Tom Wallace wrote:
How does everybody else feel because I must draw attention to the poor production quality of the last Newsletter (January 2012)? This applies to both the paper and the low res. download.
Most of the photographs are unclear and not good colour and all of the line diagrams are illegible. Take Arne Kverneland’s article “Peaking up the Junk Sail”. Figs 1, 2, and 4 are far too small and labels unreadable. There is mention of a fig 3 but no such figure is there. His pictures are too small. I have seen the original which is crystal clear with good photographs.
Those of us who, being used to the magnificent magazine composed by Fred Barter over the years, have opted for the considerably greater subscription in order to have the printed and posted Newsletter feel we deserve a better product.
I propose we revert to the status quo ante.
Tom,
Thanks for making this posting, it's always good receive constructive criticism. I got little feedback concerning issue 58 of the Magazine, but up to now, it's all been positive.
I'm not clear what you mean when you say the "poor production quality" of "both the paper and the low res download". Do you mean that you would prefer glossier paper? The quality of the images in the printed copy is equally as good as it was in issue 57, and better than it was in earlier issues that we were obliged to scan from paper copies.
The low res download is provided as a service to those members who have poor, slow-speed internet access. I would advise anyone who has broadband to go for the medium res download, where the quality of the images approaches more nearly that of the printed copy. To get the best possible quality of image in the file that was sent to the printer, a whopping file size of 97MB was necessary. Clearly, this is impracticable for members to download, so I reduced it to just under 15MB for the medium res download, the maximum size for some email inboxes.
After I had uploaded the files to our website, some corrections and additions were made before the file was finally sent to the printer. It was an oversight on my part that I did not go back and update the copy on the website Download page, and I have now seen to this. I apologise. The content of issue 58 that you now download from there will be identical to that in the printed copy of issue 58. Fig 3 in Arne's article is now in place.
I have taken the view that the three most important features in a magazine for an association such as ours are content, content and content (the fourth is presentation). Fred took the view that presentation came first, and so we had a magazine that was unnecessarily glossy, wasted a third of most pages with empty space, and had a great paucity of new, interesting content. It was also frequently months late - by the time it was published, such content as there was had got hopelessly stale. Is that what you want to go back to? I don't.
Your committee is in the process of budgeting for next year. At current subscription levels, we can publish three issues a year at the standard of issue 58, packed with content - or we can go back to an expensively edited, glossy magazine issued less frequently. The content, as always, is up to JRA members to produce, but I hope that I have demonstrated that a more active JRA magazine editor, one who is more closely linked to the body of active JRA members, one who is actively involved in making junk rigs and using them, is better than one who is not any of those things.