posted 07-07-2009 11:22 PM ET (US)     

But my guess is that the Advertizing dollars simply dried up, as boat builders like Genmar declared bankruptcy, Brunswick cut way back, many independents closed down, and Japanese engine builders reduced their promotional expenses as well. I also think the very thing for which they were liked, the Shootouts, may have been an advertizing problem.
Only one brand could "win", and the others probably didn't want to advertize in those issues. It's the same old problem, and why boating consumers can't get good comparative information: you can't show one brand to be superior over the others without having "the Others" complain and pull their advertizing.

posted 07-08-2009 03:39 PM ET (US)            

As for the shoot outs, what did them in was that test series where B&WB seemed to let things get out of hand. Mercury was very cozy with the boat builder they used. Every day the Mercury motor kept getting faster and faster, the Mercury factory guys were uploading new fuel MAP data, they were putting on $1,200-lab finished propellers, and measuring their fuel flow using different instrumentation than everyone else. At the end, B&WB never verified the fuel MAP loads as stock. I think that was the last straw for the other brands at the shoot out, and they'd had enough.

posted 07-09-2009 08:25 AM ET (US)            

No longer a thick square-binder bound publication with many, many pages, its been reduced to a very thin staple bound affair with more adverts than anything else.
Some of the old war horses are still writing for them, but the mag is now a far cry from what it was. Its almost pathetic.

On another note, I'm not surprised about BWB and Trailer Boats, I haven't seen one in a while, but to me they seemed like they were nothing more than a publishing spring board for Mercury or Yammer.

posted 07-17-2009 06:16 PM ET (US)         

"I am somewhat amazed that a magazine ceasing publication can somehow be turned into a shot at Evinrude."

can only have come from my saying:

"The Evinrude fans hated these, and openly critized the integrity of the testing, while the Mercury and Yamaha people applauded the articles!"

which was not a shot at Evinrude (the company) at all, but simply a statement of fact regarding contributors here.

posted 07-17-2009 07:59 PM ET (US)            

--the individual boat hull has the most profound effect on performance, exceeding any other influence in his series of tests and changes;

--propeller cost was insignificant in performance, as he showed an old OMC propeller outperforming custom stainless steel $1,200 propellers;

--wildly expensive motor modifications like fancy reeds or super-tuner tweaks barely showed any improvement.

BASS & WALLEYE taught me that you can't trust performance tests when there is any difference in the boat hull--even when boats are supposed to be identical. In that one series John Tiger basically invalidated almost all the testing that had gone before. This is why I adopted his method--test different engines on the same exact boat--for my testing and reporting on the Evinrude E-TEC 250 H.O. performance that I authored last fall.

posted 07-22-2009 07:32 AM ET (US)            

Magazine content in the age of the internet and hypertext will need to improve if magazines are going to sustain paid subscriptions. I don't recall if the following was published in BASS & WALLEYE BOAT magazine, but it is a good example of the problem of publishing magazines in the internet age:

Magazines have always had letters to the editor's columns. Recently a boating magazine published a letter from a reader. The reader wrote to ask for help in navigating the publisher's companion website. The publisher ran the reader's letter in the magazine and replied with advice on how to navigate their website.

I thought this was a classic example of awful magazine content. First, it stretched my credulity that someone would sit down, pen a letter to a magazine to ask for advice on website navigation, and mail it off in the next day's post. Next, the idea that the reply would be published several months latter was amazing. Who waits three months to get a reply? That explanations of how to navigate a website could be found in the letters to the editor section of a periodical was also absurd. If you need to explain how to navigate a website, you ought to provide that information on the website! Not publish it in a magazine months later. Further, as a magazine subscriber, I really do not want to pay to read advice on how to navigate a website. That's not the kind of content I am looking for in a boating magazine. And finally, if your website design is so confusing that people write to you to ask how to navigate, it ought to be a clue that the website needs some help on-line with navigation, not a reply in a printed magazine three months later.