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Giving Up On FT

I still have it because I love this forum, I tend to find time to try and read it from cover to cover, even if there are some articles I do not like to read about, i tend to leave those and come back to them later, then it is passed on to my elderly neighbours who love this sort of thing. You will never satisfy everyone, ever.
 
I've just renewed my subscription for another 2 years.

This is somewhat ironic, because I haven't unwrapped and opened an issue in at least 4 years. For several years (dating back into the mid-1990s) the latest copy of FT was a standard accessory when dining at my favorite steakhouse - often in the company of an older colleague and pal. The stories and / or themes in the current issue triggered many hours of discussion, debate, and roll-our-eyes bewilderment. My pal / colleague died 4 years ago this month, I no longer frequent the steakhouse (owing to life / logistical changes), and I somehow never get around to opening the new issues as they arrive.

I set them aside as a reserve reading resource, preserving them as an emergency remedy for any long-term down time with nothing else to do.
 
I still buy them but haven't read a new one since January. They're still piled up on the table. And the only sections I read without fail are Alan's ghost column, letters and "it happened to me." Most of the time I can finish a magazine in 5 minutes. Occasionally articles are published that I wouldn't normally have looked at but I'm glad I tried them - the article on the mystery body found on the Australian beach - Taman Shud, I think it's referred to?
 
DrPaulLee said:
I still buy them but haven't read a new one since January. They're still piled up on the table. And the only sections I read without fail are Alan's ghost column, letters and "it happened to me." Most of the time I can finish a magazine in 5 minutes. Occasionally articles are published that I wouldn't normally have looked at but I'm glad I tried them - the article on the mystery body found on the Australian beach - Taman Shud, I think it's referred to?
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The Tamam Shud article was really interesting, I enjoyed that one a lot.

Although I don't buy every issue, if I flick through it in a shop and see something interesting, I'll buy it, even if it's only a short thing I could get away with reading in the shop, cos at the end of the day, I'd much rather live in a world with Fortean Times in it than one that doesn't.
 
Kryptonite said:
I'd much rather live in a world with Fortean Times in it than one that doesn't.
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Me too!! In recent times, several newspapers and magazines have disappeared. Hope it won´t happen to FT too soon.
 
Dr_David_Sutton said:
Just wanted to chip in briefly.

I find Naughty Felid's other comments odd too; FT was full of crop circles and X-Files stuff back in the 90s, although I'm not sure why the 'Second Summer of Love' (people off their tits in a field somewhere) would have been a particularly fortean subject. This was also the period when FT's readership – fuelled largely by the X-Files phenomenon – hit a massive, unsustainable, and never-to-be-repeated, peak.
!
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No, I'm talking about potential readership a lot of those people was deeply interested in the esoteric and the supernatural at that time.

As one of those people off their tits in a field, in the second summer and the years that followed and the years before, there wasn't that many who regularly bought the magazine, (out of the 20 odd people I knew well I was the only one),

If you take this place as an example, there's me and Swifty that I know attended festivals and raves. I'm not sure who else did.

That's not many out of thousands altering their minds on a regular basis attending events surrounded by Fortean imagery.

Bob Rickard was part of a generation of the 1960's that spawned the New Wave of writings which inspired his journey to founding FT. When I started reading FT despite the excellent covers and articles it never soaked into the youth culture of the time.

Also where the hell are the younger readers?
 
Analogue Boy said:
Not quite true. As Forteans, we look at the evidence, As the limitations of compact cameras produce orbs where previously there were none.

[...]

What remains fascinating to me is the question of why should the human mind play these deception games on itself?
Sorting out the real wheat from the chaff is what we’re mostly and should be doing .
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This has my vote for, 'Post of the Month'!

Damned if reading same, thought for a moment I had written it myself...

So, you have reminded that I need to post son's latest camera video of the orbs and other artefacts which do seemingly occur when called upon to do so - on the case right now!
 
escargot said:
The letters page has always been the credulous aspect. There's been some WELL weird stuff on there. A couple of years ago there was a long rambling letter about a night-time ghostly visitation which was obviously a dream. Probably had cheese for supper.
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"It happened to me," gets me like that.

When someone at a party says, "I'm writing a novel," the traditional reply is, "Neither am I."

Similarly, when I read those allegedly true stories, I usually think, "No, that didn't happen to me either."

I did submit one once, though. It was fairly unremarkable: an elderly friend in the Morris dance community who had never ever telephoned me, rang me one evening and left me a message to call him back. I did so the next morning and found that he had died, asleep in his armchair. His widow had no idea why he had rung me. However, having discovered the news so early, I was able to get the word out into the wider Morris community and was instrumental in getting a massive turnout of dancers from all over the country to his funeral. I vaguely feel that he sensed the end was near and had that in mind.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
No, I'm talking about potential readership a lot of those people was deeply interested in the esoteric and the supernatural at that time.
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Ah, got it! I thought you meant we should have been running articles about all our friends off their tits in fields! Sorry; it's press week, so not much grey matter left at this point.

In retrospect, perhaps we should have sent an FT rep out to raves with an armload of mags to spread the word to the wasted. I'd have volunteered!

I wish we could reach younger readers, but I wonder if they are even out there. Dennis don't do anything to market the mag to readers of any age, let alone those elusive kids.
 
Dr_David_Sutton said:
Ah, got it! I thought you meant we should have been running articles about all our friends off their tits in fields! Sorry; it's press week, so not much grey matter left at this point.

In retrospect, perhaps we should have sent an FT rep out to raves with an armload of mags to spread the word to the wasted. I'd have volunteered!

I wish we could reach younger readers, but I wonder if they are even out there. Dennis don't do anything to market the mag to readers of any age, let alone those elusive kids.
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You've got to market to them via the channels they use - Snapchat, Instagram, whatever else is out there now. Twitter and FB are old skool nowadays.

I guess they might have an ironic resurgence but I can't see it. "Facebook? My mum uses Facebook."
 
ramonmercado said:
Irish!
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Sorry, I was joking. You're name is so obviously Irish, I thought I'd try to be funny.
My wife used to have friend who was Irish (from Cavan), we were at home one day, when my brother in law's friend met her and insisted she was Scottish, despite her having a very Irish accent, and her protestations that she wasn't a Scot!
 
Mikefule said:
"It happened to me," gets me like that.

When someone at a party says, "I'm writing a novel," the traditional reply is, "Neither am I."

Similarly, when I read those allegedly true stories, I usually think, "No, that didn't happen to me either."

I did submit one once, though. It was fairly unremarkable: an elderly friend in the Morris dance community who had never ever telephoned me, rang me one evening and left me a message to call him back. I did so the next morning and found that he had died, asleep in his armchair. His widow had no idea why he had rung me. However, having discovered the news so early, I was able to get the word out into the wider Morris community and was instrumental in getting a massive turnout of dancers from all over the country to his funeral. I vaguely feel that he sensed the end was near and had that in mind.
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I take IHTM stories at face value as lots of strange stuff has happened to me and to people I know. The 'cheese dream' article sticks in my mind as a waste of space. OTOH there've been some wonderful madness in there.

One of my favourite IHTM items was a story from a woman who'd been bullied as a teenager by a particular girl at school. The victim dreamed about the bully with purple hair standing on the other side of a bridge. Next day the victim learned that the bully had dyed her hair purple for a party shortly before being killed in a road accident. You don't get that level of weirdness anywhere else!
 
Spookdaddy said:
What I do miss are the mad letters...the really mad ones. Does no-one write them anymore? Or have all those guys got websites now? Or is it that the world's gone so nuts that nothing looks that weird anymore?
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I would imagine they don't want to be made fun of by the various article writers...
 
Kryptonite said:
Although I don't buy every issue, if I flick through it in a shop and see something interesting, I'll buy it, even if it's only a short thing I could get away with reading in the shop, cos at the end of the day, I'd much rather live in a world with Fortean Times in it than one that doesn't.
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yes, this!
 
It's been interesting reading all the positions presented thus far.

As far as the "skeptic vs. believer" argument, I always thought that "forteanism" was giving those with an interest in these amazing topics a third option that didn't necessarily endorse either skepticism or belief, but instead collected diverse reports and evidence as a way to see if something interesting could be brought forth out of it that might show the way to new avenues of inquiry, much in the way Fort collected newspaper clippings of events and considered what was perhaps going on. I always took the line of benevolent skepticism as being another phrase for my understanding of the promise of forteanism, not that it was just purporting to be skepticism with a humorous bent.

As way of a concrete example of where I think things went wrong with some specific FT articles, the relatively recent (last two years?) two-part article on the Bell Witch is a good place to start. What I hoped it would do is look at the reports and try to tie together other reports to see what that might indicate - specifically, how close the reports of varied phenomenon between what was reported with the Bell Witch mirror what was reported about Gef the Talking Mongoose. Maybe if I was lucky, the writer would even find out other similar reports that could connect other events. Instead, what I got was a skeptical dismissal of the overall event and an interrogation of the regions terrible history of slavery.

I do have a feeling that the rather grand ideas of the late Steve Moore and the very current Alan Moore have about magic would be laughed at by most of the current writers were they to be presented by somebody not so well known as they were/are.

Speaking of, if you could get Alan Moore to write on occasion for FT, or maybe son-in-law John Reppion, they would likely have some fine ideas and might attract some similar electric minds.
 
MrRING said:
Speaking of, if you could get Alan Moore to write on occasion for FT, .
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Give Alan Moore 6 pages to write on any subject he wants and I'm sure it'll sell a good few more copies than usual.

Has there ever been an article about Moore's novel Jerusalem? I really enjoyed the book, and am always interested in hearing what others thought of it.

Alan's late friend Steve Moore has always sounded like a fascinating man, I'd love to read a long, well- researched article about him.
 
Rushfan62 said:
Sorry, I was joking. You're name is so obviously Irish, I thought I'd try to be funny.
My wife used to have friend who was Irish (from Cavan), we were at home one day, when my brother in law's friend met her and insisted she was Scottish, despite her having a very Irish accent, and her protestations that she wasn't a Scot!
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I'm Scottish and was having a Skype session with a friend in America, his wife said I sounded just like Tom Jones!

But that's not unusual (had to add that before someone else did :) )
 
Dr_David_Sutton said:
Ah, got it! I thought you meant we should have been running articles about all our friends off their tits in fields! Sorry; it's press week, so not much grey matter left at this point.

In retrospect, perhaps we should have sent an FT rep out to raves with an armload of mags to spread the word to the wasted. I'd have volunteered!

I wish we could reach younger readers, but I wonder if they are even out there. Dennis don't do anything to market the mag to readers of any age, let alone those elusive kids.
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Festivals weren't all about getting wasted, that was only about 98% of it. The rest of the 2% was about meeting people, (old and new friends), music, food, shagging and buying stuff. The Krishnas always had a massive presence at festivals - they knew about marketing, (brainwashing), way back.

Having a stall at a festival would have been a good idea - I didn't think of it though at the time either.

FT was already getting into stuffy middle-age by the early 90's and that was part of it's charm.

Do/did you have anyone involved in marketing? I'm not just talking about selling ad space. Did you ever have anyone employed about how to get the magazine to a wider fan-base not just on the Dennis's side?

I'd be sort of pleased if you never did as it 's what made the magazine what it was, but also sort of think you needed someone who understood promotion.

Reddit and Instagram and the other stuff Carlos said that's the current places to be.
 
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Rushfan62 said:
Sorry, I was joking. You're name is so obviously Irish, I thought I'd try to be funny.
My wife used to have friend who was Irish (from Cavan), we were at home one day, when my brother in law's friend met her and insisted she was Scottish, despite her having a very Irish accent, and her protestations that she wasn't a Scot!
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Weird innit. I was once waiting to check in at a hotel, behind some pompous British bloke. The clerk was a young Australian man. The Brit told him his accent was South African. The clerk politely informed him that he was actually Australian. Bloke wouldn't have that and held everyone up while he insisted that the clerk MUST be South African.

It's about power, y'see. Getting someone into a silly argument makes them feel they have to justify themselves. It goes on in abusive relationships.
 
Is it possible that there is a young contingent within the readership, but they mostly do not frequent this board (or the official version it used to be)?

It is, after all, viewed as a rather old-fashioned medium in the world of social media.

Just pondering.

Do the FT have a demographic breakdown of the readership/subscriber base?
 
Yithian said:
Is it possible that there is a young contingent within the readership, but they mostly do not frequent this board (or the official version it used to be)?

It is, after all, viewed as a rather old-fashioned medium in the world of social media.

Just pondering.

Do the FT have a demographic breakdown of the readership/subscriber base?
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Are you asking for age, interests, preferred reading material outside Forteana, or our measurements?:reyes:
 
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