I'm not an xyHt so what can this magazine offer me ?
I think its going to be an even harder sell, I really do...
Others have tried this, unsuccessfully
There are quite a number of magazines/journals that are created by specific technical or professional organizations. One by one they have shifted names from something very specific to something more general in hopes of attracting a wider subscriber list and a wider variety of potential advertisers. One excellent example of this is the currently titled magazine "Resource". That provides absolutely no clue whatsoever as to the potential focus group and subject matter.
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It is the official monthly publication of The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers provided to all members.
"Professional Surveyor" has been on life support
I just went to your "FAQs about the Launch of xyHt" web page and I'm not encouraged.
PS has been very narrow in its overall coverage of the practice of surveying for several years. For years it was GIS, GIS!, GIS!! with several stories about the latest measurement and mapping technology mixed in, with only an occasional interesting column about business management, boundary, or law.
Then LiDAR came along, followed closely by ground-based LiDAR that revolutionized the way terrestrial based surveying is done to collect topo data, and it became GIS, LiDAR, Scanning, Scanning, and more Scanning, with the columns on other subjects becoming even fewer and farther between.
What you're doing now is just offering more of the same, but attempting to market it to a broader audience. To engineers and most other design and mapping professionals, surveyors are only measurers and map makers, ... and nothing more. If that's your perception of the profession, then you need look no further for the cause of your disappointing circulation. You simply don't understand the full set of roles that make up the Professional Surveyor. Your publication, at least over the past several years would have been more aptly called "The Survey and Mapping Technologist" as the vast majority of your focus was on the para-professional, technical aspects of surveying and mapping, and woefully defficient in covering the professional aspects.
If you are just going to publish more of the same to a broader audience, your not doing our profession any favors. You may think that you're showing these other professions what surveyors can measure and map for them, opening new streams of business for surveyors. What you will actually be doing is reinforcing the perception that all we do is measure and make maps from those measurements. Furthermore, you will be showing these other vocations just how easy it now is to make precise measurements and collect the data needed to make maps, and how easy it is to create great looking maps from that easily collected data, and they will think "That looks so easy, my CAD guys can do it. Why do I need to hire a surveyor when I can do it with my employees, save the consultant fee and bill out the work myself? Gravy!"
Certainly, the measuring and mapping technology are important tools to what we do, but they are only the tools. They do not define the practice of surveying. Shiny new gizmos that do more with less effort, that attach to a kayak and ping the lakebed as we glide across the surface, or buzz across the sky taking photos or scanning the ground as we stand below with an X-box-like controller, or generate point plots that are so dense and color coded that they look almost like dimensionally correct 3D photos is all well and good, but it's not professional judgment that is required to keep up with learning how to use this stuff. In fact, it's little more than adolescent fascination of learning a new game or how to skillfully operate a new RC toy.
The professional aspects of surveying are those that require skill in understanding what our clients' needs are and being able to recommend the services to fill those needs; it is in the knowledge of knowing not how to task a machine with collecting data, but knowing what data needs to be collected, how to plan the project for the most efficient means of collecting reliable data; how to assess and analyze the data; how to synthesize data from several sources in order to form well-reasoned opinions; how to use those well-reasoned opinions to recommend solutions to the questions or problems that our clients have brought to us or which came to light as a result of having carefully performed the measuring and all the other aspects of the survey we've made; and how to guide or assist our clients in implementing those solutions.
I lost interest in PS several years ago, not because I have no interest in the latest measuring and mapping technologies, but because I only need a fraction of what you offer in that regard to understand what can be accomplished with that technology and how it can be useful to my practice. I need a lot more content on a professional level to keep my interest.
Reading PS each month has become like the monotomy of eating the same sandwich each day for lunch, and finding that it only contains lettuce and mustard. Where's the beef! Gotta go somewhere else to get the full meal.
With one or two issues each year, I get the cardstock over cover that I'm supposed to send back in if I want to keep receiving the magazine. For the last 3 years, I've made the conscious decision to not send it in. The over covers have often proclaimed "LAST ISSUE".
You keep promising...
Matlock
Jim,
He wins the case by pulling a "Perry Mason" and trapping the bad guy with his own lies.
Now that you know how it ends, go survey something.
So how exactly is that pronounced...Exit ? (!)
I like your style, TwoBlue
You're not Jake or Elwood are you?
🙂
Don
