An interview with Craig Fuller, the New Owner, and David Popp.
Having thought about what I’ve viewed, I’m looking at a glass half full.
half full glass by Bear, on Flickr
Cheers, the Bear.[:)]
The future looks promising but some patience will be needed. Fingers crossed.
Tom
Having been one of the minions impacted by mergers and aquisitions in the past, I’m cautiously optimistic.
Reality often does not reflect the goals, hopes, and outright hyperbole of the early days.
We’ll see.
It will be interesting to see where we are at in two years. Craig Fuller said they have made 20+ acquisitions. It would be interesting to see what staffing changes have occurred at those companies in the two years following the takeover. If you are not current in communications, you will be replaced.
Reading Craig’s body language as the questions were presented to him was interesting. I saw sincerity in his answers to these guys are clueless facial expressions as he answered.
Fingers crossed for the future.
I only remember one question asked by the host, Ken Patterson, during the entire interview (Time mark: 24:48)…
“What’s going to happen to the [MR&T] layout?”
Some of the other probable questions were actually answered by Craig, as he was sharing how the acquisition came about and what concerns he had gleaned from “talk” on the internet.
To be honest, I would have MUCH rather preferred David Popp give a solo interview with Craig Fuller. I think the questions would have been more insightful and there would have been far less gushing. I found the latter fairly annoying from the host.
I do hope the promised improvements materialize. For now, I will take everything with a grain of salt.
Tom
Those guys doing the interview certainly are not journalists!
One thing that made me kind of sad was Popp saying the staff was doing everything they could to keep MR going - it really sounds like it was on the edge of getting shut down.
Does anyone know who owns Kalmbach? Popp also made it sound like the owners were really looking at the magazines as a source of cash and not ere not really interested in the product itself. Also pretty amazing Kalmbach sold the building before they had buyers for the publications. Based on that I bet the magazines sold at virtual fire-sale prices.
Glad David Popp sounds like he’ll definitely be staying on!
I think that the odds are greatly in favour of Craig Fuller succeeding. He has done it before with several other magazines so this is not a stab in the dark, and he is obviously prepared to put money where his mouth is.
Cheers!!
Dave
Hi Tom,
I totally agree! The lack of professionalism on the part of the hosts was really hard to get through. I ended up skipping through the video to watch only the segments with Craig speaking. And, speaking of David Popp, I was embarassed by the way the hosts failed to engage him almost totally.
Cheers!!
Dave
It’s a podcast and one of the most popular ones for model railroading out there. Not a rigorous journal.
Ken sets the perfect tone for a podcast situation.
It was also an extremely fortunate get that Craig and David were willing to go on at all. Kalmbach doesn’t exactly have a Podcast to leverage here and running the interview themselves would have looked far more self serving than going over to Ken who is somewhat affiliated with a competitor. It was a gushy interview, but is legitimized by the venue.
To be fair, they’re not actually journalists. Ken is a photographer / professional modeller, one of the guys is a chef, another owns a company that buys and sells used model/toy trains.
That may be true, Stix, but you don’t need to be a journalist to ask meaningful questions.
Rich
[Y][Y]
What I really find ironic is that Flying and Trains are now owned by the same company. I spent 25 years working in aviation and was an avid fan of Flying magazine. There was a gentleman by the name of Len Morgan who wrote a monthly article for them based on his experence as an airline pilot for Braniff Airways and his experience as a pilot in WW2. Len was the brother of David Morgan of Trains magazine.
I still remember after Davids passing, Len wrote in his column about his brother’s love of trains and his of flying and their quest to understand each other. It was a very wonderful tribute to David, I just wish both could have seen this day where both of their magazines would come under the ownership of the same publisher.
Ralph
An yet they scored a 40 minute interview.
You might be aware that Kalmbach DID publish an aviation magazine, briefly in the 1970s: Airliners International. The title stated the focus so this did not cover military or private planes. Evidently it did not sell enough for Kalmbach to keep it going. That was the same fate as their 1950s Ships and Sailing magazine, and of their Better Camping magazine in the early 1960s.
Dave Nelson
No David, I did not know that, thank you! I was just speaking of the two companies that the brothers worked for now being under the same publisher. It’s a shame that Airliners International didn’t work out for Kalmbach being that there were a lot more airlines back in the 70’s, like railroads then also. And a lot of companies that sold airline model kits so they must have had some kind of following?
Ralph
That was my question. A lot of positive thoughts. Yes they are going to improve the paper quality, and have lots of great photos. Subscriptions to MR have been slipping for years, no secret there. However in all the threads on multiple forums about why people stopped subscribing to MR, paper quality and lack of photos was never mentioned as reason for not subscribing anymore.
Popp said there had been some frustration of the staff but never went into details and the podcasters never followed up with any questions. It would have been interesting to know what the staff wanted to do that they couldn’t and whether the new publishers were going to let them do whatever it was that they were prevented from doing by the previous publishers.
Do they know why they lost subscribers? What have they done or plan to do to recapture the subscribers they previously lost? What are their plans to attract new subscribers?
Hi Bear,
I agree that the podcast hosts deserve a lot of credit for organizing the interview, but that doesn’t change the fact that the podcast was poorly done. Watching the hosts performances were difficult for me, to the point where I nearly turned the video off.
I hope they see the comments and take them to heart. If they want to expand their audience they simply have to up their game.
Cheers!!
Dave
Maybe a little off topic, but I wasn’t sure what a “podcast” really is. I did find this definition: " For listeners, a podcast operates like an on-demand Internet radio show. You can listen to episodes on a podcast app or subscribe to podcasts online".
If that’s really the case, if that was a true podcast we wouldn’t have seen the performers to be able to critique them.