NavList:

"If ONav is belly up, can we harvest their articles, and offer to the flock? "

Heh. No... First, that's not how copyright works. :) If a movie studio shuts down, their library of films, their "intellectual property", does not instantly revert to the public domain, right? Don't start picking at the corpse quite yet!

Does anyone know, did the original publisher of ON sell out a couple of years ago? It was very much a product of personal interest, a "labor of love". It had been on hard times economically for some years, and I believe the covid pandemic, which really got going five years ago this month, was a major blow. There are companies that try to wring some last revenue from the market of specialist magazines, and they may have been the final publisher. But there's that death spiral of declining subscriptions and declining revenue for potential advertisers. Without money, the show is over. Myself, I tried advertising in ON about four years, when they were having a bit of a 'fire sale', but the advert did not perform well (it did not perform at all).

I wouldn't worry much about that now-closed magazine. If you want something to worry about, worry about the NavList community. Volume on the message boards for this month might just beat the last record low for March, which was two years ago. Before that... the last time traffic was this low was in 2001.

So be creative! Post something interesting! Tell a navigation story. Ask a question about something you've always puzzled over. Re-visit a topic that you think has been thoroughly discussed (and don't say "it's all in the archives"). Bring it up as if most of your fellow NavList members have only been following along for a year or two (which is actually true). Talk, talk, talk. Or we could all just sit back and watch the glowing embers of the campfire grow cold... Would that be easier?

Frank Reed

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