Ive killed again.... Roadkill Magazine

Over the years I have brought bad luck to several magazines I subscribed to (Sorry in advance GRM  )

The following magazines have folded while I was an active subscriber and I was moved to another title for the remaining issues.

Sport Compact Car

Honda Tuning

Modified

Sport Truck

and now ... Roadkill

Roadkill was a premium priced magazine subscription so the 1 to 1 conversion works in their favor.  I think you can subscribe to Hot Rod and get 5 years for 5 dollars or something.

Ouch.  Their grammars are not good.

Sucks but not surprised. Cool you get the hot rod subscription though.  

Yeah, that magazine was tall on design and short on content.  

In reply to pinchvalve :

And $10 a copy from the stand. No thanks

Biggest problem I noticed from the last issue is that most of the content was stuff I had already seen from watching motortrend on demand content. I think what isn't in video form already is also on their website. 

1988RedT2 said:

Ouch.  Their grammars are not good.

Indeed.  Never a good sign when you're in the business of, you know, writing stuff.

Here's me not being surprised.

When Source Interlink (or TEN or whatever they are this week on the bankruptcy papers) announced the Roadkill magazine would be a "premium" pub with a high news stand price, I could not figure out how they would make it work. And now we know, they didn't.

As an editor I have ridden a print magazine into the ground, it was not fun. Shrunken budget for content but the same page count, coupled with stagnant ad rates and borderline blackmail distribution network (those magazines don't just appear at the grocery store for free) lead to my doom. But seeing Roadkill, a successful video series, try to cram itself into a publication model was just..silly.

I have said to many people over the years that only the niche magazines like GRM or S3 will survive. The fluff magazines can't compete with blogs for variety or timeliness.

The folks I feel sorry for are the contributors who shot photos and wrote stories for the "upcoming" Roadkill issues that will never see the light of day. Since most publishers pay upon publication, that work is now in limbo at best, and wasted at worst.

It always seemed like an experiment. Charge people a premium to hold a physical copy of what they enjoy seeing online. There's something to be said for that idea, but it didn't work. 

yeah, not surprised. Although I'm a big fan of the show, the magazine always seemed like a crass attempt at merchandising. Like a David and Finnegan lunch box.   Wait, scratch that, I might actually BUY a lunchbox.

In reply to ultraclyde :

GRM really should do a lunchbox. It needs to be the painted, stamped metal kind though.

In reply to Pete Gossett :

Yeah, I'd buy that. The graphics from the T-shirt backs would stamp nicely. They could include a little thermos that looked like a stack of second hand race tires.

The texture of the covers always bothered me. I hated picking one up because I hated how it felt. Weird, I know.

<- My "shocked" face... 

I bought the first issue out of curiosity, but didn't really see enough to make it worth subscribing to.

I did not even know Roadkill in paper form existed. 

I was more upset that "Overkill" magazine, which was TEN's Roadkill mag before there was Roadkill never made it. It was 90% features that weren't covered in other magazines and was chock full of insane over-the-top hot rods and rat rods. Really cool stuff.

Loving the show I was excited when I heard they were going print.  But $10 premium for a magazine priding itself on junk never added up.  I thumbed through the first copy on a newsstand and found nothing substantial in even that, their premier real people in issue.  I figured it would be dead within a year then, lasted a bit longer but not that much.

I can understand why they wouldn't, but I'd love to hear the GRM staff weigh in on this and the general print industry as well.

1988RedT2 said:

Ouch.  Their grammars are not good.

What grammar rules did they violate, specifically? I'm genuinely curious. I see this accusation all the time when people don't like something. 

I just realized the Roadkill subscribers got screwed. They are substituting Hot Rod issues for Roadkill at a 1:1 ratio for magazines, not the per issue price. If Roadkill was $10 per issue and you have four more issues coming this year (thus $40 worth of magazines) they are going to send you four issues of Hot Rod instead, which is around half that price. Your one year sub of Roadkill just turned into 1/3 of a year of Hot Rod.

I'd say subscribers should demand a refund instead, but that money is looooong gone.

First, Roadkill printed a magazine?  Second, it was a glossy premium thing?  Shoulda been a mimeographed sheet handed out on the streetcorner.  Third, I hate the "Lets make it E36 M3ty when it would be cheaper to do it correctly" attitude.

Funny, I just let my Hot Rod subscription lapse after 17 years. I also dumped Car Craft after 18, and Hemmings Muscle Machines (since issue 1).

I've ridden Sport Compact Car, Japanese Nostalgic Car, and Popular Hot Rodding into their demise. 

The only mags I still subscribe to are GRM, Fine Scale Modeling, and Scale Auto Enthusiast. I don't think those 3 are going anywhere but up. Unique content, delivered in a quality product, with supporting media (forums,   videos).

Javelin said:

Funny, I just let my Hot Rod subscription lapse after 17 years.

I considered it while that Evan Perkins clown was editor for all of a year. The magazine really went downhill under him. Massive errors on the cover (like when the title proclaimed a car was twin-turbocharged when it clearly had a single ProCharger. Or when the cover talked about a car that wasn't even in the issue, and then was featured the next month). A story that was featured a few months earlier was reprinted with seemingly no explanation or reason or apology. The tech articles started getting jumbled all throughout the magazine. And just a number of mediocre single-page stories on important subjects.

I wonder how long Freiburger, Finnegan and the rest of the people who appear in the videos are going to be able to stand up to the pressure - from what I can tell they are putting out new content daily, which seems like a sure path to burnout.

Personally, I've been enjoying the Hot Rod Garage videos with Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa.  Lucky also has his own Youtube channel, it's mostly short clips (a couple minutes) of the various projects he's doing on his own outside the TEN empire.

The $10 per issue thing made it a non-starter for me.  In fact I believe I started a thread about that back when their first issue hit the stands.

Can anyone find that thread and see who called their demise the most accurately?

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

The $10 per issue thing made it a non-starter for me.  In fact I believe I started a thread about that back when their first issue hit the stands.

Can anyone find that thread and see who called their demise the most accurately?

From Aug 2015 Roadkill is going to have a magazine now