The postman deposited a rather large letter on my doormat this morning, which contained an unsolicited copy of 'Esquire'. I was more than a little confused as to why I had been sent this as I've never read Esquire and I certainly hadn't subscribed to it. Then I jumped to the conclusion that my Lloyds Club Account benefit had gone wrong and rather than my wife receiving Cosmopolitan for a year I was now going to get Esquire instead...
Then my wife pointed out there was also a letter for me from Hearst magazines and on opening it I discovered that it was a letter from QP telling me that the publishers had decided that it was not possible to carry on producing the magazine, even though it seems like it's been barely a year since they bought it from 'The Telegraph' group.
Admittedly QP was far from perfect, although since the takeover the spellchecking has improved dramatically. It used to be a game of mine to spot all the mistakes in the magazine, including sentences that tailed off at the end of a page only for the next paragraph to start on the next... or sometimes continue in a different, random column.
This 'attention to detail' carried over into the manufacture of their binders, of which I have five (sadly not quite enough to hold all my copies of QP, or enough to completely fill up the space under my television), one of which is a completely different shade of brown to the other four. And last time I tried to order a sixth they had stopped bothering altogether... oh and the new binder was very slightly smaller than the old ones so the older magazines wouldn't fit in it either! :(
I guess the writing was on the wall when the magazine went from bi-monthly to quarterly a while back... but at least they didn't try to take the magazine wholly 'online'. I really don't get the concept of glossy magazine's trying to be 'online', looking at photographs of watches on a screen just isn't the same as having them large scale right in front of you, and if there's one thing we don't need it's another online 'watch' magazine! Well, I guess that is probably a big part of the problem for QP isn't it? There's too much 'free' content online and the publishing lag is so great that they are reporting on the Baselworld releases in late Summer... it just won't do in a world where yesterday's watch release is old news.
Truthfully, even though it was clear that QP was becoming redundant, I persisted with it because I enjoyed receiving a nice glossy watch magazine that I can keep and read again. I've read many copies of QP more than once, and I'm sure I shall do so again. It's also nice to rediscover articles about TAG Heuer such as the ones above and below; you may for instance remember that I was reading about the 150th Anniversary of the brand the other day when the news of the 160th Anniversary Carrera broke...
While QP definitely had it's faults it was at least readable... I'm afraid the same cannot be said for 'Watch Time' which I foolishly bought at Euston Station sometime last year, or maybe even the year before. O.M.G! Everything that is wrong with modern journalism... well I say journalism, there is no journalism in Watch Time, it is simply a simpering mouthpiece for the watch brands with press releases seemingly transcribed word for word with no opinions given and no journalistic input at all required in fact!
I never actually got through that magazine, it was so boring I just gave up. Every 'article' was simply the kind of point scoring garbage that brands love - with particular fetishistic emphasis given to the number of patents applied for when making a particular watch; all in all it was like a tedious game of Horological Top Trumps. I don't know if there are any other watch magazines available in the UK, but if 'Watch Time' is indeed the only option, then I will just have to do without!
So, to return to my original confusion, why had they sent me a copy of Esquire completely out of the blue? Well, that magazine is owned by the same publishers and they were offering me a chance to switch my subscription to Esquire instead. Well, okay I thought I would have a look - so I opened the magazine up on a full page photo of a collection of cheese graters (I'm not even making this up), because you know it's very important to have the right cheese grater if you want to impress your friends and acquaintances... the horror of inviting someone over for grated cheese and then pulling out your bog-standard cheese grater, I mean how would you ever live that down?
Flicking through the magazine I quickly realised that Esquire is a magazine for people who think it is acceptable to wear a suit and shoes without socks, although to be fair I did read an article earlier today which was quite interesting... so I have to give it that. But whether I would be interested enough to read it every two months, I'm really not so sure.
Ah well, so that's the end of QP. I shall miss my (invariably erratic) copy of QP magazine - a quarterly magazine that wasn't printed every three months as one might imagine, but rather two months sometimes and four months at others. It was always good to check out what was new and hot in the watch world five months ago and always intriguing to be made aware of what I could have seen had I visited the QP Watch Show a couple of weeks after it had taken place - yep, they couldn't even coordinate the magazine coming out with the advertising for their own watch show.
And I'm afraid that about sums it up really, QP's demise is certainly sad but it was also completely predictable.
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