What's This? Another Editorial?

Any day of the week, you and I can catch up on what JD Lowe is modelling and thinking in my right sidebar - in Trackside Treasure's 2024 feature blog '30 Squares'. Two days after JD wrote a perceptive piece on Model Railroader's 90th anniversary that really caught my eye and got me thinking, his post inspired me to erect an esoteric editorial energetically effecting eclectic edification, giving you some pensive pauses or at least a target at which to throw your rotten vegetables and other biodegradable bytes.

It must be the front-porch time I spend watching the buzzards turn lazy circles in the sky over those neighbours who take one hour and 40 minutes to cut their lawn twice-over, lulling my brain into mulling such trending topics. When I do editorialize, it's me stepping out from behind the curtain where I spin the wheels and jiggle the levers to document Canadian railway doings (in 887 posts over the past 16 years) here. It allows me a moment to inhale, exhale and have a word or two with you, before the next train.)

• 2023 - thoughts on train shows
• 2023 - pensive about the pandemic
• 2022 - planting my modelling flag
• 2022 - printed a few things
• 2020 - thoughts on sharing online
• 2020 - freedom modelling thoughts 
• 2020 - silence of the memes
• 2019 - what about Facebook? And guess who one of the commenters was! None other than JD! "I like to think I'll give up when I've run out of things I want to write about." [except he hasn't, and he doesn't!]

Now...back to JD's excellent blog post and a few excerpts from it. [Go read it. Screen shot - above] Pausing parenthetically prior to proceeding, JD's thinking/writing are in double quotes, article excerpts to which he refers are italicized within single quotes, and my editorial comments are in square brackets. JD begins by discussing the contrasts between the 50th Anniversary issue of Model Railroader (MR) and its 90th Anniversary issue published this year:

"I didn’t know that Ted Gioia would write an interesting SubStack article called The Death of the Magazine that would put MR front and centre in my mind.

"Even in 50 [MR's 50th Anniversary edition], MR’s editor at the time, Russ Larson, could see the unviability of print magazines on the horizon and made some interesting remarks on how model railroad magazine publishing might evolve in the future:

'There are two reasons why I believe the print medium will eventually become obsolete. The first is economic. The paper, printing, and delivery of a print magazine is between 35 percent and 50 percent of the cost of producing the product. When a means is found to get the information to the consumer more economically, the days of the print medium are numbered. The second reason is that, compared to television, video games, and computers, the print medium is rather dull. Reading is a great way to convey a lot of information quickly. Young people don’t read as well as my generation. A new vehicle for conveying information and entertainment is needed to make magazines and books interesting to young people who are growing up with color tv [!], computers [!!], and video games.'

In Larson’s prediction the media was still a one way affair, from publisher to reader. There’s nothing about what the reader might do with the information they were receiving on those electronic devices..."

In 1984, the magazine would publish maybe a handful of letters to the editor each month. That was the extent of reader engagement. Today, most of that reader engagement is sent to MR in the form of emails. Now, within minutes of posting online or blogging, one can anticipate reader comments within minutes. 

Actually, Model Railroader's 50th Anniversary edition is one of the Twelve Issues I Kept. In my 2017 post, here's how I summarized the stuffed-like-a-Christmas-turkey special issue:

January 1984 MR - Golden Anniversary Special. An impressive 266 pages! Another tour - this time a 'restored' Milwaukee Hiawatha 4-4-2 hit the road visiting MR staples - Carrabassett & Dead River, Cat Mountain & Santa Fe, Jerome & Southhwestern with oompah bands, forced perspective and painted structure proclaiming, "Miracle Chair Co if it's a good chair, it's a Miracle!". Stats on the hobby: average modeller 40 year-old college grad, making $30,000 a year and spending a paltry $590 on the hobby per year. State of the art proto loco was the SD50. AHC ad: Atlas FP7 for $19.95. Athearn ad: Dupont Alathon ACF Center Flow $3.50. An industry panel predicted electronic magazines, fewer words, more images, and in the late 1980's American homes will be able to access 'remote data banks' using computers. Fun! Nice article on Al Kalmbach and the genesis, history and editors of MR.

Did you catch that? Home access to 'remote data banks' using computers? [Well, that's how you're reading this right now!] Turns out that panel of prognosticators prophesied precisely. I think back to suffering through all those pages and pages of mail-order train-store advertising that used to choke the first half of Model Railroader. That was producing revenue for the magazine, but by the time I finally got to the opening editorial and the first article, it had been a long slog. Print wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

JD continues bringing that prediction into the present: "Today there appears to be no need for magazines in any form. Today’s reader of model railroading information is very different from yesterday’s. As well as being a reader they can also be a forum poster, commenter, blogger, video watcher, YouTube creator, influencer, manufacturer’s shill, and so on. Those magazine-related tasks that Larson suggested, like editing text and creating graphics, as well as sophisticated things like video production, can easily be done without the services of publishers."

Those magazine-related tasks are what enable us to blog, to vlog and to post in various social media. In fact it's the best part of blogging for me. I can publish what, when, and how I feel like it, with attention paid by me to my writing rather than by some editor. I post photos I want to share. I cover the topics I am interested in, not what fits with the publication schedule of upcoming issues. 

And let's not paint all magazines with the same brush, and ink. Fellow blogger and word-and-thought-wizard Chris Mears made his own magazine. It's something like a blog with the creator also being the editor, photographer, and modeller. Sure as the next crop of static grass on someone's HO hillside comes up in the spring, his One will become Two. Palette and pastiche.

"Gioia suggests what magazines provided was great writers, which in model railroading terms could be translated to mean access to great model railroaders. However, in today’s world Gioia goes on to suggest that even that is no longer necessary given easy access to platforms that allow those writers, or model railroaders, to publish directly to an audience. Given that’s the current situation he asserts all magazines will soon die off."

In the Death of a Magazine article, Gioia portrays how magazines spiral in to die:

JD ably wrestles with the idea of model railroading print media being replaced, or at least generationally and transitionally augmented, by pixels. [Really, go read it.]

When I go to the magazine section of my local Shoppers Drug Mart or Indigo, I find racks and stacks of glossy magazines staring back at me, but it's always just me. Nobody else is there, jostling me to reach one to look at. I could probably just stand there for several minutes and it would be no different. 

While at Shoppers recently before heading trackside, I bought an issue of MR. Somewhat out of nostalgia -  since I planted my modelling flag in the 1980s, I don't need to learn about DCC, 3D printing or applying prototypical cracks to my HO scale roads. It was then I realized that I only read the magazine in one of three contexts - during commercials while watching TV, while waiting for trains trackside, and the copy I keep in the van for when my wife is in a store shopping! Flip, floppy, flip. That might account for a total of three hours a month. You know, three hours, what my laptop tells me is my average daily screen time! Type, tippy, tap! As soon as I'm able to organize my thoughts, type out the words, format the post and hit 'PUBLISH' the results are instantaneous. 

We've heard the death knell being sounded for model railroading for over a decade now, often from some of those MR readers and their generation. The reply back from the manufacturers shills, and there are many in Canada who are in the business, is that this we are blessed to be living in the Golden Age of Model Railroading. But not Model Railroader. (MR is the only model railroading magazine I've mentioned so far in this post because it's most often the one peripatetically pilloried in the panoply of the model railroad press - the one that's most often seen to be spiralling. Railroad Model Craftsman has improved its quality exponentially, so it can be done in today's market.) If all the words and photos being posted to our 'remote data banks' every day were added up and their mass calculated, it would be hundreds or thousands times that of one monthly issue of a magazine. Inevitably though, one or several of you [and me!] will say that you prefer having the magazine as a tactile thing you can pick up and read with your own two hands.

Every excellent editorial ends with a call to action. I wish I had one. 

I will leave it you, valued Trackside Treasure reader, to conjure up your petition to your own self. 

Yo! Read on! However you do it, you do you, yo!

Running extra...

Meritocracy. Autocracy. Democracy. Only one of the three was on display in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. I watched all four nights, just as I had the RNC (Really No Change) earlier in Milwaukee. I watched Tim Walz steady Minnesota during the unfortunate George Floyd fallout. I can't believe in today's enlightened era that a [disgraced] ex-President has to make fun of another candidate's name, laugh, stepkids. What is this, Grade 4? God Bless America.

Maybe Beyonce' didn't make a DNC appearance, but the gracefully-aging Dixie Chicks did, though sweet baby septuagenarian James Taylor got squeezed out by superfluous speechifyin'. That's OK, I much prefer 70-something Billy Joel's 100th, currently being rebroadcast on CBS. This is the third viewing for me, mainly because of CBS's contractual obligation violation when they snipped the last two minutes off during the debut broadcast. "Hey Gene, what's this button do?"

Speaking of on-and-off, CN and CP are in and out of strike position as I type this. This has given the media a chance to get out all their file footage. I'm waiting for a brace of RS-18's to make an appearance. Come on, CBC, you can do it! Heck, Google and LinkedIn perpetrated this preposterous photographic picturesquestionableness: