🚀 go-pugleaf

>My biggest complaint about all the Mac mags is their glacial
>time to market.  Their reviews and news seem to run 4-6 months
>behind what I see on the Net and in MacWeek.

Well, that's because they won't publish anything until after they see what
we say about it on the net....

Seriously, production on a magazine like MacUser will run about three months
or so. There are major delays in things like printing, distribution,
mailing, etc, etc. Mac Horizons had much better than average publishing
schedules, and I still couldn't see the stuff I wrote for 60-90 days. We
were smaller and therefore a lot more flexible. 

Until you get into publishing this stuff, the delays seem unreal. Once
you've done it, the delays are never enough to get the last parts of the job
done.... MacWeek gets around the delays in a number of ways:

o not all their stuff is timely -- they have a lot of material pre-written
  and likely pre-printed. Then the new material is printed and the two parts
  collated together for mailing.

o paying for priority access to the presses. Or perhaps buying exclusive
  access and leasing out dead time. 

o paying the more expensive newspaper or first class rates for mail.

It's expensive to publish something like that -- a lot more expensive per
copy than MacUser would be in the same format to the same reader population.
But advertisers will pay a premium in per-reader ad rates to get in a
publication like MacWeek (for good reason. The population that *reads*
MacWeek is the one they really want. That wasn't really true of the late,
unlamented Macintosh Today....)

Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ
Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms