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I read all three national monthly waterways magazines
regularly and am rapidly falling out of love with all of them. Typically when I
get an issue of any of them, I spend about 10 minutes flicking through the
editorial matter and about an hour studying the adverts, which are, to me, the
most interesting part, then toss it aside and forget about it.
What do they offer?
Their news coverage is appallingly late to anyone who takes
any of the internet waterways lists/groups/whatever (or even reads IWA Head
Office Bulletin). This is because they have over-extended lead-times. I reckon
(and I may be wrong) that this is linked with their all-colour format.
Personally I could do without that, and I feel that Waterways World, in
particular, started going downhill when it took to all-colour presentation
(AFIK the others have had it from their launch). To my mind WW looked a *lot*
better when most of its photos were in b&w, but then I've never felt that
colour photography works well in print - on the screen (transmitted light) it's
fine, but on the page (reflected light) it's not worth the bother.
Their diary pages are next to useless, because they've
fallen into the common magazine-publishers' fault of lying about their
publication dates, so that the cover date (and the list of events) is a month
before the actual publication date. So if I want to know what meetings and
events are on this month, I have to find where I put this month's edition of
the mag, which isn't the one that I received last week but the one I received
five weeks ago and have probably lost by now.
I think the best thing that any of them could do is to give
up colour printing (except possibly on the cover) and cut their lead times down
so that we could buy a magazine in February that contained February's diary
(rather than March's) and January's news (rather than December's).
Their feature articles are a very mixed bag Canal &
Riverboatand Canal Boat & Inland Waterways print a heck of a lot
for the beginner-owner and the beginner-hirer, out of proportion to the need,
in my opinion.
All three publish reviews of new boats which strike me as
very sketchy and only deal with what is currently fashionable. I get fed up
with reading about "country cottage" style boats - if I wanted country-cottage
style I'd buy a country cottage rather than a boat.
All three publish write-ups of individual navigations, which
I suppose is fine, except they concentrate on the well-known navigations which
I suspect many of their readers know at least as well as the authors of the
articles.
Waterways World does have some interesting historical
features and articles about some lesser known waterways (often nowadays over
the signature of Martin Ludgate), which I find very welcome. And it covers
international and freight news better than the others.
Canal & Riverboat now seems to have the best
campaigning stance, thanks largely to its news editor, Bob Clarke.
Canal Boat & Inland Waterways seems, thankfully,
largely to have got over its early problems of being over-designed, and
probably is the best photographically, thanks to Derek Pratt (in my estimation
the best waterways photographer around, but I prefer even his work in
b&w).
All have good letters pages, which are often the most
readable bits.
They all do book reviews, but I've usually read the books
before the reviews appear. But, on the whole, I find much more that's worth
sitting down to read in, for example, the HNBOC Newsletter or
Navvies than in all three commercial mags (plus IWA Waterways)
put together.
But if I was going to recommend a boater to take just one of
them, what I'd say is simply "Waterways World has the most
comprehensive advertisements".
Review by Mike
Stevens, first published as a posting to the newsgroup uk.rec.waterways,
February 2001, where it received the following reply from Brian Goggin
(republished here with his permission) :-
I found your views very interesting, partly because I am
(unpaid, part-time) editor of the quarterly mag of the IWAI (Inland Waterways
Association of Ireland) and partly because I subscribe to two of the three main
UK mags and I buy the third whenever I can find it. I am also on the
mailing-list for many mags produced e.g. by UK boat clubs, WRG, IWA
branches/regions etc, but I'm reading them with a stranger's eye because I
don't know the waterways in question.
What do they offer?
Their news
coverage is appallingly late to anyone who takes any of the internet waterways
lists/groups/whatever (or even reads IWA Head Office Bulletin). This is because
they have over-extended lead-times. I reckon (and I may be wrong) that this is
linked with their all-colour format. [...] |
Even in all-black-and-white, my mag takes three weeks to
produce and four to reach the readers. So the "news" is always a month out of
date. I don't think that's necessarily seen as a disadvantage by everybody,
though. Folk like you and me get a lot of up-to-date information online, but I
think a lot of readers are happy to get a single convenient digest of the news,
even if it's a bit late.
| Their diary pages are next to
useless,[...] |
Agreed.
| All three publish reviews of new boats
which strike me as very sketchy and only deal with what is currently
fashionable. |
I think it's difficult for a mag to review boats – or
anything else produced by its major advertisers. It's practically impossible
for the mag to make any serious criticism – but that makes the reviews
pretty well useless to the readers. I don't know whether the UK mags see their
reviews as "advertorial", but it's difficult to know where to draw the line.
The other thing that strikes me about the boat reviews in the UK mags is that
they're almost entirely about interior decoration rather than in anything to do
with the boat as a boat.
| [...] All have good letters pages, which
are often the most readable bits. They all do book reviews, but I've usually
read the books before the reviews appear. |
Agreed.
| But, on the whole, I find much more
that's worth sitting down to read in, for example, the HNBOC Newsletter
or Navvies than in all three commercial mags (plus IWA Waterways)
put together. |
Hear, hear. The other things that are missing are a forum
for real controversy and a sense of perspective. On the first count,
criticising BW (or, here, Waterways Ireland) and asking them to spend more
money is in some respects the easy option. I'm not saying it isn't justified,
but there are a lot of other interests out there: local authorities, marina
owners, hire firms, some owners .... In many respects (and here I get to the
second point), the waterways are a battleground of competing interests, but
there is very little sense of that. It's like an amusement park with boat-rides
through pretty scenery, but all the machinery hidden away. |
