Dave Bushong ) writes:
Sedina II wrote:
Wayne Green W2NSD the editor of the former 73 Magazine
and David Booth (2004 Earth Changes) will be George Noorey's
special guest on Coast to Coast AM
Thursday/Friday evening.

On a 1 to 10 scale this show should be a 12 !!

Show info for the above:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2004/03/18.html

Main: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

See also: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/


Wayne Green. Loser extrordinaire. Failed more ham radio businesses and
magazines than anyone in human history.

I think he's a kook when he's on the show, because I sure
have not heard him talk of radio, but actually kooky things.

But I don't think it's fair to categorize him as a "loser".

He may have turned CQ around when he was editor in the fifties,
and most definitely one cannot say it was a bad magazine when
he was editor. While he was there, the first practical parametric
amplifer wsa described, along with a practical selectible sideband
synchronous detector. He drew various well known people to the magazine,
Sam Harris and John W. Campbell to name two (I can't remember if Don Stoner
was already there when Wayne took over as editor), as article writers or
columnists.

He left, and started 73. How do you rate a failed magazine? It lasted
over forty years, which is a pretty good life for an independent magazine.
Yes, it decayed badly in it's last ten years, but for 25 years or so
it was a pretty good construction magazine.

He started Byte, and while he lost it within three issues, I don't think
anyone can argue its success. But of course, it only lasted about 20 years.

He started Kilobaud, and it only lasted about 7 or 8 years. But then,
a whole slew of computer magazines, a field that he pretty muchs tarted,
died off at the same time.

He started various magazines dedicated to specific computers, which also
had a relatively limited run, but then, so did the computers they dealt
with. They, and Kilobaud for that matter, I don't think generally failed
under his watch, because he sold them off to IDG for a bundle.

He started a CD magazine, that maybe lasted ten years, but it was pretty
successful for a while. I'm pretty sure he sold it off, again for a bundle,
before it faded away.

Note that with a lot of his magazines that "failed", he was picking topics
that were on a rising curve, where there was a need for specialized
magazines because the topic was so new. They were a source of infortion,
a place to find ads for related items, and a place for advertisers to
reach the specialized field. As such things moved to the mainstream,
they lost steam becuse one could find information elsewhere, and for
that matter one needed the information maybe less because the topic
was all over the place. Take the CD magazine; it arrived when CDs
were relatively new and they could run a list of all CDs in each issue.
You likely had to go out of your way to find CDs, and you needed help
to decide which player to buy, since they were uncommon and quite expensive.
Now, you can buy the players everywhere, and for under a hundred dollars,
and you can find those CDs everywhere too.

Of course Wayne had some magazines that bombed really fast. But over
the same span, plenty of magazines have come and gone. Wayne had the money,
or gumption, to try magazines on new topics, and since he kept trying,
he was bound to fail sometimes. Others would stop after one failure.

How many ham businesses did he ever start? Radio Kits in the sixties?
A useful service for people who wanted to build what were in the magazines but
apparently it was always a money loser. There was a time when he could
publish books, because he had the press for 73. He stopped at some point,
does that make it a failure? He sold code tapes for some years, and then
that too faded away. Does that make it a failure?

Were there some I don't know about? I had suspicions about some advertising
in 73 in the sixties, that happened to be in New Hampshire near 73. Was
it Redline, that made converters? They didn't last too long, but plenty
of such small businesses came and went, even without Wayne's help.

He had his hands in multiple fields, because the core magazine, 73,
was successful enough that he could try other things. The computer magazines
were successful, likely some of them had greater readership than 73 at any
time in its history, and that meant he could try new things. When he
sold them off, the cash meant he could still try new things.

Sure, there was a period when 73 was part of IDG, but that was fallout
from selling the computer magazines. But basically, for over forty years
he was an independent publisher. He never had to go to a regular job,
never had to fallback on that when his projects failed. That has to
make him successful.

Hardly any magazines over the same period were published by independents.
Most were under big publishers. Independents had a tendency to fail.
Or, they'd be sold to the big publishers, and then had tendency to
disappear. Gernsback himself started an awful lot of magazines, and
most of them "failed" too, maybe faster than Wayne's. Gernsback,
the publisher, failed last year, killing it's last remaining magazine,
that basically hadn't had much of a life.

No, I think Wayne was pretty successful.

Michael VE2BVW