The Survival continues...

Publisher's Note/Michael Ferrara
With the inevitable end of one or two competitive titles, we are reminded that it could have been us. When you make the same mistakes that cause others to fail, you’ll likely fail. If we fail to deliver a product that’s valuable to the readership or we fail to have a readership large enough to support the advertisers, we’ll also fail. When the economy challenged us, we stepped up to work harder than ever before and we invested the money necessary to keep our family of DSPORT readers growing...

http://www.dragsport.com/issue/2010/0410_pub_note.shtml 

Things are looking pretty grim for the competition. If you haven’t noticed, both Import Tuner and MODIFIED have advertising page counts dropping to the level that resulted in Sport Compact Car and Turbo Magazine being canceled. As a result, it’s very likely that one or both of the titles will call it quits during the next six months. If they close one of these titles, the hope would be to book the canceled title’s advertisers into the surviving title. If both titles are canned, the plan would be to book the advertisers into Super Street.

I used to buy SCC and Turbo every month, D-Sport when I could find it and Modified and Import Tuner occasionally. About the time SCC and Turbo died I stopped buying magazines all together because my pocket was also feeling some strain and I was looking for ways to cut back my expenses.

I can now find D-Sport every month but only buy it if there is something really interesting in it.

I still scan through all the magazines at the newsstand and have noticed the page count and paper quality dwindling (all except D-Sport). All of them, including D-Sport, aren't technical enough for my liking.

Although I really love MotoIQ, I enjoy sitting down and turning the pages of a good magazine more than reading content on the net and I really miss SCC for that reason. THe nice thing with Moto IQ though is tI don't have to wait a whole month for new content and the articles are even more indepth. Keep up the good work guys.

Yeah... I saw that 'editors letter', or whatever you want to call it.  Modified is a mix-bag, some good stuff, some not.  The current issue has a decent article on corner weighting.  Dsport, I'll flip through in about 5 minutes, if it even takes that long.  The same for Import Tuner.

I'm guessing Modified will get the axe next.  They've lost too many guys with Jay Chen, Andy Hope, and David P. all having left.  They're trying to walk a fine line between 'technical' and, well, not technical.  I personally think they're trying to please everybody, which means you end up with a product that no one really likes.

I love Racecar Engineering.  Good thing we get it at work, because its $$$!!!

Mike is pretty ballsy to be writing stuff like that. Its borderline slanderous. I don't think Import Tuner will take a dump. Or I hope not...they have the best chicks on the cover.

In the process of searching through some old Sport Compact Car articles online (aka Modified Magazine), I stumbled across this article in Dsport dated September 2004 (funny, pretty much the same way I started this thread)...

We all remember there being bunch of import car mags on newstands at one time ...I enjoy history in general, and this really caught my attentiion because it answered questions I was always curious about, ect...Assuming the information here is accurate and despite it being 6 years old, it was interesting reading one spin on how things came to be in the tuner/import car print media industry and what one magazine was projecting it to evolve into...Going back in time with Dsport from issue 88 to issue 21:

http://www.dragsport.com/issue/2004...icle.shtml