OPINION
John explains his new role in the editor’s chair…
Cars clubs are so last century, reckon some. Why get bogged down in membership fees and all that committee stuff when you could just have a Facebook group for free? Many reasons, of course, and one of the main ones is that a classic car club usually publishes a regular magazine.
For many members, especially those not wedded to an online world to the exclusion of all other modes of communication, the club magazine is a vital window into the world of the club, its members and its cars. And you can keep a magazine. You can't so easily keep a Facebook page, and as for finding a Facebook post from a week ago, good luck with that. Facebook has its uses, of course.
And a club can often use email for urgent news of events, cars and parts for sale and other timely matters. But the magazine is a club's key communication tool, and it gives members a little buzz of excitement when it drops through the letterbox.
Last June I rapidly needed to embrace all of this as I became the editor of the Singer Owners' Club magazine, called – with straightforward clarity – Singer Owner. Previous editor Gifford Wright had been doing the job magnificently for 45 years, starting just before I joined the club, and was showing signs of not
really wanting to do it anymore. He had been hinting that I could take over, being a journalist and all, and finally I caved in. Singer Owner is quite a venerable publication. It started in the Fifties, and my first issue was number 466. It comes out every two months, is A5 format with 48 or 52 pages, and is printed by the excellent HD Print of Ware, Herts with a print run of around 1000 copies.
Gifford never took to the modern way of publishing, involving tricky things called computers. He laid the magazine out the oldfashioned way, pasting columns of copy onto templates and marking where the pictures should go. In later years the columns came from 'Trevor the Typesetter', who would be sent the original emails or word-processed copy, but it was a laborious process involving typically 24 pastedup spreads distributed over Gifford's dining table every couple of months, spreads then transferred into computerusable layouts by Trevor. And all this Gifford did for the love of the club and the marque.
John Simister has been at the heart of Br
