Check Waterways World Magazine before buying it

[canalboat]

I just got a copy of Waterways World for April and it has a 4page article printed twice in full, and one of the advertised items if missing. 

[Ray T]

We've missed the tunnel:

http://www.waterwaysworld.com/samplearticle.html

http://www.waterwaysworld.com/downloads/p.76-p.79.pdf

Edited March 1, 2018 by Ray T

[canalboat]

By Cracky, you're quick Ray. Do you spend all your time searching the internet?

Edited March 1, 2018 by canalboat

[Athy]

Ours, to which we subscribe, arrived this morning but we have not unwrapped it yet. So that's a treat in store for the weekend.

[Ray T]

31 minutes ago, canalboat said:

By Cracky, you're quick Ray. Do you spend all your time searching the internet?

Not quite,  I am on WW's mailing list.

[dor]

Discovered this earlier.

I know WW's proof reading leaves a lot to be desired, but missing a four page article duplicated takes some beating!

[zenataomm]

I stopped buying WW in the early 90s when it became a Yellow Pages type directory advertising anything and everything, with a predictable yearly offering like ...... 

Spring ..... Preparing your boat for the new season, Flora and Fauna to watch out for at this time of year. What Hire Boat Companies are offering this year.

Summer .. Preparing your boat if your Safety Certificate is due this year, Flora and Fauna to enjoy in the Summer. Which rings to enjoy this year.

Autumn ... Preparing your boat for a late year cruise avoiding flooding rivers, Duck Weed strangling The Soar. Late year bargains from The Hire Companies.

Winter .... Preparing your boat for the Winter, Historic photos of Santa at Working Boats at Sutton Stop, IWA Christmas Cards of Flora and Fauna from different rings.

[Sea Dog]

28 minutes ago, zenataomm said:

I stopped buying WW in the early 90s when it became a Yellow Pages type directory advertising anything and everything, with a predictable yearly offering like ...... 

Spring ..... Preparing your boat for the new season, Flora and Fauna to watch out for at this time of year. What Hire Boat Companies are offering this year.

Summer .. Preparing your boat if your Safety Certificate is due this year, Flora and Fauna to enjoy in the Summer. Which rings to enjoy this year.

Autumn ... Preparing your boat for a late year cruise avoiding flooding rivers, Duck Weed strangling The Soar. Late year bargains from The Hire Companies.

Winter .... Preparing your boat for the Winter, Historic photos of Santa at Working Boats at Sutton Stop, IWA Christmas Cards of Flora and Fauna from different rings.

What we're you hoping for? An item on migration of the Wildebeest?  A cross channel ferry timetable?  Something on the Terracotta Warriors? 

[roland elsdon]

You missed several vital waterways world late 1990s articles

buy a 150000 boat and put it on a closed waterway

retire on a narrowboat its great ( which is why thrupp in the early 2000 was full of pissed retired corporate people who had sold up bought a boat got bored and then could afford a house in oxfordshire

buy a fatbeam they are the future

getting one up on poor people buy buying this boat it shows bad taste

can i get away with only a 85 hp engine

)

Sorry not afford a house in oxfordshire they used to ask us if we were 'staying' when we took the down at heel motor through (brasses sparkling) i used to tell them i had a house locally 

[Murflynn]

why single out WWW?      most magazines these days are about the same:- little original interesting content for seasoned veterans, and driven by advertising.  

[Cheshire cat]

I was going to say wack it on Ebay as rare!

We had a copy of Harry Potter with a chapter duplicated and my wife took it back to the shop. I couldn't believe it. 

 

[The Bearwood Boster]

Got my copy through the post this morning-sent them an email about the duplicated article.I did think about sending the email twice...

[zenataomm]

58 minutes ago, Murflynn said:

why single out WWW?      most magazines these days are about the same:- little original interesting content for seasoned veterans, and driven by advertising.  

Because the thread is about Waterways World. 

[Stephen Jeavons]

I only buy the magazines for the "back cabin" Technical articles and Canal Restoration projects. The rest is positively boring.

Does anyone else think that all the new boats they test look the same inside? Very little imagination goes into interiors it seems. I hunt for innovative ideas but seldom see any. 

Stephen

Edited March 2, 2018 by Stephen Jeavons
correct text

[magpie patrick]

I found a most inspiring item in the news section - one that names my company 

[Tony Brooks]

9 minutes ago, Stephen Jeavons said:

I only buy the magazines for the "back cabin" Technical articles and Canal Restoration projects. The rest is positively boring.

Does anyone else think that all the new boats they test look the same inside? Very little imagination goes into interiors it seems. I hunt for innovative ideas but seldom see any. 

Stephen

Are you sure you have the correct magazine. I have not seen WWW for some time so unless they have changed I think you are talking about the other mag.

[Stephen Jeavons]

Oh go on, do tell. You know you want to

3 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:

Are you sure you have the correct magazine. I have not seen WWW for some time so unless they have changed I think you are talking about the other mag.

OK Tony, Scrap the "back cabin" from my post and I mean both magazines.

[Athy]

16 minutes ago, Stephen Jeavons said:

I only buy the magazines for the "back cabin" Technical articles and Canal Restoration projects. The rest is positively boring.

Does anyone else think that all the new boats they test look the same inside? 

Stephen

Not necessarily, though I do detect a certain uniformity in the comments on them: I don't think they have ever (at least, not since we started buying the mags some years ago) tested a boat and concluded that it wasn't very good at all. This may possibly be linked to protecting their advertising revenue: review a Bloggins Boats craft and say that it is shoddy and will fall to bits within a year, and you lose your monthly half-page advert from Bloggins Boats.

As for "boring", I struggle to understand how someone interested in boats and waterways can find a magazine packed with articles about boats and waterways - cruising guides, historical pieces, human-interest stories - boring. For the first five years. After that, subjects do tend to start coming round again.

[magpie patrick]

5 minutes ago, Athy said:

Not necessarily, though I do detect a certain uniformity in the comments on them: I don't think they have ever (at least, not since we started buying the mags some years ago) tested a boat and concluded that it wasn't very good at all. This may possibly be linked to protecting their advertising revenue: review a Bloggins Boats craft and say that it is shoddy and will fall to bits within a year, and you lose your monthly half-page advert from Bloggins Boats.

As for "boring", I struggle to understand how someone interested in boats and waterways can find a magazine packed with articles about boats and waterways - cruising guides, historical pieces, human-interest stories - boring. For the first five years. After that, subjects do tend to start coming round again.

They used to do a hire boat review, and one of them was very critical of, I think, Simolda of Nantwich (who I believe have long since ceased trading). Not long after the hire boat reviews stopped, and I guess the line was that if they coulcn't be critical what was the point.

Boats also used to be much more innovative and experimental as well, I recall them being distinctly unimpressed with the Mastercraft 1160, which had a prefab fibreglass cabing lowered, fittings, furnture and all, into a steel hull. The problem I recall was this relied on grey water discharge accumulating in the cabin bilge, they liked many aspects of the boat but not this.

[roland elsdon]

You are talking early 80s here i got the first ever ww in a bookswap 2 years ago springer engineering and harborough marine dominated

[Richard Fairhurst]

It's not about the advertising - in most magazines editorial and advertising don't really talk much, and WW's no different. (Though it's a far cry from the magazine I worked on once where the editor would cross the road to avoid talking to the advertising staff!) Historically it wouldn't have made that much difference anyway - the majority of boating magazine ad income was from brokerage ads, much less from new boat builders.

(Sadly this "church and state" separation between advertising and editorial is being lost with the internet - look at how everything from Buzzfeed to the Guardian now carries "sponsored content" which is advertising trying to pass itself off as editorial.)

My logic while I was editing WW, which I picked up from Emrhys Barrell when I worked for him at Canal Boat, was simply that I didn't want to waste six pages of editorial on a sh-t boat. The reviewers would always look at a company's boats before deciding to review one, and make sure that it was something we could be comfortable recommending.

Boat reviews are really 80% "here's some ideas for your next boat" and only 20% "this is a particular boat you might want to buy" anyway, because most narrowboats are bespoke to a greater or lesser degree, and built by companies who only build a comparative handful each year. It's not like car reviews - if Ford produce a crappy Fiesta then millions will still buy it and so there's almost a responsibility for the magazines to review it and warn people, whereas if Fred's Boat Co produces a crappy narrowboat then probably only 1 of WW's 10,000 readers will ever buy it. We obviously didn't have the space (or budget!) to review boats from all 300 boatbuilders. Instead, I figured it was more effective to run a regular page of boat-buying advice on "don't get stiffed", listing all the checks and research you should do before buying a new boat - something that would hopefully help people towards buying a decent boat, whoever made it, and not losing their money to a dodgy builder. At about the time I joined WW there was a plague of dodgy builders losing people's money and I wanted to do something about it.

But that's only my rationale - I can't speak for any other magazine editors past or present, obviously.

 

15 hours ago, dor said:

Discovered this earlier.

I know WW's proof reading leaves a lot to be desired, but missing a four page article duplicated takes some beating!

This will have been way past the proof-reading stage! It's a production-level foulup. My guess as to what happened is that the production staff had two four-page articles called "Cotswolds.pdf" (one being the Cotswold restoration piece, the other being the Cotswold history piece), or two articles on the flatplan marked "Cotswolds", or something like that - and uploaded the wrong one to the printers. There would have been a time when the printers would have spotted it (on the first magazine I worked on, the printers would routinely check the 'folio' - page number - of each page and let you know if it was out of sequence), but I suspect everything is automated beyond that now.

Bit of a shame as the missing Cotswolds history piece is lovely, though I would say that because I wrote it!

As Ray says, you can download the missing article from the WW website - you don't even have to have bought the magazine.

Edited March 2, 2018 by Richard Fairhurst

[Athy]

A most reasoned and informative answer, thank you.

I can assure you, as a regular reviewer (though not of boats) for magazines, that editors have said to me several times over the years "Be gentle with this one, they're taking an advert", so it's a not unknown scenario.

[Hudds Lad]

That's a printers cock-up as it's gone through binding, although if it's come off the press with duplicate sections it's down to repro/platemaking (unless fully digital).

It could be an isolated few that are like that, or the full run. Expensive mistake for someone if it's got all the way to your doorstep

[dor]

1 hour ago, Richard Fairhurst said:

 

This will have been way past the proof-reading stage! It's a production-level foulup. My guess as to what happened is that the production staff had two four-page articles called "Cotswolds.pdf" (one being the Cotswold restoration piece, the other being the Cotswold history piece), or two articles on the flatplan marked "Cotswolds", or something like that - and uploaded the wrong one to the printers. There would have been a time when the printers would have spotted it (on the first magazine I worked on, the printers would routinely check the 'folio' - page number - of each page and let you know if it was out of sequence), but I suspect everything is automated beyond that now.

What is interesting though is that the page numbers are correct for the place in the magazine, i.e. the repeated article has pages 70-74 whilst the correctly placed piece has the page numbers 40-44.

 

[The Bearwood Boster]

14 hours ago, The Bearwood Boster said:

Got my copy through the post this morning-sent them an email about the duplicated article.I did think about sending the email twice...

Had a very nice reply today pointing me in the direction of the on-line article.Was impressed that they took the time to reply -as I bet they were fed up with reading similar emails to mine !