Carstens Closed

Hi Jim, First off sorry to hear about the closing. I've been though a few layoffs in my life, they are not fun. I'm a little curious, if Carstens publications last day was Firday, why are the subscription pages still active for Flying Models and Railroad Model Craftsman?

 

Probably the same reason the announcement of closing was not on their website Saturday (have not looked since).
Like they just locked the doors, stop all projects.

 

I don't know if the increasing number of scale specific magazines would be the deciding factor, the bulk of modelling articles in MRC like that of its competitor in Milwaukee were aimed at HO modellers, and I can't think of many HO specific magazines out there.

 

Their other magazine I'll miss is Railfan & Railroad, it was often a much better read than Trains.

 

Often? How often did you hear Carstens try to re-classify a Big Boy as a 4-8+8-4?
I've still got copies when they were separate titles, I think. At least I remember being somewhat surprised when they were combined.

 

Ok, probably more than often, I'd spend twice as long reading R&R than trains even though it was usually a thinner magazine. From memory I don't think RMC refused to call On30 anything other than On2 1/2 either, the other publisher often tries to make the rest of us adopt the terminology they think is correct.

 

That's because clambake was lockstep with the nmra. Ever hear of the Milwaukee Mafia?
I still use the "&1/2" terminology..just because it really, really upsets some folks. Like the couplers I use on my Half 0 stuff. Mantua.

 

This "other publisher" has been in a position for a long time that allowed them to kind of steer the hobby. They out sold the competition for years, typically catering to the "inexperienced" hobbyist and keeping their circle of contributors relatively small. We all subscribed to them at one point, for the most part. And some of their repeated contributors have been inspirational to my modeling as well..... although they also were significant contributors to RMC as well.

I'm getting off my point..... anyhow, there have been rumblings that the other publisher's primary editor for their flagship magazine has been "behaving badly" behind the scenes against a couple of relatively new online-only publications which are way ahead of the curve of this major "flagship publication" and quickly catching up in readership..... but maybe that is just heresay (not that I would be surprised if it were true).

 

I had a look at that "other publishers" digital isse yesterday and find myself sorely disappointed at the crap app they use which prevents me from being able to read an entire page. Poor performance, indeed.

 

I'm not sure why you're being so coy? Trainboard rules? I will not be so coy, because I was there and it isn't rumblings, it's facts, it happened. So I'll name the names. If this is the incident I'm thinking of then the course of events was that Joe Fugate, Publisher of e-zine Model Railroad Hobbyist wrote in his column a couple months ago that based on their analysis of their web statistics, specifically for the magazine, that their readership had surpassed RMC at that point. He then made some comments on his perception on positioning of MR, MRH and RMC. What part of the market they were targeting. And further pointed out that he perceived that MR had chosen to not target N (and Z) aggressively and this lead directly to the success of the scale specific magazines. Further he suggested that if you took the sales of MR and added in the 2 most popular N scale mags, you would not see a drop in readership and that's the metric by which most people judge the hobby to be waning.

Anyway, he said all this and he was not being critical per se. Just putting out his opinion.

On Trains.com in the MR section, there was a thread about what it took to become a published Author. In this thread, some people took MR to task on their policies and it of course bled over into other magazines and MRH and so Joe's claims of readership came up. This lead to a pretty extensive argument over whether it was true, and the value of each magazine etc etc etc.

Into this muddled thread Neil Besougloff Editor for MR posted a rant in which he basically tore MRH and Joe Fugate apart making all sorts of rather poorly thought out accusations. It very much looked like the words of someone who felt threatened by a competitor.

It would have been a poor post from any forum member, but as a post from the head of the biggest Model Railroader magazine who rarely posts in the forum. It was inexcusable. Obviously, cooler heads prevailed and his posts were removed. However, the damage was done and certainly Joe captured the information (being slandered by a peer isn't cool) So the information is still out there.



On the topic of Railfan and Railroad. I only read it occasionally, but the impression I get from people I've talked to the past few days is that it was a better Magazine back when it was JUST Railfan. The combined magazine sacrificed too much. Trains is an industry magazine as much or even more so than a fan magazine. It's purpose is different Railfan and Railroad apparently tried to move in that direction.
CTC Board/Railroads illustrated had a similar crisis of purpose. However, they seem to have finally settled into being a magazine whose primary purpose is to showcase stellar railfan photography.

 

There was some coyness in other posts before mine, so I just stayed in line. That and I didn't know the complete story... better to be coy than look like a fool.