Publication Subscriptions?
Just curious, do you subscribe to a print publication? What about digital magazines?
As you probably gathered, I am a long time subscriber to WatchTime. I still love to look at glossy photographs printed on paper held in hand. For digital, I download About Time which concentrates on watches less than $2k. I used to buy the print copy of the later off the shelf until I said to my self that I ought to just subscribe rather than running to the book store, just as they went 100% digital.
So what about you?
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Love watches. Always have. At some price point, I have been collecting since the 1980’s starting with Fosil character watches. The other things I collect are vinyl records (and I suppose HiFi equipmen...
Atlanta, GA, USA
Member since
Last active: 4 hrs ago
8.00” / 20.32 cm
It has been well over a decade since I had a physical print publication subscription I went all digital since I tend to move around a lot and have become a material minimalist in many ways to keep moving headaches down heh
Watch time magazine was in my local WHSmith (a UK stationers and bookshop, most often found in train stations and airports). I'd never seen this magazine before-apparently they'd only just come in so I bought a copy.
What a waste of £9. Thinly disguised adverts, and the bits that weren't ads were either about £50,000 Langes (a part of this hobby I don't really care about) or read like the author wrote it in about 20 minutes with as little research as possible. Charting how much a Nautilus went for at some auction I'd never heard of, oh wow great (actually I suppose that could be classed as journalism. But it's just not very interesting is it?) For the section about the Mud master I doubt 20 words were actually about the watch. The bit about quartz was one of the best bits and even then it only mentioned a few examples, with the bulk of it being about the OG seiko astron and the Oyster quartz. I must admit that the bit about IWC was completely different and enjoyable, like what the whole magazine should have been. I finally understand why TGV hated watch magazines, I'd paid £9 for a book of hastily thrown together adverts masquerading as actual journalism.
Apologies for the grumpy rant but £9 ($10.80) for a magazine is not a small amount of money. Still, on the bright side it works well as firelighters
I can't imagine reading about watches, but a digital subscription is okay only as long as one accepts the utter ephemerality of such a thing. Physical ownership has some permanence to it. A publication that I subcribed to for a long time started the digi-stuff and the letters to the editor were about how great it was to toss the paper and blah blah and then they went out of business a few years later and I imagine all that cloud stuff lived up to the name while I have a stack of totally accessible print that I can read when the power goes out.
I subscribe to WatchTime as well. While I enjoy the convenience of digital content, I also enjoy the physical magazine. The magazine subscription includes both the paper copy and the digital edition, so I have access to both.
I also enjoy the "About Time" digital magazine, as well as "International Watch", which is also from Joomag.
https://newsstand.joomag.com/en/iw-magazine/M0192231001490372895
Funny enough, I just subscribed. Paper copy of course.
I know what you mean, there's something nice about a print magazine. That said I get most of my content digitally these days.
Watch time magazine was in my local WHSmith (a UK stationers and bookshop, most often found in train stations and airports). I'd never seen this magazine before-apparently they'd only just come in so I bought a copy.
What a waste of £9. Thinly disguised adverts, and the bits that weren't ads were either about £50,000 Langes (a part of this hobby I don't really care about) or read like the author wrote it in about 20 minutes with as little research as possible. Charting how much a Nautilus went for at some auction I'd never heard of, oh wow great (actually I suppose that could be classed as journalism. But it's just not very interesting is it?) For the section about the Mud master I doubt 20 words were actually about the watch. The bit about quartz was one of the best bits and even then it only mentioned a few examples, with the bulk of it being about the OG seiko astron and the Oyster quartz. I must admit that the bit about IWC was completely different and enjoyable, like what the whole magazine should have been. I finally understand why TGV hated watch magazines, I'd paid £9 for a book of hastily thrown together adverts masquerading as actual journalism.
Apologies for the grumpy rant but £9 ($10.80) for a magazine is not a small amount of money. Still, on the bright side it works well as firelighters
In the whole scheme of things, $10 four times a year is pretty “cheap”, not as cheap as Mad Magazine was back in the day, but even that costs $6-$7 an issue these days. Cost wise, WatchTime is far less expensive than most European magazines I see on the newsstand and those really do read like advertisements, imho.
As far as your critique of the writing, let’s just say we’re on opposite sides of the fence.
And reading about 5, 6 digit watches I’ll never be able to afford is like reading about that Ferrari I’ll never possess. Still enjoyable to dream.
The only publication I know of that doesn’t have industry contact is Consumers Report. They don’t accept advertising (at least didn’t last time I held a copy) and blindly buy the products they review off the shelf. All publications have some sort of relationship to the industry they write about unless they are CR.
Oh well, to each their own.