Yachting monthly Feb

[Sybarite]

You're lucky. It's nearly twice that price in France - if ever I buy it.

However the French mags are very good and cheaper.

Their articles are better illustrated. When I see a boat review I want to see things for myself in a photograph and do not need more than a cursory description. Text should prioritize aspects not visible in a photo - such as sailing performance etc.

Often a boat review involves a trip somewhere and so the place is described as well as the boat. Makes for a more interesting article.

John

 

[fergie_mac66]

whats missing ?entertaining read!

My own fault ,over the last couple of weeks,what with all the snow ,I have been so bored that I looked at some mags, from 1995-2001 and enjoyed them so much that I stupidly went out and bought Feb 2010.
enjoyed the old mags What the hell gone wrong with YM ?

red

on another thread like this i said that "the magic of the swatchway factor is missing" its more than that .

There isn't any which is why I cancelled my subscription. Too many adverts with too little decent editorial. I shall miss reading Libby Purve's 7 Tom Cunliffe's columns which were the most interesting of them, but as for the rest it is getting worse and worse. IPC seem to be losing the plot very quickly, which is a great shame because their yachting titles used to be authorative, interesting and relevant

Libby & Tom provide character and soul in their articles , In the middle of souless advertising plus advertisements disguised as articles or editorial.

If what you say is correct ,why do the mags from 10 years past still interest me ive "been there done that " spent two weeks going through all these back copies and enjoyed. This Feb one was ****


red

Summing up The old magazines had the entertaining read factor try and have a look at a few 70,80's Yms.The older ones get even better .Even the adverts in the old mags were entertaining!. It might be because of the effort that had to be put in to produce them . Publishing software is making the production process quicker

However it seem true of all aspects of the media. Look at TV OMG the entertainment factor has gone .

The emphasis is all on getting it out and filling the space in/up. Which is no reflection on the staff of the mags I am sure they work really hard to try to produce a slick YM , but I am sure they are working within constraints produced by the current world situation .

 

[daveyw]

Starting over

So if you were to produce a monthly yachting magazine, what would you like to see in it?

 

[Koeketiene]

Libby & Tom provide character and soul in their articles , In the middle of souless advertising plus advertisements disguised as articles or editorial.

And since both their contributions are available as podcasts there's very little - if any - reason to bother with the printed mag at all.

The meat on the bone - for any mag - should be the editorial content. And there isn't any.
The only one left who still 'writes' for YM is D Durham. And IMHO, he's not got what it takes. And then there's Snooks, with ever larger pictures.
But content - no.
Regurgitated blurbs and adverts masquerading as tests of products provided FOC by suppliers/manufacturers.

IPC should invest in a couple of people who can really WRITE, then YM might once again become a magazine worth READING. And, isn't that what we all want?

 

[jcpa]

Magazine cost is bad, but reprints are exhorbitant!

Hi

If £4-30 for the mag is bad, a cost of £6-95 (or whatever) for a reprint of a one page article from the heyday years is just robbery!

Cheers

John

 

[vyv_cox]

This thread reads increasingly like the script for an edition of Grumpy Old Men.

One thing's for certain - yachting journalists can't win. Over on the other side, PBO readers are complaining that the magazine has become too lighthearted.

I am in awe of the posters in the thread who read the latest edition and didn't learn anything, much less enjoy it. Fancy being so knowledgeable! After well over 50 years of sailing I can say I learned quite a lot. And I enjoyed it.

 

[Ex-SolentBoy]

For some reason or other, I ended up with all the magazines recently. Annoyed at what I felt was too much advertising and too little content I decided to do some counting. The number of pages was quite close, so percentage of advertising pages seemed the best thing to look at. The results were:-

Yachting Monthly - 56%
Yachting World - 57%
PBO - 60%
Sailing Today - 61%

In all cases, I think the balance has gone a little too far, and there has definitely been a reduction in the "depth" of the contents - too much skimming over the surface of a topic for my liking. Having said that, I do not think this is probably the fault of the journalists. I have heard from one publisher that the number of content/editorial pages they can publish is directly linked to the number of advert pages they can sell.

Would you be willing to pay more for higher quality and less advertising?

 

[photodog]

Even if you paid twice. it would make a tiny dent in the amount of advertisinng they need to carry...

Llike all businesses virtually every cost that they have has risen dramatically in the past few years... and yet the amount of revenue they can generate in advertsing has fallen as they compete with on-line for direct advertising spend and readership.

Paper and printing costs are up... distribution costs... and of course staff....

So, one of the results is fewer editorial staff trying to fill the pages... as the cost of production per page MUST come down if the revenue per page drops... and the consequence of this is a lowering in editorial quality.

You can see the result of this in every type of traditional media...

The internet is sucking money out of traditional journalism... directly by Google taking advertising budgets via Google ads, and indireclty by increased marketing budgets going on SEO and moving content on-line.

Even the BBC, which has a virtually unlimited ability to dip into the taxpayers pockets and fund themselves, have been dramatically cuttin back on editorial and new content spend...

I find it amusing that people are only now realising that the internet... far from helping us to communicate better and increase our font of knowledge... are destroying the traditional industrys and methods of production of this knowledge, and replacing it with nothing more than puff and hot air.

 

[bitman]

podcasts

There isn't any which is why I cancelled my subscription. Too many adverts with too little decent editorial. I shall miss reading Libby Purve's 7 Tom Cunliffe's columns which were the most interesting of them, but as for the rest it is getting worse and worse. IPC seem to be losing the plot very quickly, which is a great shame because their yachting titles used to be authorative, interesting and relevant

you can still hear them if you download the mp3 files as podcasts

 

[timbartlett]

I paid £4.30 for this 144 page Mag. of which 67 pages were adverts. Where is the value for money here then ?

red

It almost certainly costs more than £4.30 per issue to buy the paper, ink, binding, and distribution. That's certainly how it works out in most mags
So the writing and photography is free (to you).
(It's damn nearly free to the publishers, as well, BTW, but that's a different story!)

 

[andymcp]

So if you were to produce a monthly yachting magazine, what would you like to see in it?

I could describe my ideal in all sorts of ways. But simplest answer would be to have Yachting Life on a UK scale. It's still mostly about sailing, what people have done, what they are planning to do, interspersed with a few tests and opinions, but most of all it's about getting out and about in your boat.

In the average YM, I find I skip a lot of pages about gadgets and gizmos I'm just not going to buy. Either that means I'm getting increasingly cheap (quite possible!), or reflects an increase in concentrating on the 'stuff' rather than the 'doing'.

Having said that, I have stopped buying magazines most months so perhaps I'm out of date after the recent refresh.

 

[photodog]

you can still hear them if you download the mp3 files as podcasts

See, thats the problem.... If IPC etal are going to give it away then why would you pay for it in the Magazine????

Until the publishers have a much better understanding of why people buy their magazines... ie the articles... they are going to continue to place a very low value on journalism.... If they dont put any value on the content... why should the reader?? And if the reader places no value on the content... why would they buy it??

Its a simple concept... place the interests of the customer first and invest in the product to get a return... but they dont get it.

The major publishers used to be run by journalists.. or at least people who published because they wanted to communicate... now however they are just corporate entities were the product is the package.. and they fail to understand that their real business is in generating Intellectual Property... the package is secondary.... and that the income MUST come from the IP.... which they are currently not producing... and what they do produce they give away..

There has been a belief that has come to dominate over the past 5 or so years.. that people will not pay for content... Largley I think propogated by people like Google who want to be able to attract revenue without actually having to sell a product... (Think about it... what do google actually produce that is original????)

Well I think that this thread nicely illustrates the result of this... we have created a self fullfilling prophecy... we cut the quality to match cuts in income... and viola.. people arent willing to pay for content..

What we are missing is that ... People arent willing to pay for this content...

But this is essentially not true... People are more than ever willing to pay for content... we pay to download ringtones, we pay to download books on Itunes, or music, we pay for games online, we pay for a whole raft of digital content online.... So the problem does not lie in the lack of market.. or the lack of willingness to pay for material online... but in the quality of the product... and this thread proves that, with people crying out for better quality.

Publishers (and the BBC..) need to stop arseing about with the package... and start producing better quality content. Fewer channels.. more originality... charge for the content directly... simplify and slim down the package and concentrate on what the brands core is, editorial content.

 

[fergie_mac66]

Publishers (and the BBC..) need to stop arseing about with the package... and start producing better quality content. Fewer channels.. more originality... charge for the content directly... simplify and slim down the package and concentrate on what the brands core is, editorial content.

Absolutely

 

[reddragon44]

Absolutely

I think the point that I was trying to make was, HOW much I enjoyed the older Mags. PBO YM. YW. from 10 t0 15 years ago.
Todays version just do not match, I am well prepared to pay £4 30 if they had some quality reading in them .I have paid a lot more for them in Greece, in the past and allway found them full of interesting content
That appears to have gone from the latest mags.And I do not think that Vyv_cox as interesting as his input is ,can carry the mag.

red

 

[Ubergeekian]

I could describe my ideal in all sorts of ways. But simplest answer would be to have Yachting Life on a UK scale. It's still mostly about sailing, what people have done, what they are planning to do, interspersed with a few tests and opinions, but most of all it's about getting out and about in your boat.

I flick through Yachting Life in my newsagent occasionally, but I've never felt inclined to buy it. The editorial contents seems to be nothing but racing results and details of forthcoming races. Interesting, I'm sure, to those who want to be somewhere else as soon as possible, but not my thing.

 

[Ubergeekian]

Until the publishers have a much better understanding of why people buy their magazines... ie the articles... they are going to continue to place a very low value on journalism.... If they dont put any value on the content... why should the reader?? And if the reader places no value on the content... why would they buy it??

It's the passion I miss most in Yachting Monthly these days. It's just such a dreary read now, compared with twenty or fifty years ago. Dull homilies about following rules, getting qualified, planning everything - good stuff, but absolutely nothing that makes me want to climb in the boat and go.

It also reads as if it's put together by an editorial staff of two on a budget of £3.59 per issue.

 

[Tin Tin]

It also reads as if it's put together by an editorial staff of two on a budget of £3.59 per issue.

Maybe it is?