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After I posted on the World's Greatest Hobby program as it relates to the Times piece, I went back to the greatesthobby.com site to see what it did in fact offer to the media. First, the site is clearly oriented toward beginners in the model railroad hobby, and I still believe the program's biggest activity is to serve as a speaker's bureau for model railroaders who might want to speak on the hobby to Boy Scout meetings, other youth or school groups, and so forth. The site has a "Welcome Beginners!" banner, so dealing with the New York Times is clearly not its intent. However, there is a "Media" section, so I clicked on it, and it just has several desultory quotes from supposedly "favorable" news stories. One caught my attention, and I quote it in full here: Model Trains make The Times On Thursday, April 11, 2002, The New York Times House & Home section ran the article "A Whistle-Stop World." The article explores the hobby of model railroading and the men behind it, including performer Mandy Patinkin. "More than nostalgia for trains or toys...it's nostalgia for a way of life," the article claims. Note that even if WGH targets "beginners", it is favorably quoting a piece that makes you think, like the January 15 Times piece, that nostalgia is a big part of the hobby. (Guess we can forget about SD90s and AC6000s, huh, guys? No reason to be interested in them, they aren't nostalgic.) I guess WGH is looking for 14 year old nostalgic beginners. I was surprised that the WGH site isn't offering a more conventional media package, where a reporter might be able to see or download favorable information that presents the hobby as a challenging activity for people of all ages, with a great deal of current interest in the modern rail industry. So if a reporter called the Kalmbach Library, or walked into a hobby shop, all WGH participants would have gotten the message, "if you get a call or a visit from a reporter, by all means point them to our greatesthobby.com site, where they can find quotes and info on celebrities who like model trains (Frank Sinatra, Tom Snyder, various rock and country music stars, etc.) photos of layouts that feature modern rail operation, and so forth." THEN if a reporter walks into a hobby shop and interviews an out-to-lunch clerk or owner, it won't be WGH's fault. But that, of course, would assume someone is putting a normal level of effort into the WGH program instead of coasting. Andy?????
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