Is there a gap in the market for another mag

I have to agree with 10mpg here, what I LOVE about forums is that people...aren't afraid to f*ck up and show their f*ck ups to all of us on here - and that one learns, gains knowledge collectively, everything I know about cars is totally self-taught, from research, from the innumerable interwebs bookmarks, from trial and error. And all too often articles seem to focus on horsepower, on cost, on 'oh look i poured all this money into this steel box, go on, say wow, please?', maybe an Alfa Romeo joke 'oh the electrics' or a Lucas joke...'oh the electrics'
like 10mpg says, horribly clichéd and intensely off-putting to read.

More of the 1% 10mpg describes and they might have a chance at staving off the death of their industry.

If anyone here has seen it. A great magazine, Even if it is a bit slow of the press, Is TYPE magazine. Bloody brilliant writeups, Excellent history on what your reading thru, and doesnt do the usual pandering to all tastes.

Although its totally intended for aircooled vw enthusiasts.
Something like it though in a retro theme would be great.

Everything out there atm seems to be dedicated to "OOOOH look how low he got on those wheels" << again...


We need something with some background and interesting theme IMHO.

Like the things you can read on certain blogs (just a car guy for instance) storys with the pics for detail, Not just pics with a vague writeup... Id like something that keeps me interested while i have my lunch break rather than somthing i struggle to stay interested in.



I used to buy retrocars. But now i don't. Ill leave it at that as I'm pretty sure ive mentioned before why i don't.

But Bryn has been about since the good old days of magazines. His writing style has always been enjoyable.

Matt

Interesting, in answer to the original question, I don't think so no, but I'd love to be proved otherwise.

Reading this thread it saddens me that so many of you have stopped regularly reading magazines. I can see and understand why, as I have done the same...

< Witness the post count

What I find interesting is the need to be published, the increase in blogging, online articles and photography show that 'publishing' in whatever form is something people are interested in. I understand that some of you feel the magazines are now populated by staff who simply can't do the job, I feel the same of the internet. Obviously one group are getting paid for what they do, I know this, but you can directly link the decline of the magazine in general with the rise of the internet. What I'm saying is that the internet has watered down the journalistic gene pool.

The problem is that the internet doesn't currently provide me with the quality of content that magazines did ten years ago. So we're in a state of flux, advertisers scrabbling for internet presence, magazines scrabbling for sales, end users becoming providers, readers becoming more and more bemused... So they start a blog, take some pictures etc.

Given all that, taking into consideration that my sole income for over a decade has been from photo-journalism, I would not change a thing. It saddens me that the magazine era is lurching from side to side in danger of capsizing.

I would say the publishers are mainly to blame, not the staff. I have had a wonderful time though, my timing was right and I've had a ball... It will be interesting to see what happens next

Thanks guys, I just read your posts after replying. The second article I wrote for Street Machine in 1997 was about a Ford straight six engined T, hand painted in maroon with steels, it was gorgeous.

I wrote that article twice, the first time I wrote it in the style of a writer, or so I thought. The second, how I wanted to write it or simply, how I write. From that moment on I understood that you should do your own thing and that gives it integrity, which in turn interests people as they can relate to honesty.

I get equally as frustrated at the mis-information, cliched old tosh that gets turned out by people who I am sure as perfectly good writers, yet switch on the 'journalist' button and lose sight of good copy.

The other thing I would say is that I still consider myself to be a lucky punter, a chancer that shouldn't really be stood on the pit wall, in the private garage or getting the factory tour. This is often lost on other writers, I see them expecting the 'treatment'... Why? I really don't know, they are nothing special. We are just funnels that get amazing concoctions poured into our eyes and ears, for us to distill and the reader to enjoy

As I'm always banging on about, I love Retro Cars and I subscribe to it, as well as Evo, Octane and Classic Ford. (I also usually buy Retro Ford, and sometimes Classic Cars, C&SC and MotorSport.)

There's a lot of gloom around the decline of print media, and of course the internet is accountable for much of this, both in terms of the immediacy of fresh info and the democratisation of discussion (informative or otherwise), but the obvious model is the one currently being carried out by the likes of Evo and Top Gear - a strong social media strategy providing slightly different content to that which you'd find in the mag - as well as including stuff you can't have in print, like videos, high-res downloads etc - giving a constant drip-feed of info that drives sales to the magazine. The print medium is the central pillar of the strategy as a whole; it's worked on me - having followed Top Gear on Twitter for a while, I've started buying the magazine again.

Questions people have raised around the knowledge/enthusiasm/coolness ratio of motoring journos are valid, but perhaps slightly unfair. I self-publish (basically because no-one's willing to pay me to write about cars yet); I get the odd article printed here and there and I'd jump at the chance to do more of it, but I'd be putting myself squarely in the crosshairs of those of you who feel that an article that isn't underpinned by technological know-how is of little value.

Of course, the fundamental point is this: if a magazine isn't for you, you don't have to buy it. After five or six years of subscribing to PPC, I gave up on it last year because a) I was really annoyed by the lax proofreading and b) they were aways bloody moaning about stuff. But for a lot of readers, the spelling and punctuation of an article is of little consequence, and the subject material is what they're looking for. Horses for courses. I read Retro Cars because it always has a broad spectrum of the sort of cars I'm interested in, has beautiful pictures of them, and discusses the technical details on a relatively simple level that I understand...

...and obviously Bryn writes cool stuff for them, which is a superplus point.

since I was a kid spending my pocket money on custom car and street machine, ive always until recently bought mags. like many others it seems ,i tended to drift from mag to mag too. like a mag traveller.... I'm sure custom car is getting thinner , ppc is all wrong,hows a 27 litre rover a practical performance car???yet its in every months mag. instead of loads of different mags....and theres so many,look in wh smith and see em all lined up, theres a "retro -everything you can imagine" on sale there.
many mags become "samey" too fast , same types of cars month on month. I used to buy retro cars as there was always different cars and models in it,thats my thing. as for the whole "retro" titling,to me its not retro, ive owned the car for nudging 19 years now so to me its just a name thats been given to cars from my era. everyones todays retro is my "same old car ive had for years and just never managed to sell ". still not worked out exactly what makes a car retro instead of a classic yet either.....
I like to see a mix of cars and very much like to see non "scene" cars in mags.the minute something becomes "scene" then it becomes just another one of many .in one mag this month(think its a ford one) theres a random vw camper feature in the back!!!! what a refreshing change. not even a vw mag either. just a random feature.i bloody loved that!!! due to money ...or lack of it to be more exact the only mag I get now is classic ford. thats because the mother in law got me a 6 month subscription...couldnt afford it otherwise.
id like to see a mix of writers from accross the board and into all different styles etc in one mag. nothing worse than seeing the same type of car month after month on the cover of a mag.
only my opinion , but ill always prefer to read a build of a car thats been done by the owner and not a garage. id rather see a car thats almost perfect than a bought one thats mint. I appreciate the effort thats gone into the motor
anyway, out next month is my new mag "retro world" featuring stolen "googled" images and write ups ...............................
the internet is hard on mags and forums are everywhere,some mags have apps for your phones too so you don't even need to got to the shops.
I think something that needs to be watched though is whether mags change with trends or whether they stay firm with what theyve always done. everything needs to change over time or its doesnt reflect the buyers interests.
just a quick gripe,practical classics mag ........every month it features month a jag, how practical is that as a classic car?? id rather see an old skoda,allegro,renault 18,lada, fiat x19 or pretty much anything other than ,as clarkson once said " a jaaaaaaaaaaaaaag"
got big love for 1.3 morrris marinas at the moment so one of them would be nice to see.
obviously having no money I don't actually buy mags any more, I'm the tight git who stands in wh smith for an hour reading em for free while wifey and kids go shopping.........

I have reduced the amount of mags I buy. Mainly due to money (outright) and value for money.

I do like this idea, Hotwire. We produce an annual 'Year Book' at work. It contains technical articles, features, case studies etc. It is not quite the same idea as above, but similar. Our year book is paid for my membership money and advertising.

I would pay £10 for a RR yearbook. It could be like a roundup of all the cool stuff that happened each year.

I guess we already have that in the RR anual awards, but it the idea still has some good mileage and could be an expansion or extention of the idea.

A frustration when dealing with a lot of classic car magazines is the constant re-hash of the same old information about the same old cars. I can appreciate this situation is driven by advertisers - you stick a popular car on the cover, you can stick a load of specialist ads inside, plus there's the complete truth that if you stick a popular car on the cover more copies will sell (even though the readers will just be reading the same stuff about the same damn car).

So you think fair enough, but maybe they'll have something I don't know much about. Then you find a little tiny piece about a car you've not really ever heard much of, accompanied by the same brochure shot you've seen ten times before on Google Image Search, with a paragraph of text that might as well have been copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Frustrating.

I'd love to see a car magazine which goes into ridiculous levels of detail about cars which barely get much of a mention otherwise. A great big four-page spread on the Hyundai Stellar with all-new photography. A shootout of the different Lancia Prisma models. A big ongoing feature about the Rambler brand. Hell, they don't even need to be weird cars, just new content - I'd absolutely love to read an in-depth feature about the Sierra/Cavalier rep wars which goes further than skin deep.

It'd probably never happen though, so I'll just have to read the same old information dredged up from the Internet. Or make my own magazine that no one would buy.