[John McIlroy]

Hi everyone,

Shrink the pictures... Include more text...

You'll be asking me to take out most of the colour next!

Autosport has always had to change to react to trends in publishing and it continues to do so. Whether or not you like it, better use of photography and more 'dip in and out' content is the trend in publishing. Diz, you say turn Autosport into a magazine. That's precisely what we're trying to do. Reducing the size and number of pictures and merely running entire pages of text will achieve the exact opposite.

I'll start comparing the mag to Max Power when we feature far more four-letter words and considerably more nipples. You can see precisely the sort of situation that I mentioned earlier - the sort of thing that frustrates me about this forum. Bigger pictures = Max Power. I mean, have you seriously looked at a copy of Max recently?! Sorry, but that comparison is utter, pure, unadulterated nonsense.

Incidentally, the whole point of National Focus features like Marcus's test is to get more people interested in National motorsport. Wall-to-wall news stories will hardly encourage people to want to read about national motorsport, will they? And I'm not about to encourage Marcus to "get 'em out" for a Max Power-esque photoshoot! :-)

Hmm methinks I'm caught in a 'We want old Autosport back' discussion here. I'd love it if deadlines could be ignored, page counts could go up and down depending on the journalist's whim, pictures could be reduced to postage stamps so we look like Private Eye or worse and we could have sporting trials on the front cover. But we can't.

All I can hope - and I seem to end up saying this at this point in every single ten-tenths discussion I've participated in and read - is that there is still enough of interest in there for you each week. If there's not, you won't buy the mag, I'll be wrong and we'll all probably be out of a job before we know it. I always take on board what people say and (you may not believe this but I'll say it anyway) it hurts when anyone criticises the mag. But at the same time, it's easy to encourage risks when you're throwing suggestions at an Internet forum and not worrying about your livelihood, eh?

John