Sideline commentators

Sunday afternoon - 14/03/04

It's been apparent for many, many, months now that a goodly number of the scribes in our monthly comics are extremely unhappy about the advent of this inter-webby thingy. Hardly suprising, I suppose, as everyday electronic communication in the home has effectively destroyed the magazines' ability to control the channel. Gone are the days when a magazine could print any old rubbish, secure in the knowledge that the only redress the enthusiast had was a heavily censored letters page, two months after the event. These days the internet is a prime source of information for many of us, and if a magazine has published something that is woefully inaccurate then better informed comment will appear online before the majority of a magazine's readership have even got their hands on a copy of the offending item.

The depth of loathing for anything that gives an independant voice to consumers-at-large is well illustrated by Chris Leigh's editorial in this month's "Model Rail" magazine. A major rant that seems to have little direction other than to say "only that which we write should matter," the piece in question is peppered with inaccuracies and logical pratfalls that are, at best, ill-considered if you're scared of what those nasty people on the internet might say. Some of the wilder bits include:

• The attempt to marginalise anyone who doesn't agree with them as "self-appointed experts". So who, exactly, appointed Model Rail as experts?
• The attempt to further marginalise any of these consumers who dare to speak out as "sideline commentators". No they're not - we consumers are the key commentators (especially on the internet) around which this retail industry revolves. The magazines, thank you very much, are the sideline commentators. Take the consumers away and the industry dies, but take the magazines away and it'll still carry on in some form.
• The attempt to bolster their claim that the Bachmann Deltic, with it's widely reported faults, is "one of the three best OO diesel locomotive models we've ever had" by trying to whitewash the errors as "fairly subjective opinions." No they're not, they're matters of fact, are documented and are not matters of opinion.
• The rather bizzare claim that the dreadful painted on detail of the same loco is "neither right nor wrong" and that to actually mould panel lines produces tooling "which will wear quickly and produce impaired detail". Unsuprisingly, no explanation is offered as to how Hornby & Lima have managed to do it for 20 years or more, yet alone the myriad of plastic kit manufacturers.
• The assertion that reviews should be approached with no "preconceived ideas" when in actual fact even a half-competent reviewer should very definitely be approaching a product with strong ideas of what the prototype looks like, a core checklist of things that need to be assessed, and most certainly a firm understanding of what the consumer will be expecting.
• Likening the gimmicks of the Hornby 50 to long-dead features such as firebox glow, whilst acknowledging that, as we self-appointed experts have never tired of pointing out, the US market has already abandoned the opening doors, etc, with the perplexing "all have since been abandoned but were part of the general advance of realism". Err...if they were advances, why have they been abandoned?
• The extremely offensive implication that anyone who doesn't enjoy sticking a few details to a model, regardless of it's shape, isn't a "real modeller"
• A fairly sweeping effort (not least in the title) to give the impression that we suffer only minor detailing errors on models, that are easy enough to put right, whereas most of us are (righfully) concerned about more fundamental and major errors of shape that are virtually impossible to correct.
• The whimsical notion that the use of the word "disappointing" from time-to-time in reviews over the last 40 years has been instrumental in "the relentless development and improvement of proprietary models". Phew! Relentless, eh? For a nasty moment I thought we'd slipped further and further behind the rest of the world, but thankfully I was mistaken.
• The inference that a serious assembly fault had been deliberately omitted from more favourable reviews of the Hymek - rather difficult to substantiate and my sample certainly didn't have such a fault. Easier to substantiate is the fact that every Hornby Class 50 was shipped with a faulty circuit board that would cause a dead short and a power-down of the whole layout when a decoder was plugged in as directed. That Model Rail didn't even notice this is a clear indication that they hadn't even bothered to properly test their sample. That it eventually got a mention in a later issue as a result of the vocal efforts of a few "self-appointed experts" on the internet (including my good self) tends to undermine the whole argument, methinks!
• A recourse to semantics - quibbling over words is often the sign that there's no substance to an argument. The faults of model X remain exactly the same whether you say it's "disappointing" or stridently complain "it's bl**dy awful." It doesn't change shape just because you're using officially approved vocabulary.

Of course, it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that Model Rail isn't just uneasy with the internet, but with some of their colleagues in the publishing business too - many of whom, coincidentally, seem to have embraced the internet rather more eagerly. Flick to page 121 and you'll find some barbed comments about their competitors, which I'm concerned might be "read and taken on board by the unsuspecting, thus giving credence to personal opinion and, sometimes, outright bias as being 'gospel'". So, in the interest of avoiding this unpleasant state of affairs, which obviously troubles Chris and I equally, I think I should point out that:

• DCC has been covered for many years elsewhere - US mags and the internet being two obvious examples. It's coverage wasn't invented by Model Rail and I can't see anyone who appears to be mimicking Model Rail, I'm afraid.
• The step-by-step photography approach, whilst excellent, is similarly widespread. You don't even have to look to the US - dig out those old copies of Model Trains or Scale Model Trains from the early 1980s and marvel at how long it's taken for some of the current crop, including Model Rail, to catch up.
• The Q&A style column is again commonplace, having been used in Model Railroader, to name but one, since way before many current modellers and authors were even a glint in the milkman's eye.
• Products such as Liquid Lead and SuperCal have been used by modellers over here for ages. The fact that Model Rail decided to make a few quid by selling them as reader offers makes little difference. It's a global market these days, many of us also model overseas prototypes and already buy and use products from overseas - we don't sit around waiting for the monthly mags to catch up.

Comparisons with the competition are interesting. Have a look at Tim Shackleton's coverage of the Heljan Hymek on page 76 of the latest issue (#149) of Model Railway Journal and compare it with Model Rail's equivalent in their February edition. The MRJ article (note the opening lines in particular) displays an awareness of the prototype and an appreciation of it's translation into a model that just isn't there in the Model Rail review. You might also like to look at the review in the December 2003 issue of Rail Express and Nigel Burkin's comments on page 70 of the latest (April) BRM. All of these rate the Hymek very highly, as do I, and seem at odds with the rather uninspired Model Rail article which tends to play it down without actually giving a clear idea of why. The "lukewarm reception" alluded to in the header has no basis in fact as far as I can tell, and the "various errors" claimed seem to be unsubstantiated apart from minor details and a complete falsehood about wrongly fitted windscreen wipers. To suggest that the finely moulded roof grille is in anyway inferior to the coarse and crude toy features found elsewhere is absurd, and I personally felt that the deployment of the word "unsaleable" was suspiciously underhand.

In fairness I should point out that a review in the March 2004 BRM was equally sloppy, but as the same reviewer compares it unfavourably with the Deltic he glowingly and inaccurately reviewed in the previous issue, with, in his own words, an "obvious lack of really thorough research" I think that can be discounted. Indeed, if it wasn't for the BRM's new mega-excellent-double-superlative-squared style of reviews (and why, exactly, wasn't Nigel Burkin or someone else who actually knows their job reviewing the Hymek in the first place?) Model Rail would have been out of step with not just the internet's self-appointed experts (or customers as we're still known in some parts) but all of their industry colleagues as well. A far cry from the picture of one or two "sideline commentators" that Chris Leigh's editorial trys to paint.

Model Rail has an unenviable reputation amongst many modellers for poorly researched, inconsistent and contradictory reviews in a field already not noted for excellence. Take a look for yourself - the February 2003 issue features an absolutely glowing review of the Bachmann Class 37, with no criticisms whatsoever as far as I can tell. It even singles out the "correct body profile" for praise (it's most glaringly error!) yet this is unquestionably one of the least accurate models of our time, a fact that even the most reluctant sources will now begrudgingly recognise. However, by the October 2003 issue they were desperately trying to rewrite history, claiming they'd been "quite disappointed" with the model and the "problems with aspects of the body" - get these issues out and have a look for yourself, it's incredible. Not only was this deception rounded upon by many private individuals, it was singled out for direct criticism online by Phil Sutton, editor of rival magazine Rail Express, who'd had the decency to carry a proper review at the time that seemed to pretty much capture the feelings of many consumers. Rail Express, as well as lending their expertise to Heljan when it comes to bringing better products such as the Hymek to these shores, is also stepping up it's modern modelling content and nailing it's colours to the mast as regards greater integrity in product reviews compared to some of the mainstream magazines.

The problem this gives Model Rail (or indeed any magazine) is that if they continue to gloss over the faults of the majority of products whilst printing decidedly more critical reviews of that rare minority of more accurate releases (such as the Heljan Hymek) then more and more people are going to notice. If the disproportionately aggressive reviews with questionable factual content seem to concern products with a link to a competitor, or people who've been critical of Model Rail, eyebrows are going to be raised and there will be mutterings. Mutterings that probably won't include the words "independent" or "unbiased" no matter how many times they're repeated in editorials. Fortunately this won't happen while Model Rail has the "benefit of an editor to hold their wilder excesses in check"...

Currently On My Stereo: T. Rex - Bolan Boogie.