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Cafe Unknown
Travel, History and Portland Oregon by Dan Haneckow
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By Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon. (Like he needs any other introduction by now? -- A.B.C.)
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"Why buy a mattress anywhere else?"
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LOST Magazine is an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things.
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A journal about photography, roadtrips, trains and life, with occasional detours into movies, baseball, music, family and more.
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Good photos usually have good stories to go with them.... The goal of The Photographers' Railroad Page is to provide an outlet for top quality photographs and their story.
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Throwing Ourselves on the Grenade of Bad Food to Save You
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A Conversation About Access & Mobility in the Portland/Vancouver Region
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Authors, readers, critics, media -- and booksellers
Rambling West
The musings of a farmer with a typewriter and camera
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Documenting Portland, Oregon architecture, history, and culture through photos, postcards, and words.
The Unauthorized Observer
Observations on faith, photography, trains, baseball, the city where I live (Fullerton, Calif.), anything that I find funny (a lot of things) or irritating (some things) and various incidents involving friends and family.
Under the Weather
...the open road, fatherhood, family life, music, railroads, photography, popular and unpopular culture, sex, violence, religion, the oppression of consumerism and capitalism and the general bullshit that makes up modern life.
Urban Planning Overlord
A blog to counter the myths, lies, and demagoguery others use against sound city planning to further their own ends, fair and foul - but also to urge the profession itself to pull back from the occasional wretched PC exces.
VanPortlander
Living in Vancouver; working in Portland. I have some thoughts.
Whiskey, Texas
...life and experiences in Texas and the Southwest. Recurring themes: Photography, railroads, fading ads / ghost signs, fallen-flag railroad logos, boxcars, bicycling, Texas music, pop culture, sports, road trips, literature, kids and family.
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The Travel Writing and Photography of Scott Lothes
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Sunday, May 20, 2007
Another one bites the dust?
I've mentioned before the transition that magazines in the railroad enthusiast or "railfan" field have been undergoing. Now, general historians will be mourning the loss of a publishing giant in their niche, American Heritage. Labels: Internet, Journalism, Media, Publishing
Founded in mid 1950s, American Heritage was a highly successful general history rag distributed on newsstands nationwide. According to the New York Times, who reported late last week about the magazine's closure:The circulation is currently 350,000, or as high as it has ever been, and hundreds of those readers can still be reliably counted on to write in arguing about the true causes of the Civil War or, as happened recently, to point out that the author of a World War II article doesn’t know the difference between the M-1 rifle and the M-16, which didn’t come in until Vietnam.
Sound familiar at all? Might the term rivet counters come to mind?
Yet publisher Forbes put the magazine up for sale in January and has had no offers. In the light of this, the company is shutting down production with the June/July issue. For the moment, the staff will continue to maintain the magazine's web site, but there seems to be no clear vision of an all-digital American Heritage either. Indeed, the internet seems to be part of the problem. Editor Richard F. Snow, quoted by the Times story, stated the case like this: "We're really a general interest magazine.... We don’t play to a history buff in any narrow sense -- like the Civil War re-enactors, for example. They can go on the Web and get thousands and thousands of hits."
Again, any bells ringing? Skim the NYT story. Aging readership. Attempts to refocus the editorial direction to a younger audience. Internet incursion. Falling off advertising sales. Patient determined publishers carrying the water.
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Sunday, May 6, 2007
Jaguar's 21st Century Gamble
Jaguar is perhaps one of the most respected British car makers. It is also one of the few traditional British makers to have survived the dark years of British Leyland and arrived in the 21st century. Since 1989, Jaguar has been owned by U.S. automaker Ford Motor Company. Ford has for the most part avoided direct involvement in the company, but Jaguar has utilized Ford technology in recent designs such as the XK8. Labels: Automobiles, Design, Technology, Transportation
The Ford era ushered in an era of nostalgia at Jaguar. The car that is most symbolic of this is Jag's "S-Type". The car was meant to hearken back to the classic lines of the Mark II, one of the icons of Jaguar's "sports saloon" heritage. Unfortunately, the car's design was more like a cartoon of its inspiration. Execution was rather tame and conventional, instead of exciting.
While browsing the net the other night, I discovered Jaguar's promotional site for its advanced design concept. Called the CXF, its is a prototype for the the to-be-launched Jaguar XF, a 4 door sports sedan. The car is meant to break with every trapping of Jaguar tradition -- burled woods, cream leather, &c -- while at the same time honoring the brand's spirit of speed, modernism, and design excellence.
The CXF is distinctively like no car ever produced by Jaguar. The exterior uses a stretched, athletic shape that is erotically fast without sacrificing elegance. It hearkens slightly to the XK, although one might be inclined to view the latter as more having a kinship than being an inspiration for the former. Yet the radically different shape does have some subtle Jaguar "notes". The CXF has an overall arc shape that is like a metaphor for the leaping cat logo. It also has a subtle horizontal curvature when viewed from each end. But again, these are subtleties. The interior is almost spartan in simplicity, and yet is flowing, elegant, and radically modern. Overall, the car exhibits what Julian Thomson, Chief Designer for Jaguar Advanced Design, calls a more "aggressive" side of the brand.
Does it succeed? I think it does, though that is not the same thing as me liking the car. I'm not yet sure how I feel about the CXF. I can say this: I do get excited when I look at the car. It is a breathtaking change with the past. It cannot be confused for the milktoast of the S-Type or the suburban boredom of the X-Type. It makes every other luxury car on the market or planned for the market look boring, conventional, stone age. I wonder though if it breaks too far from the Jaguar mould, whether the Jaguar base will embrace it as a "true" Jag. Yet even if the brand loses some of the traditionalists, I suspect that the design of the CXF is so advanced that it will prove a formidable opponent for other luxury automobile companies.
The CXF's design concept website can be viewed here.
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Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Thoughts on Railfan Publishing
Over at TheDomeCar@yahoogroups, Mark Perry recently brought up the subject of the future of railfan oriented publications such as TRAINS Magazine or Railfan and Railroad. Many of my comments here are based on a compilation of the posts I have made at The Dome Car; for a fuller exploration of the topic, I encourage you to join the list and plunge into the discussion. Labels: Journalism, Photography, Railroads
Mark's post was inspired by a conversation with a twentysomething railfan he met while trackside. Amongst the younger photographer's remarks:What he did say that captured his attention was of course, the Internet, he said everything you want to know about or see, is on there for only the cost of your monthly internet charge. He mentioned that he had seen or had been on the "other car" discussion group but was turned off by the bragging and bitching going on there???? He had not seen or heard of The Dome Car. He surfs RailPictures quite a bit but does not submit.
Of the magazines he did say he liked, bought and looked forward to seeing, were those special edition issues being put out by TRAINS. The two magazines that I remember him mentioning were, DIESEL VICTORY and LOCOMOTIVE
The comments regarding the net are somewhat amusing to me, and pose a double-edged sword. Although the net is a powerful tool, there is much it lacks. Show me where you can get serious, scholarly historical themed articles online? Show me where you can find in-depth reporting with interviews with principles of major railroads and transportation agencies? Show me where you can find more than a handful of rich, well designed, well edited, well written photo essays? You can find a lot of photos, and you can find a lot of small news snippets, and you can find a lot of rumor, and even more speculation and bitchy arguing.
Sandy Mitchell, who owns The Dome Car, added the following as part of his response to the question:Nowadays, based on my somewhat limited trackside experiences of late, I'm inclined to believe that the divide begins not with Trains-versus-Railfan-versus-RI/PTJ, but between those willing to read paper versus those entirely online....
It may be easy for us to wave our hands dismissively and say "aw, those young punks'll come around", but to be honest, I'm not so sure. We are indeed entering a different era, where railroads seemingly try to hide from the public instead of doing public relations, and where railroad accessibility is seemingly nonexistent in many regions. (I vividly contrast the reception I receive from railroaders in the middle of the Arizona desert with what I get in the urban Northeast.) I repeatedly tell everyone who will listen that the Internet is doing to America in the early 2000s what the railroads did in the mid-nineteenth century -- utterly changing the ways Americans (and, of course, Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc.) live, work, do business, eat, socialize, etc. And it's changing the way we railfan and relate to railroads as well--imagine what a hopeless fantasy train-simulator software and hardware in your own home would have been in the 1970s.
I think Sandy hits it right on the head.
I kind-of straddle the two camps. One one hand, I was in many ways the last of the pre-net generation. I learned my photography on an old brass (heavy as a tank!) GAF 35mm SLR, and my first real camera was a Pentax K1000. I came of age with computers but without the net. I began subscribing to TRAINS at about 16 and kept it up for years and years, skimming each issue in hopes of learning the latest doings in my neck of the woods. Yet as soon as I gained the net, I really plunged in. I invested in Wifi from day one of being plugged on the net at home. I joined eleventeen-thousand Yahoo lists. I started a railfan webzine which had a healthy but excessively exhausting two year run. Looking at my contemporaries in my generation and those of the younger one who I socialize with, the ideas of the twentysomething railfan that Mark talked to are extremely familiar, and I am sympathetic with them.
I had the pleasure of working for TRAINS routinely for about two years, and those years taught me that there's still a lot that the traditional publishing model can bring to the table that has value. But even so, consumers don't always make rational decisions; short attention spans combined with the net's "cost-plus-free" instant gratification are potent factors.
I suspect there are some business models for paper printing that will survive. Certainly amongst those of us snobby enough to think higher of our photos than snapshots, the ego stroking of being published appeals. Plus there's the less egotistical finickiness of wanting a printed, high quality image rather than pixels on a screen.
The fact remains, however, that most young people have the net at their finger tips, every day, 24 hours a day, and generally on their parent's or school's dime. They tend to shoot digital, making electronic transfer one click and no dollars away. Unlike the 1960s, 70s, 80s, or early 90s, they don't perceive a need for print as a source of news, and likely don't care about in-depth analysis that publishing-quality writers increasingly must provide. Bottom line: they don't need print, like many of us did.
The net also provides something that I occasionally -- no, frequently -- lament, that print doesn't in a significant way: the ability to participate in the medium. On paper, this was limited to either writing the editor a letter and hoping it got published, or writing a story or sending in a photo for publication and crossing ones fingers. On the net though, anyone who can type or can upload a photo -- and thats a really low bar -- can participate directly in "publication". Instead of reading the Professional Iconoclast or Don Phillips, they can strut onto a bulletin board and pretend they are just as knowledgeable. This post for one, and The Dome Car list where the discussion originated for another, are great examples of that. We could never have had this debate on print, short of sending a lot of letters, spending a lot on stamps, and standing at a Xerox for a long, long time. Sure, there's a ton of white noise, but the younger generation has always known it, it doesn't bother them as much because its part of the world they grew up with.
The publishing industry, in general, is on a slow but steady decline, and isn't near bottoming out yet. There is absolutely no good reason to expect these wired, net-raised kids to suddenly wake up one day and go, "hey, I really need to subscribe to Railfan and Railroad!" They might, for the heck of it, because they have extra cash and need something to burn it on. To do that, though, publishers have to be more careful about providing relevant content. Kalmbach, the publisher of TRAINS, seems to be trying the special issue route as an answer and it seems to work for them; there might be other angles. I don't think anyone should get out funeral pyres for publishing. The publishing industry in general, and the railfan publishing industry in specific, will survive. But to do so they will have to adapt, and in a way that goes far beyond just adding a website and putting some "look at our site" pointers in the magazine.
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