"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


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.

It did occur to me that something was wrong there - the absence of J & T
should have been a clue.

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.

So T at H might still be going if they'd made more of an effort to get along
with J & T?!

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.

While I was googling to try and find info on what was going on I stumbled on
a forum devoted to the impending demise of Television, T at H got quite a
few mentions and wherever EE,s name got mentioned it was in a negative
context, it was mentioned that she had made one or two insulting comments in
her regular column - I think the words we "I think she needs to work on
her people skills"! Your point about editing is well taken, my only 3 fault
reports before publication ceased no longer said the same thing that I
originally wrote!

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.

She didn't cut down her own contribution though! The few times I bothered
reading her column it contributed (along with other aspects of the magazines
presentation) a feeling of "where's the recies & knitting patterns?! It was
I think, one of the owners who took part in the forum I found who commented
that in one branch of WHS he found T at H amongst the knitting pattern
magazines - an easy mistake to make!

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

There were a couple of projects I wanted to send in for component testing
gadgets, but they involved running equipment made from salvaged monitor
components directly from the mains, these would have been no problem for
experienced service engineers that were targeted by Television Magazine but
would have been courting certain disaster if presented to the casual
interest audience T at H seemed to be aiming for!
...

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.

The fact that I took out a subscription at the outset was largely out of a
sense of loyalty to J & T, now they've gone the magazine would have to be
pretty damn good to keep me paying for it, I wonder if I echo the sentiments
of other readers? There's no doubt about the dire state of the servicing
trade, I've not been actively involved in monitor repair for a while now.
All said and done the state of the industry is the biggest single factor in
what happened to both magazines, but I have a suspicion that if T at H had
retained J & T's editorial style they may have fared much better - possibly
even prevailed.

There are rumours that Television Magazine has already been bought, and
appears to be in the same stable as Electronics World, my newsagent tells me
that he gets notification from the distributor if a magazine ceases
publication, so he may be able to give me more info after he's contacted
them on Monday.