.
I suppose we are what we are, me old fashioned, I love reading but I love hanging out around here. I can read a favourite book time after time, I still look forward to the mag dropping through the door. At SIBs we hoovered up the free mags for a good read at home. The "binlids" bought me a kindle two years ago but I have only just got used to it lately with the bargains at 99p by A Fullerton fav at the mo. Am aware that the Kindle will kill the trad publishers if not careful and that the laundry book swop shelf at all he marinas we have stopped at will disappear. So the challenge for Elaine is how to keep the interest and grab new punters!
Stu
 
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Thoroughly agree about Javelin, a thoroughly enjoyable read with some really good ideas and a good insight into structural stuff on boats.
Stu
 
Unlike some others, Tom Cunliffe doesn't attract me to magazines. I think I have read all he has to say about three times now, and it wasn't terribly interesting the first time round.

He's a terrific writer and has done some of the kind of sailing I like to read about - Topsail and Battleaxe is a cracking read. But, nah, his magazine writing isn't a big draw for me. Maybe it is the saturation, and also I guess a lot of the Magazine work he gets is writing about things I'm not interested in reading about, like close quarters boat handling in Marinas. Maybe Roger Taylor should write 3000 words on how he loads Ming-Ming onto it's trailer. Or Jason Plato write a book about parking a touring car in a Supermarket. So yeah, TC is a great writer and I'd probably read something he'd written in a Mag and enjoy it if I'd already bought it, but his writing would never entice me to buy the mag in the first place. In contrast I'd make a beeline for any book by him if the topic was right.

TC, the last truly high profile print sailing Journalist?

+1. A guy who can write accessibly for beginners without dumbing anything down. Shame he doesn't frequent the forum any more.

That's the impression his Astro Nav book gave me. Presented in a straightforward fashion, but nothing missing and not patronising at all. The balance is even more important in a magazine article, and I reckon he nails it.

Glad he came up, google pointed me here:
https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/author/tim-bartlett

Time for a small Whisky and a bit of bed time reading. :)
 
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+1. A guy who can write accessibly for beginners without dumbing anything down. Shame he doesn't frequent the forum any more.



Isn't that more PBO? I'll side with Elessar's point about PBO being propulsion-agnositic. I thought it a shame that PBO seemed to be moving towards becoming a "budget sailing" mag rather than specifically what its name suggested. Definitely room in PBO for more DIY elecontrics hackery though
Sorry was addressing both mags.
You could do breadboard stuff?
Stu
 
Other than that, I'd say the main thing that YM, YW and PBO should do is make far, far more use of this forum. Every now and again there's a "hey, help us out with this article" post, but nothing comes back from the mags to here. (other than the 360 pics that snooks used to share)

I used to be staff, when Chris and I would do boat tests together we had time to produce more content for the web and the magazine. I'd always make a point of sharing the pics/video/360 of the boats on the forum first.

However, when staff numbers were reduced in 2013 (I took voluntary redundancy) there was no longer the staff and/or time to do all the extra stuff, and of course producing the magazine always took priority over producing content for the web.

My 360° content, that I've produced since leaving, is on my website:

http://grahamsnook.com/360-tours/360-degree-yacht-interiors/

Along with lots of pretty pictures of boats too.

I'm also in the process of setting up a photo-library that will (hopefully) be a great resource of images of the many boats I've sailed on and tested, but that's still very much a work in progress (keyworkding images is a thankless task) while I'm helping out at YM.
 
Oh dear me, for starters I have been on this forum for the best part of 14 years and have never seen a complaint about the term! Secondly if you put your specs on you will see I surrounded the term with inverted commas to recognise the fact that I was using a term in common use!
Stu
You must have missed my thread about the term then.
 
is the female reader caterd for?
Stu

I'd like to think YM caters for those who enjoy sailing, regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation.

YM has many excellent contributors, I could list all the contributors we have and point out that many aren't male, but there is no need to, as a contributor is a contributor just like a sailor is a sailor. You don't need a willy to sail a boat, neither do you need one to read or write for YM.
 
I'd like to think YM caters for those who enjoy sailing, regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation.

I have no reason to doubt that it tries to ... but. I've just pulled a couple of mags off the toilet shelf. First, PBO from July 2016.

  • Name checked authors: David, Laura, Richard, Dave, Sam (m), Andrew, Peter, Jake, Ben, Sticky, Trevor, Norman, Maggie (on galleys!), Daria (f), Alex, Peter, Chris (m), Dudley, Peter, Jan-Willem, Howard, Peter, Nicoll, Sam (?), David, John, Dick. So that's 24 or 23 men to 3 or 4 women.
  • The PBO Experts: Will, David, Stuart, Ian, Mike, Colin, Paul, Pat, Peter, Richard, Andrew, Gary, Colin, Chris, Tony, Richard. Sixteen men, no women.
Next, Yachting Monthly from June 2017

  • Name-checked authors: Kieran, Theo, Dick, Chris (m), Vyv (m), Andy, Barrie, Sue, Graham, Chris (?), Conrad, Ken, John, Alastair, Chris (m), Bill, Sam (m), Kit (f), Olly, Norman, Peter, Alfred, Rosemarie, Suzy, Howard, Chris (f), Suzy, Gill (m), Gaynor, Ronald, Phillipe, David. 25 or 24 men, 7 or 8 women.
Very few of the longer articles are by women - the honourable exception is Laura Hodgetts in PBO. Neither magazine contains any pictures of non-white people or contains any non-European names. All couples mentioned are opposite-sex. I don't think this is deliberate sexism or racism. However, I think it does show an unconscious bias, and one which is likely to be off-putting to readers or potential readers who are not white men (and for that matter, middle-aged or older).

That's not to say that it should be the mission of YM or PBO to put right the ills of society - clearly it shouldn't. But perhaps in these commercial times it is not entirely sensible to produce magazines which appear to come from, and therefore aim at, such a limited demographic. Can PBO really not find even a single woman expert?
 
Can PBO really not find even a single woman expert?

But that statement is exactly what is wrong with all this PC tosh. Finding a person to fill a role based on quotas, is as bad as actively avoiding people because of their race, sex etc etc.

Find the expert and sign them up, regardless of their specific traits. If they happen to be all white men, so be it. If they happen to be all black lesbians, again, no problem. As a reader we just want the right advice, I personally don't give two hoots whether the person giving it sits down or stands up to take a leak.
 
But that statement is exactly what is wrong with all this PC tosh. Finding a person to fill a role based on quotas, is as bad as actively avoiding people because of their race, sex etc etc.

Bet you're a white man. Am I right?

Find the expert and sign them up, regardless of their specific traits. If they happen to be all white men, so be it. If they happen to be all black lesbians, again, no problem.

And yet you seem to care very much that a qualified expert might be appointed in part because she's a woman. As long as she knows her stuff, why would you care?
 
However, when staff numbers were reduced in 2013 (I took voluntary redundancy) there was no longer the staff and/or time to do all the extra stuff, and of course producing the magazine always took priority over producing content for the web.

Understandable, but in this day and age a bad call I think...

In the world of sailing, the YBW forums and SA stand out as the heavyweights of forums.

SA doesn't have a printed magazine to work with but YBW does. You wouldn't know it from these forums though!
And SA is the place to go for sailing news, not YBW.

Case in point - the protocol for the next America's cup was released overnight. Is there one mention of it here? For sure YW put it on Facebook, and there's nearly 100 comments so far.... But they are supposed to own the racing forum here, and nothing....

People hereabouts still cite me as an authority on racing. I'm not, I'm just a Solent hack. You're never going to get the real racers interested in the YBW forums without any content. So why isn't it being pushed on the forums to drive traffic here instead of Facebook? I can't believe that it's a better business model to drive your content and activity on to a platform that you don't own, as opposed to one that you do own...
 
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