Peacoq: dead end or the way ahead.

Just my humble opinion, but iIt was only years after I got out of the sailing media, and then got back in for one year, that I realised how skewed it makes one's perspective. Not only does the industry you deal with 9-5 have more economic incentive to sell new stuff than to encourage people to sail old stuff, but by definition the industry tends to be staffed with people who are heavily into new technology (much more so than the typical sailor) and because they spend 40+ hours a week dealing with sailing, they get bored with it more easily than the typical sailor who spends 40+ hours a week as an accountant, plumber or whatever. The industry insiders therefore seem to demand more novelty than the typical sailor does.  The industry creates a very different view from that of the average sailor, which in turn changes the view of the journos.

It's also really hard to come up with a decent article on something like a Solo, Dart or Merlin; after all, many of your readers have spent years owning such boats and sailing them on the weekend. They know more about the class, the characters and the techniques than a journo knows, so it takes a lot of research to do an article with much depth. When it comes to more exotic stuff, it's easy for the journo to find out more than the average sailor knows, so there's an incentive for the journo to exercise that advantage.

When we look back at old mags we see that years ago, because of different economics in sailing and publishing and the different level of experience of the average sailor, magazines could have a very different approach and therefore they wrote much more about the grass roots (and also had much higher readership). 

So it's not really laziness, just the fact that being inside any industry affects your view of it. There does seem to be a bit of a lack of hard-hitting questions or articles these days, IMHO, but it's easy to say that from the outside.  Year ago I did a freelance article about a new cat and although it didn't say anything at all bad about the major established cat class and was meant to be very objective (for example, I quoted Glenn Ashby saying that the new cat was not as tough as the major established cat class) the latter's manufacturer pulled all their advertising from the mag. That meant the mag lost its second-biggest advertiser, but the editor took the long view and said that editorial integrity was more important than short term revenue loss. Given the current economic times, that is a harder line to take.

The UFO was at Weymouth when it was optimist nats a few years ago. It’s no exaggeration the optimists sailed faster, the UFO couldn’t cope with any form of chop.