Do you miss (paper) MSX magazines?

Of course I miss them, the information on the Internet is volatile: how many info has been lost due to close down of sites? Paper is forever!

Initiatives like Call MSX are praiseworthy. Although I still think that we need a magazine in English (not in Dutch nor Spanish).

Here are some cons of a paper magazine:
- A huge problem lies in the daily updates of sites like ours, rendering such paper magazines outdated when it comes to news.
- User input is minimal for paper magazines. Sure, you could post letters like in the old days, but that would also be outdated then. Not to mention that you aren't going to stuff 60 pages with user reactions.
- Reviews would be minimal again, just like it is now. There's much activity, but lots of 'em are freeware, or vapourware. Freeware would end up in some kinda freeware section, just like MC(C)M had a PD section. Vapourware is completely not interesting.
- Price, 60 pages is a realistic size for a paper magazine that wants to make some impact. But at which costs? And I don't mean the amount of work that comes with it, but the financial bit. Typically, paper magazines are payed from advertising.. which MSX'er advertises these days?
- You want a decent amount of color on your pages, color is expensive!

There are also some pros for a paper magazine:
- The coolness factor
- The lifetime content guarantee (mentioned above me)
- Transportable.. bed, train, etc.
- Most people would argue that paper is more pleasant to read than a monitor.
- A staff of people are able to make a quality magazine without the danger of low-quality user input. E.g. on MRC someone can post his text in bad English, and there's the risk of flaming/namecalling (but that's luckily very minimal for quite a while already). A paper magazine can be made and polished in all ease, so that what remains is really quality.

Ivan wrote:
Of course I miss them, the information on the Internet is volatile: how many info has been lost due to close down of sites?

Yeah, definitely a lot is lost! I was trying to collect info on JoyNet recently, and of course my own web site with the specification was still available, most of the other websites with tools, software and info were down. I was able to recover some through web.archive.org, but not all.

OTOH, the opposite also happens; e.g. I read a letter in PC-Active from someone who asked about an article in a very old issue of PC-Active, from 1997 or early 2000 or something, and even they didn’t have all the old magazines anymore. There are some collectors who still have them, but it’s hard to find if you’re not one of them yourself. Whereas there are tons of websites that exist on the internet forever and just stay available.

I have a bunch of old MCM’s stored at my parent’s house, and I can get them if I need to find back some old article (albeit with more trouble than if their contents had been on the internet). But I don’t have every issue, so I might not be able to find a certain article that I’m looking for.

But basically, the difference is: with websites, it’s the responsibility of the owner to keep them available. With magazines, it’s the responsibility of the readers. Good owners try to never remove information from the internet, and make sure it’s always available somewhere, even if they themselves have moved on to other interests. A good example of this is MCCW, which is still available online even though it moved a couple of times, and MRC as well because their archives go back all the way to the beginning.

If the owner is ‘bad’ however and lets his content disappear, it’s useful to have a spare copy, and paper is a good medium for keeping.

Wolf_ wrote:
Here are some cons of a paper magazine:
- A huge problem lies in the daily updates of sites like ours, rendering such paper magazines outdated when it comes to news.

I don’t know… what the MRC publishes is mostly like the Maïskoek in MCCM, small messages. There are few full-length articles on msx.org, and a paper magazine could definitely do much interesting there without being outdated by the time it’s published.

Passion-MSX publishes some nice full-length articles every once in a while, although it’s not always in English. A paper magazine could do that as well. There’s a lot of subjects that you could write about which wouldn’t be immediately outdated; reviews (maybe most games are small, but there are quite a lot of them!), interviews, programming courses, retrospectives, et cetera.

- Price, 60 pages is a realistic size for a paper magazine that wants to make some impact. But at which costs? And I don't mean the amount of work that comes with it, but the financial bit. Typically, paper magazines are payed from advertising.. which MSX'er advertises these days?
- You want a decent amount of color on your pages, color is expensive!

Don’t know about that, seems to me that it’s cheaper than it used to be. And afaik financial problems were never the reason for any of the magazines to quit (at least it wasn’t for MCCM). Look at Hnostar, which had a fair number of very fancy-looking issues published during the ‘silent years’.

There are also some pros for a paper magazine:
- A staff of people are able to make a quality magazine without the danger of low-quality user input. E.g. on MRC someone can post his text in bad English, and there's the risk of flaming/namecalling (but that's luckily very minimal for quite a while already). A paper magazine can be made and polished in all ease, so that what remains is really quality.

MRC also reviews and corrects submitted news before posting submitted news. In fact, I rely on that when I have some news to submit (e.g. on the MSX fair Bussum)! And additionally, the MRC collects news themselves as well. So I don’t think this is a real difference. It’s definitely not a ‘pro’ that is specific to paper, it just depends on the editors.

But anyways, I think right now, it’s not so much an issue of finance, outdatedness or material to write on. I think the problem is mostly that there is not a large enough group of people who want to spend time on writing articles about MSX. If there was, I wouldn’t be looking at the last issue of MWW Magazine that’s on my desk right now.

~Grauw

I don’t know… what the MRC publishes is mostly like the Maïskoek in MCCM, small messages. There are few full-length articles on msx.org, and a paper magazine could definitely do much interesting there without being outdated by the time it’s published.

Oh, we'd really like to write longer newsposts if there was more information available.. but typically there isn't. I also think our articles section could use some more content, but very few ppl submit some, and MRC webmins usually spend their time on the Frontpage, moderation and their own private stuff. Added to that, the foundation members tend to want to spend some time on the global direction of MRC now and in the future, and atm 2 of the foundation staff are also the main news writers. So, I guess that in this case snout and me are not the first ones to *also* write articles on top of all the rest.. that said: if anyone has an article he wishes to share with the rest of us: just send it to us, and -iirc- the one who submits it gets 8 points! (and eternal fame :P)

Passion-MSX publishes some nice full-length articles every once in a while, although it’s not always in English. A paper magazine could do that as well. There’s a lot of subjects that you could write about which wouldn’t be immediately outdated; reviews (maybe most games are small, but there are quite a lot of them!), interviews, programming courses, retrospectives, et cetera.

Like I said above, articles are most welcome. In a certain way one could perceive some forum threads as large articles on their own. Remember that times change.. perhaps articles do so too. We currently have a large article about SymbOS in our forum, the largest article we have.. it contains the history, startup, user feedback, images, comments, lol, etc.
Same for Manbow 2.. our Manbow 2 article started somehere in February 2005, it contains programming courses, game design, images, VDP.. you name it!
One of the problems with traditional articles is that not much is really new. What's left in the scene are the experts from yesteryear. An MCCM could write an article about the most basic BASIC commands like PRINT, INPUT etc. .. could we? Wouldn't it be a waste of time and energy? Even if we do an article about BASIC commands, then nyyrikki comes by and proves us all wrong.., so much for our article.. :P

Don’t know about that, seems to me that it’s cheaper than it used to be. And afaik financial problems were never the reason for any of the magazines to quit (at least it wasn’t for MCCM). Look at Hnostar, which had a fair number of very fancy-looking issues published during the ‘silent years’.

What circulation number did Hnostar have? MCCM in their final days had 1500. If you do the printing at the local printshop, then it's quite expensive I think. If you are to combine all the pages into a magazine yourself, then that might be fun for 50 copies.. but are you really going to do this each 6 weeks for hundreds of magazines? Are you also going to send 'm yourself to hundreds of addresses? Why/when did Hnostar stop btw?

It’s definitely not a ‘pro’ that is specific to paper, it just depends on the editors.
True, but on average I think traditional paper editors are more skilled than average online editors. Online there's an edit button for us, if there's a typo. For paper this is less easy when it's in the shop.. :P Paper magazines are usually commercial situations with payed staff. Such a magazine may expect a certain expertise of her writers while anyone could do an online magazine on a website, without any related education or interests.

What about doing the magazine on PDF, with the possibility (there are some sites that do that) of "printing on demand"? That way, you can have it stored online *and* have it preserved by readers!

slotman:
I thought of that myself. However:
- The price. Normal magazines are made in large quantities, and most of their funds come from advertising. If you'd PoD such a mag using a service like Lulu, then this would become a truly expensive magazine and the shipping time is also quite considerable. Note that I know Lulu a bit, it's great for books 'n such, but they don't have magazine formats -I already asked, months ago-. So, not just every PoD could print in magazine format. By the way, if you happen to know a Pod website that prints in magazine format (thin pages, color, thick glossy cover).. for a price of ~5euro per copy of ~50..60 pages, do tell!
- I think ppl just want to come home, and find a new magazine on their doorstep.
- If such a PDF magazine comes in a digital form, then what's the difference with a website? We could as well publish all those articles on MRC and be done with it. A paper used to be so different from what websites are today, I think if ppl are to get a subscription on a papermagazine they really want real intrinsic paper with a color cover on glossy paper.. just how things were 15 years ago.

Recycled paper is nice, PDF is fine, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM is useful.
I would buy some stuff with great software bundle.

I liked the old BASIC Magazines and the music. The games were fine too.

With a portable internet device (Nokia 700, iPhone, PSP, etc.) you can read MRC on the toilet!

Anyway, it would really be cool if people would just write articles which could be published on MRC. As Wolf said, Passion MSX is doing that very nicely! In the last MCCW I even put a call to send 'all your articles' to MRC...

If you want, I can provide english translation for the articles made on MSXCafé or PassionMSX.

In a certain way one could perceive some forum threads as large articles on their own.

Not really. Look at the SymbOS thread. More than a hundred pages. And I only clicked on the link to it because I wanted to know a little more about it. An article is edited, that’s where it’s very different from forum threads. I don’t really have time or ‘zin’ to plough through the latter. The quantity is too high and the quality is too low, so to say.

Maybe there are forum threads that are more concise and to-the-point, but there’s nobody pointing me to those, so the only way for me to find them would be to look at all forum threads.

The Manbow 2 thread you mentioned certainly isn’t a good example. Yes there are a lot of topics, a lot of them interesting, but it’s not edited so it’s not sorted into separate articles by topic, not introduced, not easy to scan through, no carefully created examples, not easy to digest. I really don’t think that qualifies for the term ‘article’ at all, posts on a forum are really a different beast.

What circulation number did Hnostar have? MCCM in their final days had 1500. If you do the printing at the local printshop, then it's quite expensive I think. If you are to combine all the pages into a magazine yourself, then that might be fun for 50 copies.. but are you really going to do this each 6 weeks for hundreds of magazines? Are you also going to send 'm yourself to hundreds of addresses? Why/when did Hnostar stop btw?

Well, let me just repeat that financial issues were not the downfall for magazines like MCCM, and I don’t think that even now financial issues should be an insurmountable obstacle. Especially when it’s not on paper, like MCCW, the costs are minimal and there are many opportunities that are harder to do on paper (such as being multi-language).

The real problem I think is 1. lack of editors/contributors, and to a lesser extent 2. lack of news. Problem 2 can be resolved by printing less issues per year, but I think 4/year should be pretty doable, there’s a reasonable amount of MSX stuff to write about. Or if it’s an online magazine, just ditch the concept of issues entirely. Problem 1, I don’t know how it can be solved. MRC, as you say, also suffers from it, there is only so much two people can do. The same is true for e.g. the online magazine MCCW of which 3 issues were released after MCCM stopped (unfortunately no more than that, it was really great!), and also for the paper-published MWW magazine of which recently the last issue was sent to subscribers.

As for Hnostar, dunno. But probably also lack of contribution from editors. Afaik the guy who did the printing still does Sunrise’s printing work (but you have to ask sunrise about that :)), so I think they still have ties to MSX and might be willing to print magazines at a low cost.

~Grauw

Do you miss (paper) MSX magazines?

Yes, and I would subscribe to a new MSX magazine 43.07 % (59)
Yes, but that time has passed 37.23 % (51)
No 19.71 % (27)

Difficult to answer. Today, I don't really miss paper MXS magazins. Maybe a couple of years before, I would have missed them. In the early 90th, I wrote some articles for a german MSX magazin called MSX-Contakt. Althougth this magazine was quite good and professional, there were some annoying things, too. My articles got some unexpected alterations, some other articles in this magazin were an insult to good taste, many orthographical errors, actual delivery date was far behind the date indicated, the magazine got shrinked form A4 to A5 format, the latter was too bulky for its size etc. To be fair, many of this problems wasn't the fault of the editor but implied by the constantly falling number of subscribers and due to lack of time for making the magazine. The number of subscribers was far below the number the editor initially expected, and we end up by IIRC 15 subscribers. Would you spend very much time, effort and money to publish a magazine for just 15 subscribers, from whom some of them most likely will not pay?

Is there a real project of create a new MSX magazine behind this poll?

An MSX site with over 1 million visitors annually and only 68 potential subscribers -by now- to a new MSX magazine? Nahh... I'm not going to accept the result of this poll.

Ik heb nog een aantal liggen uit 1978 /1980 Gratiis voor de liefhebbervoor