AGD shortchanged by APG

[luke]

Anyone else notice that APG (page 136) made no mention of the fact that the new 45 frames by AGD were Intelliframes? They didn't even get the name correct, they were just dubbed AGD 45's. :( Besides the oversight it's a cool spread, and right up front!

How about page 138, the Benchmark Kit by Pro Team, cool looking gun but you could drive a small Sedan behind that trigger! ;) Is that an E-Mag body?

[Webmaster]

HEY! I had pics of the new intelliframes - and the SLF emag... Dont know why they didnt put them in OR why they went and misspelled the automag extreme... I called it the modular body...

Still -= they let me have like 13 pages - so that was pretty huge for APG.

[shartley]

Webby.. its called being unprofessional, and lack of a real editor. I just sit and shake my head. So very sad. Just because you are widely read does not make you a professional outfit.... attention to detail and accurate articles do.

Can you imagine Time doing that?

Also, it is customary when running an article about products to let the manufacturer proof the article to make sure things are correct. The manufacturer does not get a say in WHAT gets published, just helps make sure it is correct information. Also most times the Manufacturer will have better pictures anyway (since they would have had them made for marketing purposes), thus making them the logical choice to pull from.

Evidently this was not done. But it is classic for the Paintball Industry, unfortunately. And people still ask why other Industries, Mainstream Media, and the average Joe Schmo don't take Paintball seriously? Well, this kind of thing is one reason, and there are many others.

However, I am sure I will not win any brownie points for saying this. But it is true. And the only way you can fix a problem is to identify it. Unfortunately few are willing to step up and say the unpopular thing...... You can always work from the truth, even if bad.... but you can't from a lie, no matter how "good" it sounds. ;)

[Restola]

that sucks. i stopped reading apg though. i havent read it in about 12 months but the last time i did was kind of like all the other issues i read, because they are all the same issue, have outdated information (compared to the internet), and a lot of tourny coverage that i could care less about. probably biased and unfounded, but i get my kicks from pop sci, sci am, and political mags.

maybe there just isnt enough info going on in paintball, or maybe all paintball events end up being the same therefor articles are the same. i just wish there was a magazine out there for paintball that i liked. i mean i like getting stuff in the mail.

[Webmaster]

I believe they are calling it the "extreem" due to an earlier release that may have been mispelled. It was spelled that way in just a product spotlight. As for why they didnt print certain photos etc - its all space concerns. There were other things I send in and they cut copy and pics. The article was 4000 words with, I want to say, 150 pics!

Other than that - for people who compare any paintball magazine with streamline media - its obvious to see why paintball magazines pale in thier "professionalism".

In the case of APG I partly blame CFW. You make more as a shift manager at mcdonalds than you do as the editor of APG. Both Dan Reeves and Jessica Sparks work on the two CFW magazines out of love more than money. Both of them are lawyers and make much more at thier "day job". So being an editor is a part time thing...

Asside from having uderpaid editors, many of the writers are not professional. I consider myself a hack, but even thier core writers like Bambi, Mad Dog, and Roadrunner arent proffesional writers (at least to my knowledge). Fortuneatly they have experiance and do what I think is a good job. The rest of the magazine has writers who are less prolific.

On one note, since the writers arent true professionals, grammerical error etc are going to be more prolific and more likly to not be caught by harried editors. Furthermore, some of it is left in as the writers unique "voice".

So what of the caliber and quality of writers? As I said our sport lacks anyone who makes a living writing - other than possibly Hollywood. But most people who are writers wouldnt waste their time with a magazine in our sport. Bill Mills told me he got paid more money for two paragraphes in Wired than he did for a whole article in any paintball magazine.

Then I have heard complaints about APG being a "newbie rag" I mean how many "Tips for your first time" articles can you make? Well - lets be honest. APG does have the largest readership. And APG DOES bring people into the sport. I know it did me! I poured over friends magazines a month before I finally played! IF you didnt constantly have these newbie articles, you would be ignoring a core group of people who would benifit from them!

On a personal level I try to do the best I can. In the case of the two barrel articles I wrote - it was a case of an editor splitting things up for space reasons. We already had a talk about that, and something like that fiasco wont happen again. I also try to check any questions I have with manufactures. Fortunately I am blessed with having a good core of knowledge already. And being on a first name basis with people at ICD, AGD, ProTeam, and BOA helps me further get information I need.

I have thought about writing for other magazines with a bit more prestige - but I really dont think any other magazine is heads over heels any better. PGI is probably one of the most liked magainzes - and certainly the best laid out and designed - but its casual banter and attitude get annoying to me at times.

So, I can see how people my see this as making excuses. And I suppose I am to a degree. But at the same I wish to maybe fill some people in on the inner workings. Then instead of critisizing, you can do something about it. APG and the other magazines are always looking for writers. If anyone is interested, I can forward your information to APG. If you wish to write for another magazine, they should have contact information listed.

[dawump]

I have two articles in the pipeline for publication.. one in Paintball and one in APG. I've found the editors to be great and make up for my inexperience. I write mostly technical stuff, and Jessica took one of my articles ( A Science Fiction piece about a tournament final in 2018 ) and made it pretty slick with a strong editorial touch.

From my discussions with Jonathan Bernstein ( sp? ) another regular author these magazines do find it hard to discover writers who are paintballers - so if anybody out there would like a go, I highly recommend that you contact them.

My relationship with them started when I cc:ed an email to them that was sent to the executive director of Manhunt ( that sucky lame show with rambo wanabees firing paintballs at contestants not wearing eye protection ).

They are interested in Paintball from all angles. When I first got in touch with them I hadn't even played, and the article in APG is a before / after piece.

Keith

[shartley]

Webby, thank you for the insight.

It did however prove that it is easier to make excuses than to fix the problem. And that is another reason many things in the Paintball Industry have not progressed... people are satisfied with CRAP from "nice people", or just lack the backbone to demand better.

Few other Industries would put up with that. And those IN them have more self respect than to put out inferior things and back it up with excuses.... they rather put in the extra effort to do it right.

I have been fighting that type of thinking for over 4 years with some people in the Paintball Industry... and you know what? Those who stop settling for substandard things, and demand quality from not only those they deal with, but also themselves, do BETTER. Do you sell crap because everyone else is, and it WILL sell (because that is all that is out there)... or do you demand more from yourself? Seems like a HUGE difference in thinking to me. And which one do you think will actually benefit the Paintball Industry? ;)

We don't settle for weak excuses concerning other aspects in our lives, so why should we do so from the Paintball Industry or those representing it? And readers of these publications should not be forced to read them simply because they have nothing else to read, or the other Paintball Publications are not much better. This just means Paintball Players are a bunch of sheep that will eat any grass that is placed in front of them. Is this the case? I don't think so.

I too would like to see a quality Paintball Magazine put out. Something along the lines of Road and Track, and Car and Driver.. but for Paintball. You want Tournament information, pick up one of the other Magazines out there. They seem to think that is all folks want to read (because they may see their own picture or their name in print). It doesn't take much skill to go to a tournament and snap off a couple pictures and do an essay about what you saw.... some of us would like more meat and potatoes.

I for one, am tired of "nice people" getting pats on the back for crappy work. I am tired of hearing how HARD these people work, and what "dedication" they have, etc., but seeing only substandard copy. I would rather read a quality Paintball Magazine published by "not so nice people", and get the information correctly and on time, than to settle for the status quo.

I shake my head at things like "don't criticize, but do something about it". If it was MY Publication, you better believe that I WOULD do something about it, but it isn't. And why should it be the READERS responsibility to fix the problem? That is like Tom making a substandard part and then turning around and telling the customer to do something about it instead of HIM fixing it. It is not the readers' responsibility to make the Publication one of quality... it is the Editors and Publishers responsibility.

So again, I am sure they are all wonderful people, but that does not mean they should not be held accountable and directly responsible for their own publication. And you can not blame people for wanting more, or expressing their displeasure. Again, unless you would rather blame the person pointing out the problem then those directly responsible for it.

Thank you for your understanding.

[FeelTheRT]

i don't even know why people buy APG, they are written by 13 year olds... serioulsy. I know this kid that writes for them... or used to about a month ago for a few months.

[raehl]

I write for APG sometimes (ok, once... ;) ) and I'm 23!

There is a huge lack of quality material to publish. Unfortunately, there are VERY FEW people who have the ability to write at a level suitable for professional publication, and even fewer of those who have the requisite paintball knowlege to do so for a paintball publication. You'd be surprised how many people can get out of college even and not know how to write.

On the other hand, for many of the horrendously written articles that make it to print, there is no excuse - MSWord has a very nice grammar checker, one which I use religiously on anything I release publically, and one which would nab 98% of the bad grammar that makes it to print. Authors *AND* editors need to make a habit of taking advantage of tools like this.

And the other part to lack of quality is lack of material. One thing Paintball is lacking (competition wise anyway) is statistics and team history. When you read a sports article about say, baseball, what are you really reading? You're reading a bunch of stats about previous performance as it applies to how well a team is likely to do next time. No one keeps concise stats on previous team performance, partly because few teams exist longer than a couple years, and partly because, well, you need someone at each field keeping stats. How many players survive a game for a team on average? What percentage of the time do they get the pull? Hang? Stalemate? What's the average amount of time for them to get a pull? Which players get the most eliminations? How many players per game does a team lose on penalties? Points on hot-gun penalties? Stuff like that requires paying someone to sit at the field and write it down.

You'll start to see a lot of that change with college paintball, actually. The enviornment necessitates that the teams are around forever, West Point has been around since 1984. Purdue since '93 at least, UofI since '96. I can tell you exactly how many times UofI has beat Purdue in the history of college paintball (4-2 at MICT's, 2-0 at National Championships), or how many times Army has beat Navy (currently 1-1). Paintball is mostly coverred from the "What happened?" perspective. It needs columns by someone predicting who is going to win, keeping track of which players are back from last year, stuff like that. We all know that there's a tournament, teams and promoters show up, and someone wins. Old news. It's hard to make predictions though when you don't know who will be there - you can pretty reliably predict NPPL Pro attendence, but beyond that, things get a little more random. You do, however, see the same college teams at events over and over again.

Ok, enough college paintball plugging. ;) There's other problems too - almost 100% of advertising in paintball magazines comes from paintball companies. That needs to change. We have a magazine that reaches hundreds of thousands of young people, yet no advertising from Coke or Pepsi. Why? Part of it is the quality - corporations will be hesitent to put their names in something that appears to be written by 13 year olds.

On the newbie front, there do need to be "newbie" articles. While those of us who have been playing for years know all this stuff, it's no different really than Cosmo publishing their 36th article on "How to land a Nice Guy" or Maxim's 20th article on "10 Things You Can Do To Get Your Date To Come Up For "Coffee"". Yes, it's a rehash of the same material, but it serves a valuable function to new players. I don't read all the sections of Newsweek; I don't expect to read all the articles in APG either.

Another thing I think is missing from paintball coverage is what's happening in the industry. Do you know how many publications contacted us about the fact that a national, non-profit association of college clubs had been incorporated? None, but you'd think that'd be a pretty major happening in a sport, wouldn't you? Hopefully there will be some real news coverage of the SPPLAT thing (as opposed to just PR coverage) to start changing that trend. How about articles on paintball legistlation? High School clubs getting official recognition? Fields threatened by local legislative action?

That leans towards another problem - lead times on paintball publications are horrendously long, usually takes 6-10 weeks between deadline and when the mags first hit the mailboxes. That's an awful long time. In the age of the Internet, that provides a huge advantage to places like Warpig.

- Chris

[Webmaster]

Well I am trying more to give you REASONS why it is substandard. If you only had a part time job to lay out a large magazine like APG - how well would you do? The actual lay out and design is done by CFW - who also pumps out a bunch of martial arts magazines. They are really less concerned about the sport as they are with selling magazines. I have never seen nor directly spoken to any one at CFW other than when I had a 1099 tax question. I am not trying to make excuse - but there are REASONS For the way things are. And I wish to express that it is good people trying their best - but they only have limited resources.

There is simply no way you can compare "road and driver" or any other main stream magazine to any paintball magazine out there. Road and driver has a full time editors - multiple editors - full time writers, and a staff in an office.

APG has part time editors working out of thier home with thier writers scattered across the usa.

I suppose you have a right to critisize thier performance - but at the same time one should be aware of the circumstances and that they have some limitations.

One can NOT directly compare APG to any mainstream magazine. It simply isnt fair. It would be like comparing some guy trying to race his monte carlo - vs a NASCAR monte carlo. The lone guy simply does NOT have the resources to do as good of a job.

The ONLY way the magazine will get better is if they get better writers/photographers etc to make better articles.

It would be nice if CFW had better designers and cleaned up the look - but that is unlikely to happen.

I do what I can and try to make as complete and viable articles as I can.

It just frustrates me to see such harsh critism - when if one looks at the big picture, one can see they do a GREAT job given what they have to work with.

[Webmaster]

One more thing - looking things over - I didnt call it the Intelliframe in the article, because when I wrote it, there had not been the contest to give it the official name! Remember, those grips were a week old when they were at zap.

They still should of had the EMAG SFL - it was one sweet looking gun!

[raehl]

Circulation and advertising. Magazines like Car and Driver pull advertising from huge automobile companies, have a wider circulation (I would assume, anyway) and just have more money to play with to hire full time editors and staff writers.

Anyway, I'm assuming you were replying to someone else mainly, as I'm pretty sure all my comments were on fundamental problems publishers and editors face when trying to cover this industry as opposed anything under their control. Well, except the use of grammar checkers. ;)

- Chris

[shartley]

Webby,
I apologize if I came across harsh. That was not my intent. My intent was to point out some issues (no pun intended) and do so in a realistic, yet maybe not feel-good, manner.

Does everyone honestly think that all the mainstream magazines did not have to WORK for the startup funds? Does everyone honestly think none of the mainstream magazines started out from grass roots? Does everyone think that the STAFF of all the other mainstream magazines were diehard "players", "drivers", or "fans" of the subject matter?

Let's be real about this. You often have to reach outside your "group" to get things done right. And there is no crime in that.... it IS however a crime in my opinion if you refuse to.

How long has APG been in publication? Is this their first season? I refuse to be complacent.... but that is just me.

Far too often I see people in the paintball industry (not just magazines) want to fall back on the financial issue, as well as the others stated in this thread. Well sorry, but ALL industries have the same problems. The difference is that they do not fall back on the excuses, they take care of the problems.

Think it can't be done? Sure it can. The question is, does anyone want to do it RIGHT? People can sit around and say what a great job folks are doing "considering" everything, and take the blue pill... or they can swallow the red pill and help advance the Paintball Industry, but that seems to be a pill most people find hard to swallow. And that is unfortunate.

[Webmaster]

I had a reply to this, but whats the point. Where are my pills?...

[shartley]

I think Neo took the last one in stock. LOL Damn him! ;)

As with most things debated here on AO, I don't think anything will change (unfortunately). It was however a good exercise in opposing views. :D

I hope others take note in how ISSUES were debated and not PEOPLE. I think this went very well. :)

[Shaft]

My biggest problem with niche magazines is the reviews are always "love-fests," (to quote another AO member).
Rarely do you ever read, "this new product from company A sucks."
Mainstream mags like Car&Driver will at least call a piece'a junk a piece'a junk.
I don't know if they are scared to lose potential advertising dollars or really easy to please, but it makes reading these magazines useless at times.

[raehl]

The editors of Car and Driver, and their writers, probably rarely see any big car company executives. It's not like that in paintball, where the people who cover the industry play in the industry socialize heavily with those in the industry and somewhat built the industry. It's hard to "call it like it is" on a product made by a company when you'll be seeing the President of that company at every tournament you're going to be at.

Paintball is, comparatively, small. While I'm sure we all enjoy the relative ease with which we have access to Tom and the heads of other paintball companies, when was the last time a customer talked to an executive from, say, Spalding? It doesn't happen, and there's a reason for that. A sport eventually gets big enough where someone goes to the store, asks which product is the best for them, and buys it, and the idea of having personal contact with the executives of the company responsible for that product never enters their head.

The industry is young, and those "in charge" of it are almost completely players, because if you wern't a paintball player 10 years ago, you never would have thought to get into the paintball buisiness. That's very atypical for most sports. The players are the owners are the media. Niche by definition means you're going to have everyone scratching everyone else's back.

What you're going to see as this sport grows is all of these smaller companies are going to colesce into bigger ones. There won't be a company that just makes barrels, or air systems, or markers, or whatever. You'll eventually see 4-6 companies with COMPLETE paintball product lines, markers, air systems, loaders, barrels, gear, etc. AGD is getting close, they just need barrels and loaders. Brass Eagle is working on it, they just need to get their marker-related gear up-to-snuff at the middle-upper range of the product line. The whole "Java" thing is kind of along these lines as well.

- Chris

[deweasel697]

what are these benchmark kits?

[EvilErnie]

My biggest problem with niche magazines is the reviews are always "love-fests,"
I think I will start a magazine to find the worst products in paintball. I will call it Paintball Crap! Maybe I can get people to send me product to test. That would be cool. A magazine devoted to crappy products. I bet I would have a large group of readers! What do you guys/gals think?

[dawump]

I wouldn't buy that because there would be no AGD stuff.

keith

[shartley]

Yes, I think a no holds barred tell it like it is Paintball Magazine would be great. Ever notice how Road & Track and Car & Driver seem to not have a problem with advertising? It is because they know people READ the magazine for the honest reviews and articles.

It forces companies to produce quality products, not forces them to not advertise in the magazine. I have seen many issues where a particular product is given unfavorable reviews, then turn several pages and see a full page add for the SAME company that made the poorly reviewed product.

So not wanting to ruffle feathers is not a valid reason why no such Paintball Magazine has been published.

Also, the size thing, and not rubbing elbows with actual owners? Please, if you don't have enough backbone to tell things like they are, you should not be doing an interview, writing an article, or Publishing a Magazine. And if the owners of these Paintball Companies wanted to be jerks because they made a crappy product and your Magazine or Reporter said so... then what does that say about THEM?

I think people often confuse the line between liking a person, and liking everything they do or make. It is often quite different. And saying a product is bad, is not saying that the owner of the company is bad.

I would most definitely buy a PB Magazine like the one discussed... even if it only came out twice a year. It would be money well spent... for me anyway. :)

[luke]

Originally posted by Webmaster
- I didnt call it the Intelliframe in the article, because when I wrote it, there had not been the contest to give it the official name! Remember, those grips were a week old when they were at zap.



Boy this thread opened a can of worms! Just so you know Weby, I wasn't really complaining or pointing fingers or anything like that. It's a cool little spread for AGD, but from an advertising point of view, it lacked all the info.... In a hundred years nobody will care about this little oversight! ;)

Every year (for about 3 now) I tell myself "this year I'm not going to renew my subscription" and every year I do. There are many things I don't like about it, but nobody forces me to buy it either. That's really what it boils down to, boycott it, change it or ignore it. We all have a choice. I have to admit, I no longer read it cover to cover, and sections I wouldn't read if you twisted my arm. It's a newbie magazine, a fact they don't hide, but what would I (we) trade it for, a magazine full of tournament results? Once in a while I'm surprised and actually read something with some good information or something I simply enjoy. For the few bucks it cost, it's no big loss anyway you look at it.

Am I missing something or did AGD stop advertising in it?

I guess if we want a quality magazine TK will have to bring it too us! :)

[Shaft]

It's forums like this where one can find honest information and informed opinions. Sometimes in the face of the product creator (speaking of, Shartley, did JJ ever agree to give us those free memberships?).

I buy the magazines more for the advertising - it's cool to see what's new. APG does have some good players tips as well.

[luke]

Originally posted by Shaft

I buy the magazines more for the advertising - it's cool to see what's new. APG does have some good players tips as well.

Me too, the first thing I read in APG is "Gear Bag", it's the best thing about the magazine. I did find the article about Alvarez interesting, the sport could use more like him.