What is happening at EVO magazine?

What is happening at EVO magazine?

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browngt3

1,409 posts

210 months

Saturday 20th January 2018
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I'm actually quite impressed with the latest issue. Nice photography and interesting selection of articles.

I was ready to cancel after the ECOTY fiasco but I'm prepared to give them a chance now.

Agree that Stuart Gallagher could have said something in the editorial. Especially given the overwhelming negative feedback.

SidewaysSi

10,742 posts

233 months

Saturday 20th January 2018
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BlimeyCharlie said:
I have some copies of 'Car' magazine from the 80's and the way the magazine was written is infinitely better than anything currently produced.

I still buy 'MotorSport' magazine but that just seems to revolve around Richard 'I'll now call myself Dickie and wear a tweed cap to emulate Jenks and Setright with a trademark visual style' Meaden. Another track test around Goodwood? Of an old Jaguar? Oh no. Road cars? Oh no.

F1 or F1 racing? Formulaic. Same old same old.

All the magazines seem to have the same style of writing and photography. Over-produced, too much photoshop etc. Not bought Evo for years as just seemed to be track tests of Renault Clio's and tyre talk.

I challenge anyone to pick up an old copy of Car from the 80's or early 90's, especially with a Russell Bulgin article and not be entertained.

I guess life changes but all the car magazines are so bland. Then again so are modern cars.

But please Dickie, go back to being Richard. And ditch the tweed. It is so contrived!
I never particularly liked Bulgin. Decent bloke but I would not make any purchasing decisions based on his writing.

havoc

29,927 posts

234 months

Saturday 20th January 2018
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SidewaysSi said:
I never particularly liked Bulgin. Decent bloke but I would not make any purchasing decisions based on his writing.
You're probably in a minority then (and I hate saying that to a fellow 'teg fan...take it you've read his "R for religious" article - only link I can find is a copy-paste here: http://www.hondaforum.si/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1... ).

I really rate his writing (moreso than even Mel Nichols and LJKS) ...although DC2 aside I can't think of a car judgement of his that I've had strong feelings about either way.

iSore

4,011 posts

143 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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Bulgin was not especially well liked. A fantastic writer and supremely intelligent, but based own my experience a thoroughly awful bloke in real life.

Modern cars aren't so bland - a decent magazine with proper time served writers as opposed to the usual trendy 'Ben with designer stubble and a geeky girlfriend called Beth who works as a rape counsellor for Haringey council, really into Instagram and you know yeah, a bit of a wheelsmith'.

As a result, writing is just a long conscious stream of shouty, agonising cliches as opposed to something erudite and considered such as written by LJKS.

coppice

8,562 posts

143 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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Judge the art , not the artist... Bulgin , perhaps even more so than the wonderful Setright, David E Davis , Roger Bell and Pete Lyons, was a supremely stylish and insightful writer . I have spoken to people who knew RB and all spoke highly of him - but that's really neither here nor there - his work stands as a fine legacy .

chunder27

2,309 posts

207 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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I have not bought car magazines for many years now, and every time I do I regret it.

The only magazine I enjoyed recently was a motocross magazine, but that was a few years ago now.

Publishers ONLY decide what is in magazines, they control the entire thing, the content, the way it looks, the advertising.

Having worked in the industry briefly I found it a rather depressing place. A lot of very motivated people, very talented, obsessing over the tiniest detail, just totally forgetting that people actually want to read stuff, not just look at great design, pictures and bite size crap. This is the trouble when the people owning the magazines also publish lads mags, womens mags, celeb mags, they all think the same and special interest is not the same.

The old days of Fast Car features being pages long of almost pure text, CCC articles running for pages, an MN Rally report giving you almost stage by stage coverage of the top crews.

We have all been told we want this modern journalism by publishers, surveys, but the reason people don't buy them is that they are massively expensive, most car mags now are over a fiver which is far too much for the content they contain. And we find stuff online.

People wont pay for magazines online so either have to go back to being how they were, featuring masses more content or die.

iSore

4,011 posts

143 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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His piece on the then-new 1992 Astra Mark 3 - where he 'donned a double breasted' and went on the road repping, taking in various motorway service areas - is one of my favourites. You can read it time and time again, and never tire of it.

itcaptainslow

3,694 posts

135 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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Thought the "M4 to various racetracks" article was a reasonable one this month-quite enjoyed reading it. Let's just hope the eCOTY disaster feedback is taken on board and 2018 reverts to the format we prefer and love!

anonymous-user

53 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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BlimeyCharlie said:
I have some copies of 'Car' magazine from the 80's and the way the magazine was written is infinitely better than anything currently produced.

I still buy 'MotorSport' magazine but that just seems to revolve around Richard 'I'll now call myself Dickie and wear a tweed cap to emulate Jenks and Setright with a trademark visual style' Meaden. Another track test around Goodwood? Of an old Jaguar? Oh no. Road cars? Oh no.

F1 or F1 racing? Formulaic. Same old same old.

All the magazines seem to have the same style of writing and photography. Over-produced, too much photoshop etc. Not bought Evo for years as just seemed to be track tests of Renault Clio's and tyre talk.

I challenge anyone to pick up an old copy of Car from the 80's or early 90's, especially with a Russell Bulgin article and not be entertained.

I guess life changes but all the car magazines are so bland. Then again so are modern cars.

But please Dickie, go back to being Richard. And ditch the tweed. It is so contrived!
TBF, everyone calls him Dickie, always have. Apart from me (and my mum).
Magazines, sadly, have to cater to their current reader - especially in view of the stuff you can get for nothing on the interweb. Kind of says more about the readers than the magazines, sadly.
No, I don't agree with it but it'd take a big pair to go against the grain. Someone will, but by the time they do, all traditional magazines, as we know them, will be gone. I'm a big advocate of launching a big, fat, glossy, quarterly magazine - not with road tests per se because you can't compete but epic drive stories, in depth interviews that properly get under the skin, 5000 word tales of micro-managed engineering feats, etc, etc. All with the photography to match.
To make it pay and be a viable business proposition, it'd have to be a readership of at least 15,000. All spending £300. Numbers go up, cost to reader goes down. And on a subscription only basis. (You give half of your cover price away to the distributor). Unless it's a vanity project, it's never going to happen! Back in the day, I worked on a magazine that regularly sold 200,000 issues per month and we made a st load of money, until the company realised we were making a st load of money and started calling the shots about what we did. When management started telling us what our readers wanted (rather than us, who knew our readers) the downward spiral started.
'Magazines', said the kid born in 2005, 'What are they?'

havoc

29,927 posts

234 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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skintemma said:
To make it pay and be a viable business proposition, it'd have to be a readership of at least 15,000. All spending £300.
£4.5m per annum? For a quarterly glossy? Are you sure of those figures...seem rather high to me...
- salary costs (journos, 'togs, editors, IT support...) for a moderate-sized team would be <<£1m, probably significantly <£0.5m if the mag is partnered with other publications, as a quarterly mag isn't a full-time job by any stretch. Using self-employed or part-time staff would bring the costs in at IMHO £200-400k depending on size of team and actual work required. Call it £500k worst-case.
- publishing/printing costs would be <£100k using shared or subcontracted resources*
- marketing costs could easily be kept to low 6-figures, if not <£100k by use of social media and word-of-mouth (which is how this sort of mag would probably grow/appeal anyway)
- ...which leaves support overheads...again, if part of a larger stable these would be largely absorbed but the 'stable' would expect their return. So let's call it £250k as a worst-case.

...all of which adds up to less than £1m on the shelf, or ~£60-70 for 15k subscribers, proportioning downwards...so you could make it viable at £10 per issue for 25k sales per quarter.


* On the basis that a £5 on-the-shelf magazine shouldn't have more than 20% production costs, arguably.

markcoopers

590 posts

192 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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Complete lack of humility. While I was not perhaps expecting a complete breakdown and tears, some serious acknowledgement that the changes to the mag are not what it's readers want was anticipated. More importantly a note that a change was going to be made.
Hey ho, ignore your consumers needs and they will find somewhere else to get them met.

Does anyone believe that they received letters in support of the new ECOTY format?

anonymous-user

53 months

Sunday 21st January 2018
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I've cut and pasted as I'm a total luddite and if I'm going to answer succinctly, I'd prefer to have it in front of me. Apologies if the spacing, etc isn't quite right. But to answer your questions...

£4.5m per annum? For a quarterly glossy? Are you sure of those figures...seem rather high to me...
Yes, I'm pretty sure, for the following reasons.
You said - salary costs (journos, 'togs, editors, IT support...) for a moderate-sized team would be <<£1m, probably significantly <£0.5m if the mag is partnered with other publications, as a quarterly mag isn't a full-time job by any stretch. Using self-employed or part-time staff would bring the costs in at IMHO £200-400k depending on size of team and actual work required. Call it £500k worst-case.
I say. Where do you find those part time staff from? That aren't being retained by other outlets? The best writers, editors, photographers, etc are all on retainers. That means that they can't work for anyone deemed to be competition. If Bob is working for publisher A, he can't work for publisher B, unless they have a contra deal - as both publisher A and publisher B have a shared interest, they sure as hell aren't going to let Bob work for some upstart publisher C. Therefore, if Bob wants to work for publisher C, publisher C is going to have to pay, no matter how many times a year they print their magazine. Bob isn't going to drop his pants just on the off chance that the new magazine might be a success. I would disagree that a quarterly mag isn't a full time job, but then, I'd prefer to do things properly.

You said '- publishing/printing costs would be <£100k using shared or subcontracted resources*'.
I say ' I'd like to find out where your figures come from and do some business with them. Again, print houses make their bread and butter from regular, monthly, weekly, daily streams. Print deadlines and margins are incredibly tight. Even buying paper/ink has its own separate industry. Aside from those barriers to entry, that doesn't, of course, include setting up the presses for that particular paper stock or magazine run. If you're only publishing four times a year, it's going to cost a lot more than running some tv mag on cheap paper every week. Again, it's an economy of scale. If you're subcontracting resources, you'll be put to the very bottom of the pile. Nor does it take into consideration the distribution - the shelves are on a monopoly basis - have a deeper look and you'll understand who owns the distribution companies and why the costs are so high. Therefore, you'll have to sort out your own distribution. That's not cheap.

You said - which leaves support overheads...again, if part of a larger stable these would be largely absorbed but the 'stable' would expect their return. So let's call it £250k as a worst-case.'
I say, if it's part of a larger stable, it wouldn't be happening for all of the above/below reasons.

You said 'marketing costs could easily be kept to low 6-figures, if not <£100k by use of social media and word-of-mouth (which is how this sort of mag would probably grow/appeal anyway)'
I'm not going to comment on the marketing but I'd love to see a successful product that hit the ground running, to support the kind of investment that a new magazine would command, with these sort of costs.

Magazines are a fickle market. If you're an investor on a monthly product, you won't see any return for at least three months, generally six, just because that's the way the system works. Sell 50,000 copies in WHMagazine shop, they won't pay you for three months. Scale that, or the timeframes, up to a quarterly. You not only have to find the investment to launch the product, you have to hold your breath for, basically, a year to a) find out if people liked it b)find out if people bought it c) find out if you'll get paid.

In short, there are easier ways to make money. That's why nobody has launched a magazine for quite some time.



slk 32

1,486 posts

192 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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markcoopers said:
Complete lack of humility. While I was not perhaps expecting a complete breakdown and tears, some serious acknowledgement that the changes to the mag are not what it's readers want was anticipated. More importantly a note that a change was going to be made.
Hey ho, ignore your consumers needs and they will find somewhere else to get them met.

Does anyone believe that they received letters in support of the new ECOTY format?
With virtually all magazine sales stalling or declining the only way to increase / maintain profit is to cut costs. I'm guessing Gallagher probably focused on this at the job interview. (The axe man cometh).

As mentioned by a previous poster these people are driven by an incredible self belief. Unfortunately this is often in direct opposite to their actual ability.

They are ISIS like in their inability to consider any option other than their chosen one, even when confronted by evidence to the contrary.

The issue is that having sold his cost cutting changes to management at the interview, to renege on this commitment now would look like he doesn't know what he's is doing and potentially make them question their decision.

Instead, true visionary that he is he will continue down the path of enlightenment whilst throwing out a few crumbs to subscribers (we've listened to your feedback!) Whilst making no commitment to actually change things back. In his mind those people who complain just need to get with the programme.

Eventually circulation will drop off even more and even someone as thick skinned as he will end up jumping before he's pushed and turn up at another motoring mag.*

*colloquially known as 'doing a Trott'

suffolk009

5,344 posts

164 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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markcoopers said:
Does anyone believe that they received letters in support of the new ECOTY format?
There may have been one from Gallagher's mum.

suffolk009

5,344 posts

164 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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skintemma said:
That's why nobody has launched a magazine for quite some time.
5054.

coppice

8,562 posts

143 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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slk 32 said:
As mentioned by a previous poster these people are driven by an incredible self belief. Unfortunately this is often in direct opposite to their actual ability.

They are ISIS like in their inability to consider any option other than their chosen one, even when confronted by evidence to the contrary.

Steady on old chap, it's only a bloody car magazine ....

RemaL

24,967 posts

233 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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Anyone get a email last week apologising for poor replies with regards to emails and contact with subscribers?

Seem'ed generic and just saying the changes with who deals with this and how it's changed but no reply to my comment on having to stop my DD as they would not reply.

only took 2-3 months to reply.

havoc

29,927 posts

234 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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skintemma said:
I've cut and pasted as I'm a total luddite and if I'm going to answer succinctly, I'd prefer to have it in front of me. Apologies if the spacing, etc isn't quite right. But to answer your questions...
OK, I'll take on board all of that...but I'd still maintain you're thinking too linearly / using the existing structures/strictures of the print market.
- 4 issues a year IS NOT a full time job for a journalist. Unless you're only employing 1 or 2 to produce ~50 pages of copy for each issue, in which case the salary costs go right down but so probably does the variety.
- The fact of 'retainers' is arguably restraint-of-trade and should be tested. I'd also point out that there are plenty of writers out there who aren't on retainer.
- You're dismissing the backing of an existing publishing house altogether - not sure why...are they ALL that narrow-minded?!? If so, then the market has got to be ripe for disruption.
- You seem to be talking about setting a print-shop up from scratch - not sure why, as I'm sure there's plenty of spare capacity out there right now which could be subcontracted to.
- Marketing - OK, in the standard metric you might be right, but again there appears to be little evidence of disruptive thinking - look at some of the more successful 'niche brands' recently and they aimed at social-media / word-of-mouth to spread the name and the brand, aiming to give it 'cool points'.
- You're also overlooking the ability to distribute as digital-only initially, expanding into print once a 'head of steam' has been built-up and proof-of-concept established.


I'm not in the industry, so I don't know all the barriers you seem to be alluding to. But I do know how to do business very well, and your post above seems very "I can't do it / it can't be done", not "how CAN we do it?".

Truckosaurus

11,183 posts

283 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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If magazines have to pay 50% to distributors and WHS take months to pay up, why aren't postal subscriptions massively cheaper than the shelf price (as they are with American magazines)?

NomduJour

18,988 posts

258 months

Monday 22nd January 2018
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Truckosaurus said:
If magazines have to pay 50% to distributors and WHS take months to pay up, why aren't postal subscriptions massively cheaper than the shelf price (as they are with American magazines)?
Car & Driver is $25 for a two-year print subscription - for an extra $5, get Road & Track too...