Sounds like everyone is addressing this from the point of view of what we who are already engrossed CW students want to read. Weider’s growth potential (i.e. new readers) is not that great among serious students of the CW because it is a finite market, which is probably pretty close to being tapped out subscription wise. Those of you who lead tours probably note the same faces year after year on your tour groups.

If Weider wants to grow his business, he needs to tap into the larger general population. In many ways this could be a good thing for the CW history community – many general readers who have had no contact with CW history at all will become junkies and want to read more detailed articles and books.

We always, always complain that CW history is not marketed to the masses, people don’t care about history, and so on, but here is someone trying to reach out and expand the audience and I can only hope that he is successful as we will all benefit in the long run.

There are many books to be sold and any new potential reader is a plus to me.

As for ‘freelancers’: nothing gets things moving like a controversial article which turns the accepted orthodoxy on its head. The heat and light can lead to a renewed interest by lots of folks who have become bored by the ‘same old same old’. Even if one disagrees with the writer or finds his sources unsound, often something of value is revealed in the controversy. Again, if I want to read the orthodox position on a subject, there are books enough to go round. Sometimes we need to be challenged in our intellectual ‘comfort zone’.

I hope that the magazine remembers its reason for existence. Many businesses in the U. S. went bankrupt when they decided to ‘diversify’ because what they had been successful in a limited market. Their belief was that they did well here, so why not take a winning strategy and spread it around! Usually within a few years not only was the ‘diversified’ store gone, but the original store was gone too. A shoemaker should stick to his last, as the old saying goes. It is better to do one thing well than ten poorly.

Thanks for the informative post and I share your dissent of Dimitri’s suggestion to minimize or do away with the use of freelancers. In my opinion, freelance writers have provided some of the more interesting material over the past decade-plus that I have been reading the glossies. To be sure, there have been mistakes and re-hashing of myths and old material, but this is usually due to editorial direction not to freelance contributions.

I’ve been trying to do my part to inspire more and better freelance contributions through my “School of the Writer” series on my blog.

Best Regards,

Jim Schmidt
http://civilwarmed.blogspot.com

Chris is a terrific fellow and historian, and his resignation does not bode well for CWTI or any of the other Weider mags. If Eric Weider doesn’t get a real historian in control of them soon, I think his foray into history is over. And what’s more pathetic is that great mags like CWTI (the grandfather of CW mags) will be gone.

J.D.