Bad year for magazines.

Hi Ian

I spoke to John R on the phone last week, and he had been told by one of the contributors that stayed on with TeleMag after we left, that it was definitely finished for good. My copy was always got in for me by my newsagent, so I didn't have a subscription, but apparently, Nexus have written to all the subscribers to tell them that publication had ceased. As far as T @ H goes, I also had an invoice in for fault reports and an ongoing article series that I was doing for them, but as soon as I found out the level of financial problem that the owners were suffering, I cancelled it. I am still in touch with them, but I don't know yet if there is any definite intention to continue publishing by whatever method, in the future. I know that Steve has not personally ruled it out, but I don't know how it will stand with the other two. I have told them that if they do get it going again, I will continue to contribute for free for as long as it takes. The way I look at it, with the sad decline of TeleMag after the editing team were changed, and now its demise, I'd rather contribute my time for free, if it gets a valid publication for the trade, going again. What is your take on this ?

Arfa

There are certain times of day that I like to get away from the PC and read articles printed on paper so I miss T_at_H and will miss TeleMag - even what it became under Nexus!

For this reason web based publishing wouldn't appeal to me unless its very low priced, after all most of the likely content can be found on the net anyway - even if it is a little hard work running searches to find it.

As T_at_H is partly made up of the team I dealt with when I used to be a regular contributor at TeleMag, I would like to see them return from publication suspended, although I feel that they tried to cater too much for the technically minded man in the street and less so for the "down to the metal" service engineer. Under the Nexus flag TeleMag was severely weakened and T_at_H might have done better to have taken them head on!

The link re-direct from TeleMag to SJPP seems to hint they've already been sold and may re appear in due course - hopefully better than it was under Nexus.

Actually, the T @ H editorial team, was only anything to do with the original team of John and Tessa, for a very brief period, before they decided that it was not for them, due to a conflict of personalities with one of the owners.

Originally, when the editing of TeleMag was brought in-house, John and Tessa were summoned to the offices ( they were both freelancers ) and just told that their services would no longer be required. No notice period, no sorry. Their contracts were just terminated. Both of them were actually very upset about the way that they were treated, and that was a lot to do with why Steve, Michael and Elaine got together to start T @ H. They felt that John and Tessa still had a valuable contribution to make to a trade magazine. They were thus hired to edit the new mag, but unfortunately, the owners' ideas for it didn't really match with John and Tessa's editing style, so there came a parting of the ways. That left the owners with the whole task of both running and editing the magazine, as well as dealing with the contributors. This on top of their normal work.

This is the main reason that it went to bi-monthly publication, which I think was perhaps a contributory factor in its current status. I also found that having Elaine as a " commissioning editor " made it difficult to write for them. With John and Tessa, they always accepted everything I wrote ' as was ' and tended to fit it in to the magazine without making many if any changes to the running length. I'm pretty sure that you probably used to find the same thing, as your monitor fault reports, which I always enjoyed reading, used to be relatively long and detailed. When I was contributing fault reports, I only used to bother sending in the interesting ones, and used to make a point of detailing the diagnostic methods that I had used to arrive at the cause of the problem. I could never see the point in the " This one wouldn't play discs, so I replaced the laser ... " variety of report.

However. my descriptive style of writing didn't work well with Elaine, and she was forever trying to cut down the length and content, which in turn, didn't sit well with me, so I finished up dealing exclusively with Steve, who was the technical editor.

At the end of the day, I think that they had to appeal to too wide an audience to make it financially viable. This led to the mag having a bit of an identity crisis I think. I continued to write my stuff as technical articles, aimed at service engineers, but whilst 'on the street' technophiles might have found the content of them interesting, I fear that the detail would have gone over their heads. The final nail in the coffin of T @ H in its paper form, was the distribution costs via W.H.Smith wholesale, and for this reason, I can't see it ever re-surfacing as a mag in print. Like you, I also like to read 'proper' paper journals, but I don't think that we are ever going to do that again for a trade mag serving our business ...

Still, hats off to the T @ H team, and I am very sorry that in the end, they didn't get to fully realise their dream, and ended up personally so far out of pocket on the venture. It took a lot of guts to have a go, and it was a shame that it came to an end just as I felt it was beginning to find its place in the market.

Arfa

It did occur to me that something was wrong there - the absence of J & T should have been a clue.

So T at H might still be going if they'd made more of an effort to get along with J & T?!

While I was googling to try and find info on what was going on I stumbled on a forum devoted to the impending demise of Television, T at H got quite a few mentions and wherever EE,s name got mentioned it was in a negative context, it was mentioned that she had made one or two insulting comments in her regular column - I think the words were: "I think she needs to work on her people skills"! Your point about editing is well taken, my only 3 fault reports before publication ceased no longer said the same thing that I originally wrote!

She didn't cut down her own contribution though! The few times I bothered reading her column it contributed (along with other aspects of the magazines presentation) a feeling of "where's the recies & knitting patterns?! It was I think, one of the owners who took part in the forum I found who commented that in one branch of WHS he found T at H amongst the knitting pattern magazines - an easy mistake to make!

There were a couple of projects I wanted to send in for component testing gadgets, but they involved running equipment made from salvaged monitor components directly from the mains, these would have been no problem for experienced service engineers that were targeted by Television Magazine but would have been courting certain disaster if presented to the casual interest audience T at H seemed to be aiming for!

The fact that I took out a subscription at the outset was largely out of a sense of loyalty to J & T, now they've gone the magazine would have to be pretty damn good to keep me paying for it, I wonder if I echo the sentiments of other readers? There's no doubt about the dire state of the servicing trade, I've not been actively involved in monitor repair for a while now. All said and done the state of the industry is the biggest single factor in what happened to both magazines, but I have a suspicion that if T at H had retained J & T's editorial style they may have fared much better - possibly even prevailed.

There are rumours that Television Magazine has already been bought, and appears to be in the same stable as Electronics World, my newsagent tells me that he gets notification from the distributor if a magazine ceases publication, so he may be able to give me more info after he's contacted them on Monday.

"ian field" wrote in message news:nnoxh.89826$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe6-gui.ntli.net...

I think that they were only directly involved for the first two issues, before there was a problem with one of the owners that J & T perceived as editorial interference. Sort of - either they had been hired for their editing expertise, or not ...

This is my feeling, but from talking to both sides, I think that J & T felt that they could continue to assemble the mag along the lines of TeleMag, particularly as almost all of the potential contributors were those of us already well known to them, but one of the owners, who had some experience of the magazine world, felt that the owners themselves needed to be fully in charge of content and presentation, to protect their financial investment. I can kind of see where they might feel that, but by the same token, I think that up until that point, TeleMag had been the single best edited and presented electronics trade mag on the market, and I think that was entirely due to the stewardship of John and Tessa. Incidentally, you may be interested to know that the reason the decline set in for TeleMag as a commercially viable publication, was that it had not had an advertising manager assigned to it for 2 years ...

Yes indeedy. I got off on the wrong foot with her, and she actually rang me up at home. It was to do with the series on valve amps that I had in hand. This was originally intended to be a follow on to the original article on getting PA amp repair work that I did for TeleMag. John had already accepted it in principle, in readiness for publication, and we had all agreed that it should now go over into the new mag, but EE had other ideas, and decided that no long-running series were going to go in, as the punters would get bored with them. She sent me quite a pointed e-mail about it, and suggested that I produced a pitch to put to her, which she would then review, and decide how many words that I had to write if she deemed it of sufficient interest. I told her that I was not one of the professional writers that she was used to working with, and that I could not work under those sorts of constraints. I told her that the first couple of parts were already written, and said just what I wanted them to, so if that was not good enough then we just wouldn't bother. John was really upset with this, and I think that the episode only sought to underline the bad feelings that J & T were already beginning to have. It was after that that I just dealt with Steve. He just went ahead and told me to carry on submitting in the normal way, and he would edit them. I still finished up having to rewrite major tracts to satisfy their requirements, and as you say, it no longer really quite said what I had intended. As it turned out, we never got as far as part 3 going to print, although they still have it, so you never know, one day it might see the light of day again ... The fault reports section changed considerably when EE's old boy took over the handling of them, and some of mine that I had submitted, were severely edited, to the point where I felt that it was pointless to publish them.

Oddly enough, you are right on the money there, as I understand that she is or was directly involved professionally, with a knitting or sewing magazine. I too found her articles a little incongruous in an electronics mag, to put it politely. Also, as she was setting herself up as an editor, on occasion, her grammar left a little to be desired ...

Agreed. I think that given time, the original reader base would have all migrated across to T @ H, and probably the advertisers as well, but I guess that it was such a financial burden and gamble, time wasn't on their side. The trade is dire at times, for sure, but it's treated me pretty well over the years, and continues to do so. These days, I do only trade audio work, and am probably the only person in my area doing it, so tend to get the work from all of the independant shops that still take such items in. Along with some commercial vending machine boards that I do in large quantities, there is enough work to keep me and my son going, and to pay for a couple of stateside holidays a year. I don't know how much longer that will keep up for, but it's not showing any signs of letting up at the moment.

That's interesting to hear. I understand that the title has been bought and 'parked', but I am not sure whether that is with any serious intention of resuming publication, or a " just in case " scenario. I would like to know what you find out on this score. Mail me direct off-group if you like, as this thread is starting to get a bit long, and probably wandering a bit OT now.

Arfa

Nexus sent me a reply email confirming Television Magazine has ceased publication, they made it clear that the title has not been taken over - so that's the end of that then!

Oh well ...

Arfa