JCMARTIN43_at_aol.com wrote: > > A tangential thought re Sea Kayaker and, probably, most other magazines which are commercial and which have to sell "news" for which people are willing to spend a portion of their disposable income. > > I know no more than any other PaddleWiser about what Doug has related on his dealings with Sea Kayaker --- a magazine that I enjoy reading and to which I have subscribed for nine years. But I am concerned with something which Doug has raised: the greater importance of having an "exclusive" status on a news item similar to this thread or of anything else.< I think editorial policy that looks for that kind of exclusivity is being short-sighted and not doing a service to their readers. No amount of discussion in fleeting email on a listserver can ever substitute for a good article carefully constructed, edited and researched and printed later. It is what keeps the weekly newsmagazines in business and the monthly specialized mags going. Something blars out on TV and gets our attention as it develops. Later that day a newspaper has a reporter pull together the pieces into something more thoughtful than instantaneous TV stuff. A week later, Time or Newsweek puts further thought and focus on it as the smoke begins to clear. Still later an Atlantic Monthly or New Yorker (a weekly that looks back further than the previous week) looks at in a cooler analytical, meaningful way further piecing together the significance and multi-sides of the topic. If the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and Atlantic Monthly would only print what they exclusively discovered, they would be very empty indeed. Your own coverage of Tom Hancock's misfortunate death on Lake Erie is a clear example of this. Over time. you added layers and layers to the original report, wound up chucking some conclusions and coming up with newer ones and topped it off with, as I recall, a brilliant set of insights on likely went wrong that were great lessons for all of us particularly those unaware of the dangers of calm water paddling in cold water with equipment only half applied right. Your final report reached perhaps about 1,200 readers (I am adding the number of subscribers to PaddleWise and CPAkayaker, although some people subscribe to both and should be counted only once). Even that number didn't all read it for various reasons...too much email that day, away for a few days and deluged upon getting back on line, etc. Moreover, for the most part, the audience for the listservers tends to be somewhat more sophisticated and experienced, and those who are not are listening carefully in an accelerated learning curve. Sea Kayaker has a circulation in the 25,000 range. Being in print, the information is captured more permanently and, if not read today, the mag will wend its way to the john where it may get picked up and looked at again over and over. The mag's readership is vast and among those numbers are likely more people who inspired by the glossy ads and the seeming simplicity of paddling their new boat are unaware that they are pushing the edges of survivability when they venture out into cold water conditions even on calm days. The Hancock tragedy and the lessons learned would have been a classic, with the same impact on a lot of readers of Sea Kayaker as had the article by Moulton Avery in the early 1990s about the dangers of hypothermia which scared the beejezz out of a lot of paddlers. Doug's piece is another matter. While I understand Doug's frustration and why he finally spilled the beans on PaddleWise, it really was just one person's account of something, a person who was a direct player in the event, how it unfolded and its consequences. As such it was of necessity Rashomon-like with all the emotions of one deeply involved in the event...like all those conflicting accounts that mountain climbers rush to publish upon coming down from a tragic summit climb. The original idea, which Doug (to his credit) sought out, was to have Matt Broze, certainly a recognized, respected analyzer of sea kayaking accidents, write it up pulling the varied accounts and pieces together and coming up with lessons. Then, although I don't know how Sea Kayaker works, it would likely have gone through vigorous editing and challenges from a good editor, who as any good editor should act as "the reader's friend" (in publishing parlance meaning someone who makes certain all the appropriate questions about the event are raised and answered in the article). What a piece would that have been! ralph diaz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Apr 13 2000 - 08:06:26 PDT
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