YM - Worst ever?

Hang on - have you bought two Julys. My July has anHR 36 thundering along in fine style and my August has a couple of youngsters jumping from a yacht in a Caribbean location. June was a trad boat with a girl on the pulpit.

I think you've got your June and July issues mixed up James?
- June: said HR36
- July: trad boat with yellow foresail, girl in pulpit
- August: same trad boat, same foresail (now on deck), same girl jumps from same pulpit..
 
They've bought both cover pictures in from John Kelly/Getty Images. The girl, looks like the same one too!
I agree that it is subjective as to whether the mag is of interest to the reader. They can't please everyone.
 
Well I'll be d****. I got the issues in the wrong order, sorry for that, and I have just had another look at the July and August issues. I think you are right, they are the same boat - very different shots, though
 
in the "Old Days"
there was PBO for those starting-out & gave lots of tips ect
Yachting Monthly for those more experienced sailors with cruising articles,helpful practical advise, port info & a good local "round-up"
Yachting World - giving a glimpse into the heady world of super yachts, racing & cruising far-away places.

the two former now try to be "all things to all men" + repeats ad infinitum
i cancelled all subscriptions years ago & now browse-n-buy if interested ( which isnt often ) /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif
 
maybe that's why they've started with the polythene wrap arounds. The cheap give aways are to hide their true intentions of stopping you looking before buying.
Gave up my long standing subscription last year due to all the repetition and superficial articles. Occassionally there would be the odd good article.
I found the forums were a more interesting and better read and recently they have had some outstanding photographs. Well done everybody!
 
YMEnd.jpg


Nuff said.
 
I have stopped my subsciption to all three, PBO, YM & YW. I am a horder and looking through years of old copies demonstrated how full of bumf they are and short of analytical articles. The best article I can think of was on anchors and that was translated from a French magazine.

I recently scoured the old mags for articles on folding/feathering props and apart from a general article that gave manufacturers contact details and the most general info but no anaysis I could find nothing. One Formite sent me a translation from a german mag. Unfortunately dated 1997 otherwise the info was great. Actual thrust measured both astern and forwards for a given power output and many other useful comments etc.

To me many of the articles are to promote products and nearly all seem to lack any reasoned criticism. It must be an unfortunate consequence that the majority of the mags income? is derived from adverts.

Its when you do a magazine cull that you realise how little is worth saving - I consider others real life experiences one that I do save.
 
Re: Part of it is us.

YM has a mature readership of experienced sailors. It has to keep on trying to attract new, younger and less experienced readers, or it will stagnate.

YM, when JDS ran the show, probably had a very simple view of it's target audience. These days the analysis is probably a tad more complex. The reading habits of the magazine buying public are no doubt, sounded, sniffed, poked and stroked on a regular basis. Then the advertisers must be satisfied and all under the paternal gaze of the publisher and the man from accounts. What they've discovered is that technical magazines won't butter the parsnips of the new reader. They like SMS articles with pictures. 400 words is about the limit of attention and you have to hook em like salmon, with big writing and colour or they'll wriggle clean through your shallows.

In years gone by a learned article could be heavily technical and very wordy with a few photo's. Many of the articles I read in my early days were really quite testing to understand. Some pages had nothing but words on them. I remember one series my a full blown professor, who's name I've forgotten, all about how the rig and sails worked. It was very deep and almost rewarding.

The pages were full of things to do and make. These days they're full of things others do but now it's also full of things to buy. So articles on the way waders with a gas cape over the top made perfect foul weather gear or how to make a a bilge pump have slipped their moorings to be replaced with articles that assume the reader to be a technical numbskull. Remember this assumption is based on extensive research. Every now and then an attempt to explain something is made but these days the engineering tends towards the social rather than the oily.

The modern trend is towards less word's and lots of photo's. Covers used to have a photo with a few bits of writing now the trend is to get the contents on the cover. In fact all over the cover. This drives photographers mad, well mad'er.

Articles that are lists are very popular. You know what I mean, 10 things to do with a bowline, 20 places to avoid in Hull.

What was really need was a way of maintaining the old YM, for it's salt encrusted readership, until it or they died of natural causes. A new title, a sort of briney GQ,Cosmo and 101 things to do with a dead cat, printed on the finest paper and filled with inserts, could then attract the aspirational.
 
Re: YM - Worst ever? Don\'t think so

This morning having read the post I got on my bike, wandereed off to WHS and found a copy lurking in the superbike section - Read it on the spot in about 10 minutes and bought it.

I've got a collection of YMs & PBOs & CWs & many other miscellaneous magazines that sit on reinforced shelves in my loo. I just wish to say that the older the magazines get the more readabble they become.

What I've found, and no doubt everyboady else has hound is that both YM and PBO emulate Gardeners World and have to repeat the same catechism once every 3 years - It's the same as broad beans/florence fennel/globe artichoke ... etc ....

When there's nothing new you just have to repeat the same .... and it still makes good reading: I found the current edition of YM to be worthy of adding to the 4th shelf and I look forward to re-reading it in 2015 /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Editor Paul and I had a discussion about this thread and we agreed that there was probably not much to be gained by replying to it on the basis that anything we said would probably only stir you all up again /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif.

But I've changed my mind - if only because I have been working for the magazine since 1980 and been reading it since 1968 (which is probably almost as long as all you have been) and I honestly can't agree with what's been said (of course).

I really don't think the magazine has been dumbed down in that time. Yes there are more pictures and short articles but you shouldn't confuse vastly improved production values and a brighter look with lack of intelligent writing. We have tried to make the magazine more accessible, both for long standing readers and newcomers and this has sometimes mean that, instead of tackling, say, everything about heavy weather sailing in one chunk (with pages pure text, poor illustrations and some often appallingly bad black and white pictures), we tackle it in sections. We actually publish more pages of editorial a month than we did 30 years ago and there are fewer pages of adverts (a good or bad thing depending on your point of view).

In the seventies and eighties there were some irreplaceably good writers such as the great JDS and Bill Beavis. Professor Tony Marchaj wrote brilliantly on the physics of sailing (mainly in PBO, I have to admit), Jeremy Howard Williams who was excellent on sails and Alan Watts who was good on the weather, to pick a few at random.

But in their place we have such outstanding yachtsman-writers as Tom Cunliffe, Bill Anderson, Libby Purves, Rod Heikel, Nigel Calder, Paul Jeffes etc, who, in technical and writing ability knock spots off most of the contributors I worked with in the early days - indeed, some of them have been with us since the seventies and eighties.

In amongst this gold there are some aged hacks still bashing out the bread and butter stuff but the staff now boasts the keen journalistic talents of ex-fleet street writer and east coast sailor par excellence, Dick Durham, the bright star of the future, Toby Hodges, and more. Both our photographers are highly experienced yachtsmen and several of the production staff are too. Editor Paul is the best read cruising yachtsman I know and has sailed with many of the greats. He is, instinctively, a dyed-in-the-wool YM reader of the old school but also has the essential journalistic skill of knowing his readers and how to react to a changing market.

And those last two words may be the key. For better or worse boats, the people who use them and how they use them have changed radically since the seventies. So have magazine production standards. We couldn't possible get away with some of the things we wrote then, or the way we presented them, these days.

I, personally, mourn the reduction in number of cruising yarns, but space had to be made for the sort of articles the majority of our readers, and potential readers, were asking for. Writing for today's YM requires a much tighter, sharper style which is actually much more demanding than the indulgence of being able to let it run.

Long standing readers of YM, or indeed, any magazine, will find the same subjects being repeated at intervals. This is inevitable and has always happened. But when you were new to the magazine you wouldn't have noticed. We have always had equipment reviews and, in my judgement, we are more thorough and critical than we were 30 years ago. The piece on the self-steering gear was hardly a puff piece, nor was the Twistle rig report, both of which were warts-and-all. I thought the non-sailing spouse article was refreshingly different and just the thing to ring the changes on an occasional basis, but I can also understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea.

I've broken all the rules of good journalism in this long-winded, personal, unstructured rant. Sorry, and good night! /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
 
\"Sailng Skills\" - Bill Anderson\'s quiz in Yachting Monthly

I read this thought-provoking YM article often and am frequently baffled by Bill's solutions. I have refrained from public comment until now, in case he revokes my existing modest qualification on the grounds of incompetence. But this month's epic really has me flummoxed.

By my calculation the "fast approaching" craft has approached 4 miles in 5 mins. Convergence speed is therefore 12x4=48 knots.Don's boat speed is 5 knots therefore approaching vessel's speed is 43 knots. That's pretty fast! With 1 mile viz, on sighting the other vessel, he will have 48 seconds to encounter - hopefully not too close!

Bow to bow his radar image is minimal. Surely his best course is to turn to port with full speed. This will present a bigger radar image from his hull and also the sails if they have been left set. The reference to ColRegs Rule 19 is clearly irrelevant in view of the shortness of time. If the "hint of change of bearing to the right" means the approaching vessel is veering to port and intending to pass green to green, Don's correct sourse is to match it and increase his clearance.

Don's dilemma is of course common to all boats whose radar screen is fitted below. Ours, being mounted in the wheelhouse, is in front of the helmsman at all time. We set the range at 12 nm flicking up to a higher range from time-to-time to see what else is out there, or down if we have a "close encounter situation" in which case we put on "track" to monitor the relative tracks.

Don should also sound his fog signal regularly (Colregs) but the approaching vessel is unlikely to hear it above the roar of it powerful engines at full stretch! A look-out on the bows used to be our only hope before the days of small-boat radar.

Should Don be attempting to cross shipping lanes in poor visibility anyway?

Comments please from qualified skippers...
 
May I (I hope in the spirit of constructive critism) make these suggestions;
Competitions that require real skill along the lines of the old pilotage quiz.
Critical long term equipment tests. For example take the twisle rig and do a trans-Atlantic.
Critical boat reviews / Long term boat tests. I.e. Buy and run a boat for a year or two not just a couple of hours.
Drop the "it all went wrong because I was poorly prepared tales.."
 
Suspect the true test will be the circulation figures. I do think reading ennui sets in cos there's actually only so many things you can say, and after reading 'em for a few years you've read most of it before anyway
 
[ QUOTE ]
My criticism is with YW. It's becoming less and less relevant as it continues to move up market.

IMHO they should look closely at French magazines especially "Voiles & Voiliers" and "Voile" and "Loisirs Nautiques" the French equivalent of PBO.

The clarity of their presentations is in a different league. Much better illustrations

John

[/ QUOTE ]
I agree entirely. The quality of the photos and illustrations alone sets these french mags leagues apart from the dismal offerings we are presented with in the UK. Take a look next time you are in France, if they ever translate them into English and publish in the Uk it will be instant curtains for YM & PBO
 
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