ChrisPer said...

The glossy magazines in every sport have an important function - SELL STUFF. They whip up your enthusiasm, show the good stuff, get the reader past whatever the last good thing they bought to buying the next. They also get you more committed to the sport, if the articles are good and oriented right.

Its very good for everyone, but obviously glossy mags need to have a minimum base to pay for distribution and they COST if you keep buying them.

Now, for those of us who get our kit off the verge rubbish collections, do we really need to spend our few dollars on mags?

You're right, the glossies depend on their readers buying stuff. The problem is that they may not get you more committed to the sport, but turn you off them.

All those articles on this year's gear can just turn off the sailors who don't have all that much spare cash after they've paid for the kids, food, car, etc. When you're always told how your 4 year old gear is crud and out of date, you can start believing it and getting dissatisfied with it, which is no good at all for your dedication if it's all you can afford.

Same thing with technique articles and travel tips. You may love sailing at Palm Beach- until you get told how much better Maui is. Then your local spot starts to look like shyte.

I think the windsurfing scene really started to suffer when the OS mags (and I'm told Germany's Surf was the first and worst) started to test all their gear in windy places. In some ways it was logical but in other ways it was utterly illogical - if you live and sail in Munich or Manly that's where your gear should be tested. It's like testing a family car just by sending it around a banked oval track or the 'Ring in dry conditions.

What testing like that did, combined with the fact that the mags used to rubbish older gear to sell more stuff for their advertisers, was turn people off perfectly usable gear and towards more expensive stuff that wasn't designed for the normal winds we get.

Some other glossy mags manage to walk the fine line; surfing mags push local spots okay, kayaking and sailing magazines also do a better job of respecting real-world conditions.

Moby, I'm glad that you think the Aussie mags had that fault and I think you're right ...... I can assure you from the inside we didn't have the money to do our tests in Maui anyway! But the OS mags got into the whole thing of testing in conditions that their readers rarely got to sail in, and I think that distorted the whole sport and really hurt it badly.

Even the fact that you work in the industry changes your viewpoint; you spend so much time talking windsurfing that you demand more novelty than Joe Average, you are by definition dedicated enough that you should be a much better than average sailor, you can probably go away more, probably don't have a family demanding your presence, etc.

If your readership demographics are right you can run a mag in Oz with a circulation of 6,000-7,000, but the demographics of windsurfers aren't that great (ie it's not that easy to sell the inside from cover double spread to BMW because you're readership isn't that rich) and the advertising dollar just isn't there.

Where we differ is that I think that mags and ads spruiking new gear can turn people off their old gear, even if the old stuff works well. As far as I can see, in our consumerist society, few people want to be seen using old gear or something deemed "uncool" and therefore a lot of people took their windsurfing into blind alleys and then gave up.