Most hobby magazines are run on shoestring budgets, their circulation will not support anything else. As I mentioned earlier, there is just the Editor on the editorial side, no reporters or anything like that and the Editor also has to do a lot of admin work connected with payments to contributors etc. During Covid, budgets for Model Boats and the other two MTM titles were cut by 40% and this was mostly met by slashing contributor rates which are now peanuts and have not been restored to their original levels which were hardly generous in the first place.
There is therefore no real financial incentive to write articles, the satisfaction comes from sharing your work in print and helping to support the hobby. The articles you see in the magazine are a mixture of items from the regular contributors supplemented by occasional or one off pieces by the readership. Sometimes the Editor will be sent a kit or some other modeling item to review and will pass it on to who they feel is best placed to write the review. In the case of a kit the reviewer can usually keep it but there is a sting in the tail that if it is a working model the reviewer usually has to supply the motor(s), radio and anything else not included in the kit needed to make it work. This frequently adds up to far more than the reviewer is paid for the finished article. I reviewed two of the SLEC Fairey kits and was out of pocket on both but I enjoyed the builds, now have two boats I like and the article fee did at least subsidise the fit out.
The items in the Reader's Models section are not paid for but the owners have the pleasure of seeing their work in the magazine for just a photo and a short description.
When I edited four Special Issues between 2010 and 2015 I was given a very small budget indeed as they were promotional ones with some sort of tie up with W H Smith. On the plus side I had a lot of experienced contributors to commission articles from but they understandably expected the normal page rates which meant that I had to put around half of each issue together myself by writing new articles and recycling classic material from the archives. It was a lot of effort and financially I was working at negligible hourly rates. But I had the time available and a lot of it was fun. Sadly, many of those I commissioned to write articles are no longer with us and their loss is keenly felt which is why we need to encourage new people to send articles in. That way we can recruit more regular contributors to keep the magazine on a strong footing.
Colin
