Posted By:
Bob LemkeWhat happened to SCD is the same thing that happened to Beckett, every other magazine in the hobby, every card show and every card shop . . . eBay.
When SCD was weekly, it was the fastest medium for advertising to buy and sell cards and memorabilia; it was the 800 lb. (or 400-page) gorilla. When eBay came up with something faster, they became the #1 marketplace.
To a lesser extent, the consolidation of the auction market, from hundreds of individual collectors and small dealers in every issue of SCD, to a handful of super-firms that have huge quarterly or annual auctions, removed the cream of the crop type items from SCD. Black-and-white ink on newsprint that goes obsolete with the next week's issue is no match for a slick-paper color catalog that sells the sizzle as much as it does the steak. In the days before every home office had a color scanner and every corner a Kinko's, the proces of putting together an auction catalog was a specialized field that SCD could package with its "regular" advertising to help the auction firms reach the advanced bidders, but today SCD no longer has an "exclusive" on that technology.
It was not my intention to state that the sale of F+W to its new owners was a bad thing for SCD, but rather that the sale of (then) Krause TO F+W was a bad thing. The reason is that the magazine (and the rest of the company) passed from the hands of owners who cared about the hobbies they served and felt their long-term future lay in the heath and growth of those hobbies to owners who only saw the company as a component of a larger publishing entity that could be polished up, repackaged and sold for a profit.
The role of a publisher, that is, the man who sits in the publisher's chair -- at least in the current F+W -- is to develop, monitor, adjust as necessary and achieve a business plan that provides the dollar volume and/or percentage of profit dictated by the corporate headquarters.
Lastly, no, I do not feel an ink-on-paper sports memorabilia magazine can profit to the extent that SCD, Beckett, et al, did in the pre Ebay days. The hobby world has moved beyond that business model.