One thing we all need to get straight: There’s only a handful of people in charge of what goes on at T&D: Principally we’re talking about Will Shiers (editor) and Chris Turner (deputy editor), followed by designer Steve Gale. Together with publisher Andy Salter, it is they who have the final say on what does or doesn’t go in the magazine, the format, the style, etc., not anyone from this website.
Anyway, to answer a few of your questions:-
The ideas above are all good ones. I’ve toiled with them myself. Trouble is, it’s not as simple as it sounds…
Re Afghanistan:
Over a year ago now, I had the offer to accompany Ghurka troops out in Afghanistan. Please remember this isn’t a trip to the seaside. My life would have been in danger from the second I flew into Afghan airspace, to the second I left. An RSM in Salisbury (who’d just returned) told me mortar rounds regularly land in the camp fired by insurgents from surrounding hillsides. I would go out with the convoys, where the risk (according to the British Army) was even greater. Despite all of this, I was determined to go. I thought it would be a photographic chance of a lifetime, and so put that before everything else. Three months down the line we (I say we, I really mean others) were embroiled in a series of endless meetings conducted at a level well beyond my pay grade. Personally, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just get on a C130 and go. In the end I pulled the plug myself.
Re Volvo:
I had the same idea two years ago. I thought I’d start at the foundry where they cast the block and work my way through to the bit where they drive the truck off the line and along a short section of test track. I contacted Volvo’s PR people both here and in Sweden but the whole thing sort of fizzled out. Sometimes it’s just the way it goes. Spreading the article over several issues would be, in my opinion, a bit of a non-starter. It would switch people off in a “here we go again” sort of way.
Re US Truck Shows:
The problem with this one is not the cost of the flight or the hotels, it’s the time spent away from my office and studio (which is the reason I don’t do LDDs anymore). If I sent someone from this forum away in a truck for four days and told them I’d only be paying them for a day, would they go? I doubt it.
Re 3D issue (to answer some of the other questions above):
I can’t speak for Rikki, but I certainly don’t “sit in the pub all day” as someone on here suggested above. If you read my blog (tomcunninghamphoto.blogspot.com) you’ll probably get a clearer idea of why we embarked on a 3D issue. We genuinely thought it would be fun. In three and a half short weeks from now we’ll know the answer.
Re T&D (on the whole):
At present, I am the guy wholly responsible for the magazine’s Editor’s Choice, plus a few of the other features on a random basis. I have worked on T&D for over three years now, but before that spent 10 happy years on Trucking. Having supplied large amounts of material to both, they (admittedly) do have a huge crossover in terms of reader demographics, but there’s also a large separation between them at the same time. What works for one, wouldn’t always work for the other. Having two magazines in the same market supplying the exact same thing is the stuff of bankruptcy courts.
Unlike Rikki, I don’t have a salary, and unlike you lot, I don’t get a wage from driving a truck. I make my living solely from manufacturers’ photographic requirements and/or magazines. If a day comes when I’m not doing much, I’m running at a loss. I have full public indemnity insurance to the tune of £5m, full business car insurance, fully licensed software on the latest high-end Mac, and yesterday morning I coughed up £22K for three new Nikon cameras, six lenses and three flashguns. The average lifespan for my camera and computer gear is 24 months. I’ve got three telephone lines (so we can FTP files on separate lines), and a whole host of other fixed costs clients don’t know about (or want to know about). I’m not trying to be flash or clever here, I’m just trying to explain the difference between someone who does this for a living and someone who doesn’t.
Years ago I used to take the view that the readers came first, and would suffer long periods away from home for very little money. That was over ten years ago when the photography business was still relatively small and the overheads low. You only have to read some of the comments on this forum to see my stance on putting the readers first was, let’s be honest, a little stupid. Most of them don’t really give a monkey’s what I do, how I do it or how I make money.
I know it all sounds very simple, this magazine lark, but in reality many of the ideas the people on here come up with we’ve already thought of - many times over. We’re far from stupid guys. We look at a whole host of things; some work, some don’t. There is always a reason why they do or don’t see the light of day.
The main problem with T&D is the audience. We know who they are, we know what age they are, and it’s a bit worrying. For someone like me it’s a bit of a tightrope act of attracting new, younger readers without alienating the old guard: I realise the vast majority of T&D’s readers are 40 to retirement age males, but they are (to a large extent) the converted. They were brought up in the industry and probably sat in the passenger seat of their father’s lorry as children. That doesn’t happen in 2010 - for a multitude of reasons. We know twenty year olds are not even in the slightest bit interested in hearing stories about driving up Shap smoking a Woodbine and stopping at the top for lashings of jam roly poly; most of them wouldn’t know a suet-based pudding if it hit them on the head. This is where the conflict starts. Trust me, I’ve thought about it until my head hurts.
Last but not least, I’d like to end by saying that the day T&D’s editorial policy is dictated to by a handful of people on an internet forum, will be the day I leave. We’ve got tens of thousands of readers on the magazine, but trawling back through comments on here it always seems to be the same half a dozen empty vessels who think they’ve got the right to tell us how the magazine should be produced. “Those things simply do not work for me…” is one thing. That sort of stuff, the editorial team could act on and change course. However… “T&D should be scrapped. Awful magazine.” and “i dont buy it these days due to this fact, if i ever see a copy lying around i will take it with me just in case i dont have any toilet paper as this is all it is fit for these days wiping your [zb] with…” is quite another matter.
As I said to Lucy last night, "the noisy cog always get the grease - and you’ve got a lot of very noisy cogs… " I work bloody hard to produce the content I do, and I find it grossly insulting when faced with the comments above. I know the rough financial mechanics of this website; I think you are all very lucky people - I can’t think of many companies who would prop up a website which so openly, and so personally attacks the business, its products and the people who either directly or indirectly work for them.
But hey, if we’re all open to speaking our mind’s here, let me give you my little pearl of wisdom: If I were the person in charge of the ■■■■■ strings at rt.com, I would server the lifeline to this forum tomorrow. Instead, the money RBI spends could easily be invested in a proper T&D website with interactive areas, downloadable Editor’s Choice screensavers, up to date news, health topics, weather forecasts, minute-by-minute live traffic info, etc., etc. I wouldn’t care less if thousands of people were wiped off the company’s page impression data figures. At the very least I could go to work on Monday morning safe in the knowledge I wasn’t funding a misinformed, ill thought out personal attack on myself, my staff or my publication’s contributors.
) If you type submarines and Barrow into Google the same pic comes up lots of times.
