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Issue 54: January/February 1990
A Letter From the Publisher …
Dear Reader,
Nineteen ninety will indeed be a year of considerable change for Australian aviation magazine.
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From its inception as an annual in 1977 the magazine grew to be published quarterly just two years later and then market forces in 1985tookAA to bi-monthly status. This year though will see the dawn of a new era as your aviation magazine will be published monthly from the May edition onwards.
The decision to publish monthly has been under detailed study for more than two years now and was driven principally by two factors. Firstly, the market is demanding more frequency and secondly, our ongoing enemy – lack of space – is making it inevitable that we increase our page availability so that we can bring you the news that you rightly expect.
Indeed this latter point is the most significant benefit in going monthly. As a bi-monthly we currently produce around 750 pages a year as against 1,000for our first full year as a monthly. Actually the magazine will be produced for ten issues a year rather than twelve. We have decided to forego the January and February editions for anumber of reasons and will cover this period with extended editions of the December and March issues instead.
Each monthly edition will be of 100 pages,much the same as the issue you hold before you now and will carry the same content that you expect of your aviation magazine. The big benefits to you, the reader,is that our news sections will now be much more relevant due to the enhanced publishing frequency. We are confident that as a monthly, and with our special StopPress section, we will be able to bring you the key news stories before any other magazine. This benefit will naturally also carry over to all our regular columns and will make the magazine a lot more current than has been possible in the past.
The other major benefit is that we will be able to run more,and bigger, pictures to better illustrate our stories. Ongoing space constraints have always meant that we have had to be frugal on illustrating some features in the past despite an excellent library of over 30,000 photos of everything from the Fox Moth to Fulcrum. This will make the magazine more visually impressive while a larger typeface in the news sections will also make them more readable. More, and larger,pictures in thissection will also be a long overdue plus, while colour has already been increased to further enhance your magazine.
The additional space will also allow us to now publish a large number of features that previously were assigned to a holding pattern. We presently have nearly two dozen major features on the back burner through lack of space and now fortunately these will progressively be able to see the light of day along with many new and exciting regular features that we plan to introduce through the coming year.
While the newsstand price of the magazine will remain at $4. 90, direct mail subscribers will be actually paying less per issue than they presently do. One year subscribers presently pay $4. 16 an issue while two year subscribers pay $3. 66. This will decrease to $3. 90 and $3. 45 respectively, unprecedented value in anyone’s language. Full details of the new subscription rates will appear in the March edition. Current subscribers will have their subscriptions automatically adjusted to suit the new frequency (on a per issue basis) and they will now save even more when subscribing direct due to the increase in publishing frequency.
I would like to say one last thing though and that is simply that I give my personal pledge to every reader that there will not be the slightest decrease in quality as a result of increased frequency. We have just moved across to a more expensive and better quality printing process, we have recently invested a considerable sum in state-of-the-art typesetting and data analysis software as well as new computers and will be taking on two additional full-time team members to ensure that a monthly AA is even better produced,more topical and relevant than ever before.
Thank you for your past support and we look forward to being of continued service in the years ahead.
Yours faithfully,
Jim Thorn
Managing Editor
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