Icon Aircraft in financial trouble

[Area-51]

4 hours ago, Area-51 said:

If the content and copy writing is provided wholly by vendor it will say "paid...."; if copy writing is provided by journalist commissioned by publication then it will not. The publication runs a "story" on the product with the word count proportionally reflecting the advert size and position. If the advert itself is a vendor provided story then "paid..." must be displayed and border added... if you flick through a news paper and see a story with a border around it then its been paid for placement and charged out as advertising, "intentionally politicised propaganda".

Advertising keeps magazines in print; unsold out of date units have the title cut off the front cover and returned to publishing house; rest goes in the bin.. unsold books go to clearing houses and sold second round discounted retail before going into bin... Trees get grown on plantations once used as  farming land, chopped down, sent on ship to paper mill, then another ship off to printing house, then on another ship off to retail, then into bin; everyone gets paid and gretta goes out and gets arrested again.

[Marty_d]

The developer may have written the article themselves and sent it to the magazine. 

I worked with a bloke whose wife sent a couple of articles to the local rag, they were just published without contact or fact checking. 

[FlyingVizsla]

Not unusual for a publisher seeking advertising to offer a package of "we give you a two page article, you pay for a full page advert".   Like the Air Park did.  The other offer is where a maker offers the journalist a "test fly" to write a favourable article mostly from the maker's literature and photos to promote the plane.  They may also have a paid advert.  It is lazy journalism, and there's an element of tax deductibility where someone did their Endorsement in order to write an article about it.  The Sport Pilot publishers specialised in glossy tourism / travel magazines, hence the early Sport Pilots were more travel log, and I suspect a very similar looking article was in one of their other publications (just tack a bit of Hey, it's got an airport!).

[danny_galaga]

IT's a shame about the mag. I mean, I appreciate that there is one at all. But it used to be a much more fun mag before the previous editor died. It had a lot more features on aircraft many of us might conceivably fly one day. Perhaps ONE person in the whole of Australia is ever going to fly the Icon (the reviewer), even if it stayed in business. Maybe one or two pages would be enough to tell us prols about it, rather than 8. It might have fitted better in 'Posh Planes Monthly' or something. 

 

Still, the cover story was more in keeping with what might interest more of us (Ercoupe). Although I have a feeling they've written about it before. And a story about Lawrence Hargreaves was welcome. If any of the magazine editors are reading this- More cheap and cheerful stuff please! I wanna read about Austers and C150s and Zenith 701s and Drifters, as well as the fancier stuff. How about the history of Quicksilver, pretty much the biggest name (I think they have produced over 15,000 aircraft) in 'real' ultralights?