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I can't help noticing that a random survey of MR issues compared to the year-earlier issue seems to reflect a pretty consistent decline of 5% or so in total pages. For instance, the January 2002 issue had 170 pages; the January 2003 issue had 162. (The January 2000 issue had 210, something more like what we used to see for holiday period MRs.) October 2001 had 154 pages; October 2002 had 146. Like others who've expressed opinions here, I've let my own subscription expire, and I don't buy all issues of MR at the hobby shop, so I don't have a full set to compare. Then I did a little quick arithmetic over page count in all magazines. Let's say that MR averages 150 pages per month lately; let's give RMC an average of 120 pages; and let's say each of the other three monthly US model railroading magazines averages 60 pages each. That's a total of about 450 pages of model railroad magazine a month. MR's share of pages per month is about a third. In the days some of us remember when MR and RMC were the only two mags, MR's share of pages per month would have been well over half. Since the 1970s, several monthly magazines have come in to absorb some portion of this market, and interestingly, some of these magazines have survived for 20 years and more, with levels of production quality generally nowhere near as good as MR. Why hasn't MR been able to clean their clock? If MR's share of pages alone had remained consistent, you'd see monthly issues of MR in the 300 page range. And ads aren't duplicated among the mags. You see high-end brass suppliers advertising in the smaller mags, not MR, apparently because the ad buy elsewhere is a better buy -- you reach more people willing to spend serious money on the hobby in the other mags, while MR sees a lot of low-end ads, schlock, and kitsch (and I notice a lot of the full-page ads in MR are cross-selling other Kalmbach products). Is anyone at MR willing to comment on the future of the magazine? I can't imagine that Kalmbach can be happy with a steady 5% page count decline from one year to the next, with what this must also say about circulation and ad revenue.
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