Uk workshop magazine?

[Boothie14]

I have been reading the 'Crapola mags' post,and I was wondering why dont we,as a forum create our own magazine?People could contribute on their latest projects,and do reviews of their own tools machines ect?
Just a thought

Thanks,
Harry

 

[MikeG.]

I suspect that there is rather more to producing a magazine than you might imagine, and that as we are a fluid bunch connected only by our hobby there will be no-one prepared to give up the hours required to make this work.

Anyway, using the Search facility on here you can almost treat the forum as a digital magazine anyway.

Mike

 

[big soft moose]

I suspect that there is rather more to producing a magazine than you might imagine, and that as we are a fluid bunch connected only by our hobby there will be no-one prepared to give up the hours required to make this work.

Anyway, using the Search facility on here you can almost treat the forum as a digital magazine anyway.

Mike

I'd concur with mike - not to mention the fact that those of us with projects worth writing up would be wiser to contribute the write up to nick and potentially get paid for them.

 

[wizer]

Silly Idea. Will give Nick Gibbs a laugh tho :wink: :lol:

 

[matt]

Anyway, using the Search facility on here you can almost treat the forum as a digital magazine anyway.

Yes, I agree. Very like a magazine - the same things come up over and over again :lol:

 

[Doug B]

The thing is..........

The projects folks come up with, others will have seen before.

The tool reviewers will be told they are biased as they own the tool or are hoping for freebies from the manufacturer for a favourable review.

The style of the magazine is old fashioned, too many hand tool reviews.

The magazine is to modern, there`s a review of a new machine costing £££££££££s.











HOLD ON, i think i`ve heard all this before.

It`s easy to criticize, It`s a whole different ball game to produce an entertaining, continually evolving magazine.

 

[wizer]

There is room for something else like this in the UK but not in paper form. Think Finewoodworking.com and the Popularwoodworking blogs. Even The WoodWhisperer.

 

[OPJ]

Tom, I'm inclined to agree but, do you really think it would take off? This isn't America. We don't have the same amount of money and woodwork certainly isn't as 'big' over here...

 

[wizer]

How many of us are here? How many people are on the other UK based woodworking forums who aren't posting here? How many people attend woodworking shows and buy magazines that don't post on internet forums. Yes the market is much smaller, but so is the country. There is space for a decent net based magazine style community such as lumberjocks/fww.com/popwood etc. I'd love to do it myself but IMHO it needs to be done by a current magazine or woodworking society. You need good writers, good content. Hence why the rest of the UKW site fell by the wayside.

 

[Ironballs]

Doesn't look like it would fly to me, most niche mags are having to get by on a wing and a prayer.

Tom's idea may work, but I know that I for one like my mags in paper form. I don't take the PC into the khazi for a good read whilst dropping the kids off at the pool

 

[matt]

I don't spend much time visiting the aforementioned US magazine sites so perhaps missing the point about what would be sufficiently different about a UK one to draw UK customers away from the US sites?

I'm guessing a lot of the content would be the same and that perhaps shop reviews/directories (if such a thing were included) would obviously be UK shops and tool reviews would exclude tools only available in the US?

I'm not quite smellin' what you're treadin' in just yet.

 

[wizer]

Well if that made sense matt then why are we all bothering to post on a UK based forum and buying UK based magazines?

 

[ondablade]

I guess it'd be great if there was a high end design, make and business UK mag available - one that didn't consider DIY planter boxes made from leftover decking the height of sophistication.

Would agree though that it's not an easy one to pull off - you've got to find experienced woodworkers, get them interested in writing, get them working within a sensible context - and then you find out if the guys can write or not, and if there really is a market.

One of the big issues on UK mags in general (based especially on my experience of the motorcycling press) is that it all went to dung when they switched from employing and retaining experienced journalists to using inexperienced kids (cheap?), and with that started to hype and personalise issues (trying to force sales), to emphasise advertising revenue over sales, and to run with shallower and shallower content on the assumption that the punter has the attention span of a horsefly and anyway we don't want to water off our advertisers. (and because cliche ridden bling journalism requires no research, and is consequently cheap to produce/recycle)

There was a very definite transition quite some years ago (in the 80s?) when the bike mags switched from being relatively stable businesses in themselves that a journalist could hope to make a career in, to just a title in some sort of larger business vehicle driven by the short term bottom line, staffed mostly by rapacious accountants, and moving journalists on after only it seems sometimes a few months before they got expensive.

The woodworking mags are a bit behind, but it seems to me on a similar trajectory.

This approach has in my view cannibalised motorcycling already, the effect has been to drag the orientation of mainstream motorcycling down to the level of something like that of the crowd at the Roman circus - a fashion/bragging rights driven lifestyle choice to be played with for a year or two until you get bored. Most mags are as a result worth a three minute flick through and into the bin if you are older than 14.

How can such a shallow and overly hyped product that wholly misses the real heart in the activity hope to deliver anything like long term involvement, or indeed contribute to building lifetime involvements and loyalty on the part of the punters to the very activity that produces your bread and butter?

I guess the million dollar question is whether or not a journal that relied primarily on magazine sales revenue driven by quality content could be a runner in today's environment.

How many here would pay extra for a decent quality mag, with maybe less spent on glossy porno mag presentation and more content? :wink:


PS it mightn't need to be that much extra if this and the corporate costs were stripped out, the presentation made a little more basic but with quality content as the central selling point.

 

[Boothie14]

I would agree with ondablade and wizer-there is a gap for somethinlike this in the uk.If we did the online route-like finewoodworking.com,I think plenty of people would contribute techniques,projects,reviews ect.

 

[matt]

Well if that made sense matt then why are we all bothering to post on a UK based forum and buying UK based magazines?

If what made sense? You seem to be asking almost the same question as I posed, albeit it seems in a rhetorical sense which, erm, means I still don't get what will make a UK magazine site distinctive from the US equivalents that members of this forum seem to visit already (or perhaps not?).

Will you expand on your idea? The more people that understand what you're suggesting the better I would have thought?

 

[crazylilting]

I thought about this at length since that thread. The amount of time involved in such an endeavor is staggering. I've worked in the newspaper industry a little bit and the amount of people and time it takes to put it all together is immense. I also worked on a college newspaper in almost all aspects of its development working late into the evening and weekends just on the design and layout portions of it.

It would take huge amounts of devotion and selfless contributions of a lot of people to get such a project off the ground and even once off the ground would take years to make it into the consciousness of the public before it would even begin to be a viable business idea.

That being said starting out as an internet only publication would reduce the upstart costs. ie. domain name, server space, digital equipment, development costs.... so on and so on

Still the idea is intriguing.

 

[wobblycogs]

I like the idea but I stuggle to see how it could work due to the time and effort required.

But if someone does want to give it a go here's my 2p worth: I think it would make sense to make any publication web based only, at least initially, with a printable PDF version for those who like FDT format. I'd also make it quarterly and great rather than monthly and fair. The world of wood working moves pretty slowly, there isn't enough material for a monthly magazine without it repeating itself month after month.

I think the biggest problem would be finding enough people that are both good writers and good woodworkers unless there is going to be professional writers for the magazine.

 

[Jake]

Forums are the new magazines, and that's the reason magazines are struggling.

People who want to make money from their IP (or what they see as it) are going to have to find a new way of exploiting it.

 

[LocalOak]

Here's my penn'worth, which is worth about a penny.

I am a working journalist, freelance and mainly in radio not print but I have written for a number of publications including a frequent column for The Times.

The problem is always going to be money. Good writing, and more importantly good editing, costs. It is remarkably difficult to run and edit even a simple magazine or website. Ones run on a wing and a prayer usually look amateurish and don't attract or keep an audience as a result. To draw in readers you will need to have a number of well written, genuinely interesting articles for each edition plus tips, puzzles, celeb interviews or whatever else you can think of. That rapidly turns into a very large amount of setting up and editing. It takes dedicated soul to do that for free.

That being said, it might just work as a website and if asked I'd contribute a thousand words on the pitfalls of saying you're going to build your own kitchen from used school laboratory benches when the biggest thing you made before that was a rough and ready compost bin where square doesn't really matter :lol:

 

[wizer]

The problem is always going to be money. Good writing, and more importantly good editing, costs. It is remarkably difficult to run and edit even a simple magazine or website. Ones run on a wing and a prayer usually look amateurish and don't attract or keep an audience as a result. To draw in readers you will need to have a number of well written, genuinely interesting articles for each edition plus tips, puzzles, celeb interviews or whatever else you can think of. That rapidly turns into a very large amount of setting up and editing. It takes dedicated soul to do that for free.

This is largely why I've never gone ahead and done anything like this myself. I'm quite capable of building a website. But, whilst I think I can write well, I have no content to provide. Setting something like this up would take either money or a lot of faith from 2 or 3 pro writers who were willing to be a part of something in it's embryonic stages. Too much going on in my life to deal with that right now. I'd certainly welcome a British based online woodworking media publication in the same vein of those produced in the US.