PPCs Charlie gets ripped off by royal mail

Hi there,

I've been subscribing to Practical Performance Car for around five or six years, and the time has come for me to renew my subscription... and unfortunately this time I've decided not to. I just wanted to give you a little feedback about why I won't be doing so, in case it's useful to you in some way.

My reasoning is largely twofold: quality and attitude.

Quality.
I feel that the magazine has gone downhill in terms of quality over the past year or so. Working as an editor and copywriter, I like to be quite fastidious about checking and proofreading publications that I send out to a broad audience, and this has made me a stickler for detail. Of late, it's seemed that no-one's proofreading PPC at all. Take the current issue for example: on the front cover you've listed the 'drill out a stud' feature twice on the lower banner. In Will's intro on page five you have one spelling error and one grammatical error, and that's in a two-sentence piece. The fact that the magazine is often riddled with such errors makes it quite annoying to read, to be frank - particularly as, at £4.40 an issue, you're charging premium money (similar to magazines such as Evo, Motor Sport or Octane, for example, which aren't strictly comparable in context/content, but are twice the size and fastidiously constructed) for an increasingly inferior product. Is it spelled 'Gogomobil' or 'Goggomobil? You used both freely...
It's also rather a cynical ploy to keep splitting articles into two- or three-parters to ensure future sales - for example, the recent Alfa Romeo road-trip, or the 'how to make your own fuel' feature, which could easily have been one-offs.
The quality of the writing used to be strong. Recently, it feels increasingly like the text is rushed to a deadline, with the minimum possible amount written and nobody bothering to re-read it before it goes to print.

Attitude.
I used to love the all-boys-together camaraderie of the PPC team, but it feels like this has become a caricature of itself with the reader becoming increasingly isolated. There's a strong undercurrent of negativity that flows through the magazine that frankly makes me feel uncomfortable. I know that Will's a nice guy from having chatted to him in the past, but his 'character' within PPC is one of almost Daily Mail-esque ire and bile - is it really necessary to have a weekly Piston Broke detailing what he hates this month? Has Charlie's character become an unnecessarily profane and angry one, intolerant of new ideas or young people in general? Does Dave Walker need to sound off about how much he despises current fashionable motoring trends such as hydraulic suspension or stretched tyres (contentious issues, admittedly), thereby alienating a large portion of the younger readership?
The negativity is rife throughout. Take, for example, the coverage of a kit car show a couple of months ago. Every picture caption was in some way slagging off the car in question. What's the point of visiting a show to see cars you don't like, let alone printing them and saying 'look how curse word this is' in the hope that the audience will jump on board? It reaches further than throwaway comments. Every time another country is mentioned (France, Italy and Poland seem to be the favourites) we can always expect a xenophobic comment or two. The last issue's letters page featured a letter from a reader containing the word 'hydrospastic'. A letter in the current 'tech talk' section asking about a potentially interesting home-built trailer project is batted away with Kev saying 'it's illegal - or at least it should be' - what's the point of printing such a letter if you're just going to mock the person who wrote in? And so it goes on.

I'm not saying these things to have a go at you - I just hope that maybe you can take a few of these observations on board to improve the magazine. My prized PPC collection sits proudly on a shelf in the spare room, well-thumbed and continuing to be of great interest. However, I just cannot justify spending money on a publication which, sadly, I'm finding increasingly irritating to read. The choice of feature cars and subjects of tech articles are excellent as ever - it's just the negatively-toned and poorly-checked copy that, I feel, doesn't make it worth the money.

I hope this is in some way helpful.