Moved from Other thread

On 19 December 2024 at 15:29 Russell Eberhardt Said:
On 19 December 2024 at 13:54 Neil Wyatt Said:
An official announcement on the future of ME and MEW will be made soon.

Neil Wyatt
Well I hope it is soon.  Mortons have already sent me two emails to say that I should renew my subscription to MEW now as it expires soon.  It has just over three months to run! Is that their definition of soon?

Russell

Sorry just seen your official anouncement.  I’ll not be renewing just yet then!

Congratulations Neil.  It is a great opportunity for you but at the same time it must be rather daunting thinking of all the extra work.  Sorry about your bereavement.  I sympathise having lost my wife this year.

Good luck

Russell

I think the stark reality is that without the magazine there is no forum.

regards Martin

I’ve looked at ME from the days I was at college to buying the odd one and flicking through most in WHSmiths and have subscribed to ME since about 2000, had access to MEW for most of the many years I have moderated here.

I’ve made some of my thoughts known in Martin’s thread as well as several others over the year sso will just comment mostly  on some of Neil’s Points.

– Firstly I would suggest that the existing subscribers to the two mags are the ones that should be asked. So when the notice goes out about the changes to subscriptions at the very least a link to this thread asking them to comment should be included. Better still a questionnaire they can fill in and send back. This would give a better picture as many subscribers and contributors don’t use the forum.

– I’m not too worried about what the editorial and letters pages are called but would like to see the content of On The Wire at least relate to the hobby engineer. All too easy to just copy and paste a press realease to fill in a page that is more industry news than what the person in a shed really wants to know.

– The mention of lost subjects such as model aircraft, ships, etc. These are now catered for with their own specific magazines that never existed in the past so by trying to cover too much the focus may be lost and unlikely to attract new subscribers as they are already trying to justify the cost of the subs to another mag that has a lot more relevent content to them in it. But happy to see parts being made to replace or improve those of say an RC car or heli, just not a build log of a wooden ship.

– Couple of things on layout. ME has a very wasteful layout with the first page of each article having the left hand column taken up with none of the actual article or very little else. No subscriber wants to pay for blank spaces and with a limited editorial budget that pays by the page the editors should be trying to get as much content onto each page as possible.

Padding out pages with either excessively large drawings or small ones with a massive blank space around them. Take a look at 4750 page 52 and 54 as an exampe of both. One part is drawn so large it takes up over half a page, the other small enough to be the width of one column but bounded by a box that makes it 3 columns wide and therefore takes up another half page

I’d like to see arreturn to advers grouped at the front or back not randomly throughout the mag

– Space, as one who has always put additional photos into a thread rather than pad out an article I’m all for having some article content on the forum. Whether authors will submit stuff and probably not get paid for it is another matter. As is who will get paid to put extra stuff on the site if you are only getting paid to produce the mag? Something to consider adding to the author pack

larger photos are OK but not just for the sake of making them big where the subject can clearly be seen on one half the size or having several almost identical shots when one well considered photo would (see web content for those on the cutting room floor)

– Long articles are going to be a problem, bad enough a loco or traction engine build taking maybe 2 yrs in ME now it could take 4 with only a small percentage of readers interested in it and even less that are likely to build it. Any build no matter what length or article would need to run in consecutive mags as once every 2months is just stretching things out too far.

On a similar note some of the long running topics may need to be dropped or limited to a couple a year. Things like Engineers day out, The Stationary Steam Engine, Butter side up, even club news.

Although I’m a bit biase the last couple of years has seen ME content predominantly Loco based with a slight move to more stationary steam over the last couple of months. I’d like to see less loco and more stationary steam, IC, Hot air and generally a more varied subject matter on the Model Engineer Side. MEW is a reasonable mix. I don’t know if this large loco content is part of what has seen subscriptions fall but Dave’s survey and any comments from subscribers should be taken into account.

Not sure of the maths but a 40% increase in feature content of a monthly mag may sound good but will still be considerably less content than the two lost mags so overall a large loss. So what content there is needs to be the right content, preferably new and not old archive material.

Likewise if I’m paying for the magazine I want to read original content. I don’t like to see the mag containing little more than copy and pasting of something an author has already put on a forum where it could be read for free. OK with a few images and a general description on a forum to tempt people to buy the mag and read the details but not just the same whole build. Again something to be asked in the author pack?

Well that’s enough for now, may add more later.

On 19 December 2024 at 17:17 Graham Meek Said:

 

I do however wonder if the comment above “use the forum and don’t subscribe”, is the way the Forum is heading in the future, ie subscription only access.

Regards

Gray,

Interestingly when website first started along with the forum there was quite a bit of “subscriber only” content now there is nothing.

My subscription has just been renewed, I await with interest to see what I get. If its monthly will I get 26 issues that I have paid for ? or will there be a price hike and I only get 12? I find it interesting that this should be announced in the week before Christmas – or am I being cynical ? A subscriber since the late 80s and MEW to issue 300 ish. Get rid of Butterside Down NOW, a terrible waste of paper and ink ! I look forward to the final return of ME as it should have been, and the coverage of more subjects. Noel.

Well I’m active on the forum and a subscriber to MEW. I’ve just renewed my subscription so will also be interested to see what I now receive.

Robert.

Deleted

Totally agree with what Noel Shelley has written, I have just renewed my subscription in the last week and now wonder if I have wasted my money, I didn’t renew MEW because nothing in it interests me anymore. Butterside down is in my opinion a total waste of space, same is true of reports of visits to various societies, they all have the same things, a track, a clubhouse and a workshop, see one and you have seen them all. Let’s stop wasting space with half page pictures just to pad articles out and let’s have quality articles.

On 20 December 2024 at 00:11 Charles Lamont Said:

[…] Question 1: Describe the target readership.

 

Those who will spend good money with the advertisers [?]

… likely to be an iterative process, but let’s not kid ourselves.

MichaelG.