Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Miscellany

[quote=John V6 It relies on members writing articles or it will always be trip reports entered by Centres.
It is the major spend of MSCC by a long way so if the members don't like it then we need to help MSCC change it to meet our needs & desires not just moan about it.

Any ideas?[/quote]

+1

I would just mildly say that when I received the communication of increased costs and asking for suggestions, I responded by suggesting that a substantial saving might possibly be made by offering a lower priced membership to those who would happily forgo the printed mag and happily accept as an e publication.
I received no acknowledgement of any kind.

Ditto, having sent articles and photos over the years that have never been acknowledged or used I eventually gave up, if others had the same that's why they have run out of potentially (non dining club) interesting articles

When the recent annual accounts appeared with a substantial 'unplanned' payment to the printers, I queried this and got a basic fob off reply with no proper explanation

I sent this email on Oct 15 last year; quote:
"Why not offer the alternative of a digital-only Membership, for say half-price ? Miscellany is a good read a couple of times, thereafter it just takes-up space. Ads would appear within a time-frame that means advertisers' offerings would still be current (often "gone" by the time they appear in Miscellany)".
No reply or even acknowledgment.

There's no excuse for not acknowledging the suggestion, but I doubt that such an idea would lead to a significant reduction in fees because of the way that magazine printing (like other types of printing) is costed.

I don't know about Miscellany but we have looked at the possibility in another club of similar size, and the marginal cost reduction in moving from say 6000 copies to 4000 copies is no where near pro rata. The saving in paper and in postage is real but the actual setting up and printing isn't much cheaper.

Correct to save you reduce pagination and frequency.

I belong to a number of clubs and societies and for those that offer a digital-only option the subscription savings are very small - as little as a fiver-off, certainly nowhere near half-price. One genealogical society concluded that the minor savings would hardly cover the costs of maintaining two different subscription levels.

There's a French expression (or it may be German -- or I may have invented it...) "There are many ways to make an omellette".
So tackle the Miscellany debacle from the other end: reduce the size to A5, get rid of all the blank white spaces, and use lower-quality paper. Years ago when I was a member of the TVR Car Club, their "Sprint" mag was just like that -- and crammed with good articles and captions on all the photos. Here's an example: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/224372884694
When they decided to "go large", in came acres of white space and glossy covers (which fall over when you have a stack of them). Not interested.

I find the mag a ‘one cup read’, ie I’ve read all the stuff that interests me in the time it takes to have one cup of coffee. No interest in reading about who’s had dinner with who and where, not much interest in reading about folk who have driven places to see things either. I’ll flick through to look for anything practical and then glance through the classifieds, then off to the recycling unfortunately.

Must be a huge waste of resources and energy at a time when we are supposed to be conserving both! A problem for a lot of clubs/organisations I imagine.

Saga magazine has just gone digital for lifetime members. If you want hard copy, you need to pay the going rate for the mag.