"ian field" wrote in message
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"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...

"ian field" wrote in message
...
At the beginning of the year I discovered that Technology-at-Home was
suspending publication, at which point I enquired about the likelihood
of payment for fault reports I'd submitted, I was assured that these
payments had been budgeted for and told to send an invoice. A month has
passed with no reply so I emailed again - also with no reply, so I did a
bit of googling to see if I could find any info on what's going on.

Among the hits was a forum on which it transpires that Television
Magazine has also gone tits-up!

So far the messages coming out of Technology-at-Home suggest a modicum
of optimism that they may yet return to the market place the Television
link redirects to Saint John Patrick Publishers "site under
construction" - I wondered if anyone out there had any further news on
either publication?
Hi Ian

I spoke to John R on the phone last week, and he had been told by one of
the contributors that stayed on with TeleMag after we left, that it was
definitely finished for good. My copy was always got in for me by my
newsagent, so I didn't have a subscription, but apparently, Nexus have
written to all the subscribers to tell them that publication had ceased.
As far as T @ H goes, I also had an invoice in for fault reports and an
ongoing article series that I was doing for them, but as soon as I found
out the level of financial problem that the owners were suffering, I
cancelled it. I am still in touch with them, but I don't know yet if
there is any definite intention to continue publishing by whatever
method, in the future. I know that Steve has not personally ruled it out,
but I don't know how it will stand with the other two. I have told them
that if they do get it going again, I will continue to contribute for
free for as long as it takes. The way I look at it, with the sad decline
of TeleMag after the editing team were changed, and now its demise, I'd
rather contribute my time for free, if it gets a valid publication for
the trade, going again. What is your take on this ?

Arfa


There are certain times of day that I like to get away from the PC and
read articles printed on paper so I miss T_at_H and will miss TeleMag -
even what it became under Nexus!

For this reason web based publishing wouldn't appeal to me unless its very
low priced, after all most of the likely content can be found on the net
anyway - even if it is a little hard work running searches to find it.

As T_at_H is partly made up of the team I dealt with when I used to be a
regular contributor at TeleMag, I would like to see them return from
publication suspended, although I feel that they tried to cater too much
for the technically minded man in the street and less so for the "down to
the metal" service engineer. Under the Nexus flag TeleMag was severely
weakened and T_at_H might have done better to have taken them head on!

The link re-direct from TeleMag to SJPP seems to hint they've already been
sold and may re appear in due course - hopefully better than it was under
Nexus.

Actually, the T @ H editorial team, was only anything to do with the
original team of John and Tessa, for a very brief period, before they
decided that it was not for them, due to a conflict of personalities with
one of the owners.

Originally, when the editing of TeleMag was brought in-house, John and Tessa
were summoned to the offices ( they were both freelancers ) and just told
that their services would no longer be required. No notice period, no sorry.
Their contracts were just terminated. Both of them were actually very upset
about the way that they were treated, and that was a lot to do with why
Steve, Michael and Elaine got together to start T @ H. They felt that John
and Tessa still had a valuable contribution to make to a trade magazine.
They were thus hired to edit the new mag, but unfortunately, the owners'
ideas for it didn't really match with John and Tessa's editing style, so
there came a parting of the ways. That left the owners with the whole task
of both running and editing the magazine, as well as dealing with the
contributors. This on top of their normal work.

This is the main reason that it went to bi-monthly publication, which I
think was perhaps a contributory factor in its current status. I also found
that having Elaine as a " commissioning editor " made it difficult to write
for them. With John and Tessa, they always accepted everything I wrote ' as
was ' and tended to fit it in to the magazine without making many if any
changes to the running length. I'm pretty sure that you probably used to
find the same thing, as your monitor fault reports, which I always enjoyed
reading, used to be relatively long and detailed. When I was contributing
fault reports, I only used to bother sending in the interesting ones, and
used to make a point of detailing the diagnostic methods that I had used to
arrive at the cause of the problem. I could never see the point in the "
This one wouldn't play discs, so I replaced the laser ... " variety of
report.

However. my descriptive style of writing didn't work well with Elaine, and
she was forever trying to cut down the length and content, which in turn,
didn't sit well with me, so I finished up dealing exclusively with Steve,
who was the technical editor.

At the end of the day, I think that they had to appeal to too wide an
audience to make it financially viable. This led to the mag having a bit of
an identity crisis I think. I continued to write my stuff as technical
articles, aimed at service engineers, but whilst 'on the street'
technophiles might have found the content of them interesting, I fear that
the detail would have gone over their heads. The final nail in the coffin of
T @ H in its paper form, was the distribution costs via W.H.Smith wholesale,
and for this reason, I can't see it ever re-surfacing as a mag in print.
Like you, I also like to read 'proper' paper journals, but I don't think
that we are ever going to do that again for a trade mag serving our business
....

Still, hats off to the T @ H team, and I am very sorry that in the end, they
didn't get to fully realise their dream, and ended up personally so far out
of pocket on the venture. It took a lot of guts to have a go, and it was a
shame that it came to an end just as I felt it was beginning to find its
place in the market.

Arfa