If the new Firecrown is the same in the flying world and railroad world, then the first thing they did was to combine a bunch of flying magazines under one flag. Then one by one the experienced writers disappeared at the flying mags. I wonder if the same will happen to all the railroad / trains magazines.
My two cents:
I think the Firecrown mantra is to monetize without sacrificing user experience. A lot of the magazine and web content can be bought from other sources. Experienced writers (I am sure they figured out by now) can make more money pursuing independent efforts and marketing via various multi-media modes to multiple channels vs staying with one firm.
Just like IT. You can stick with one employer and try to get ahead or you can bounce around picking your projects across a menu of companies. The former will stagnate your salary and opportunities but is low risk. The latter will make you very marketable but is higher risk of being idle at times when there is an economic slowdown. B2B contracting works well for some people as they can be their own boss and run their own company.
I think Kalmbach being largely a small company sat on its website and publications for too long without a lot of innovation. Maybe that was due to lack of spending or the view of the Kalmbach family. In my view Firecrown is catching the publications up to where they should be.
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I think the question is at what standards the editorial contents will remain or even improve? I donât think the analogy to IT or IS or other independent contractors is valid.
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Kalmbach, by the end, seemed to want to be a ârailway ageâ type industry rag instead of a rail fan publication.
Way too much Fred frailey/ehh pro-psr BS by the end.
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[quote=âzugmann, post:4, topic:416751â]
Kalmbach, by the end, seemed to want to be a ârailway ageâ type industry rag instead of a rail fan publication.[/quote]
I saw that as well with the ads and some of the articles. Also, the articles became less railfan oriented. They used to be really good with locomotive rosters, maps and just nitty gritty detailsâŚthen became more generic and high level. They also used to delve into railroaders career history more in the past then they do now.
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what type of innovation?
Yeah, over the last several years, WRP had way better content.
The intrusive ads on the forum often have no relation to RRs or model railroading.
I used to work in print media. What is happening with Kalmbach has been pretty common in the industry for the last 15-20 years. Smaller publishers (magazines, local newspapers, etc.) get gobbled up by a conglomerate, then streamlined and updated to digital in an attempt to make them profitable again. Print media has been dying a slow, painful death for a long time.
Thereâs just no money in it. When your product is paid content and youâre competing with free content (aka blogs, websites, YouTube) expecting someone to pay $9 for your latest magazine is difficult. Especially when itâs at least 50% ads.
All that to say that the new ownership likely wonât be the last. Some of these media companies are structured to just trim the fat so the properties can be sold again.
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Yep, a 9 dollar magazine thatâs half ads? Ainât nobody got time for that! The problem isnât YouTube, Blogs, Etc. itâs offering something they donât. That takes work. It takes somebody having their pulse on whatâs hip and whatâs trending in the hobby or even better being the one creating the trends. That takes a culture of creativity and artistry like I talked about in another thread which unfortunately is lacking in legacy media as more and more of the content decisions are turned over to corporate types trying to appease greedy shareholders bellowing for more more more dividends. Instead you get bland family friendly pablum that tries to be all things to all people but appeals to nobody.
Oh please. A Model Railroad print subscription is $50/year, so $4/issue. The magazine has ALWAYS been half ads.
And that $50/year also get access to the magazine archive. So subscribe today, and get the entire 90 years included. You can go back 60 years and could the pages of ads.
Wait, Iâll do it for everyone,
October 1965, 32 out of 76 pages were ad free
October 2025, 47 out of 76 pages are ad free
Trains for a long time was trying to be an industry magazine to some extent. For years there have been ads for railroad equipment that the average railfan wouldnât need.
Itâs not the ads, but the content and attitude of some articles, especially columns. They tend to take the railroadâs view as gospel. But thatâs the way they get access to dispatchers, shops, cab rides and other places non-employees will never see.
I always liked Fred Fraileyâs articles. I do like the articles that have details of operations. I also have noticed such articles, and most articles in general arenât as detailed or as long as they once were. This isnât new, nor exclusive to Trains. Some have opined that the change is due to the general population perceived to now have the attention span of a gnat due to the digital age.
Jeff
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Frailey was loved by some; to others he was just a mouthpiece for the corporate offices. However at least he (and Don Phillips, the Potomac Pundit) wrote informative and entertaining columns. Not so much now.
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And change history? 4-8+8-4? When they pulled that piece of kit, I quit buying Trains mag
That wasnât all LeMassena punditry. As I recall it was around the time Kalmbach reprinted Lionel Wienerâs classic âArticulated Locomotivesâ, and Wienerâs notation for extending Whyte coding for a Mallet-pattern chassis was that x-x+x-x. Iâll confess it brought me up short, too.
Interestingly, Wienerâs book has almost nothing about high-speed American simple articulateds in it at all â I think the only one was the original B&O 2-6-6-2 design from Baldwin (essentially an attempt at a 'Mike-and-a-half). (One was later turned into a 4-4-6-2, repeating ATSFâs experiments with Mallets, with apparently about as much satisfactionâŚ)
If a change in nomenclature brought you up short, that seems like uber-pedantry. Or maybe the actor?
Yep, I know I always like reading about the operations side as well as the old technical drawings of locomotives and cars model railroader used to do back in the day and feel it gets overlooked heavily by a lot of the hobby press in favor of watch `em go roundy round in circles layout visits or âBuy yet more stuff!â pieces. I also like reading about real life operation in Trains as well. Realistically thereâs only so much you can say about paint schemes.
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It brought me up short because I hadnât seen it before, but it was being pushed as the new and more correct way to do Whyte coding. It would be a few more years before I actually read and appreciated what Wiener was trying to do with notation conventions.
I did think about using âpedantryâ for it, but I think it was more an attempt to use âbetterâ knowledge than to show off superior knowledge. Some of that distinction may have become lost in the arguments afterward when LeMassena started defending his use of the + convention⌠this was back when 2-C+C-2 for a GG1 was also a bit new and strange.
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What was his background? Strictly writing about mountain and narrow gauge rails?