Friday, February 20, 2009

Everton's Genealogical Helper goes Quarterly

I subscribed to Everton's Genealogical Helper last summer while at the SCGS Jamboree - I subscribed for the digital edition for $10 (at the time - it's $12 a year now) and was ecstatic to save a tree and not endanger my life from stacks of paper falling on me in the Genea-Cave. It helped that, since Leland Meitzler's managing editorship started, the emphasis in the magazine was modified to reflect both traditional and Internet genealogy articles and advances, with much more content in both areas.

I have waited patiently for the January-February issue of Everton's Genealogical Helper to become available for my digital download. I tried again today, and voila! there it was, so I downloaded it and started paging through it (you probably wondered why I didn't post much this morning, right?). This issue has 176 pages of content.

The BIG news for genealogists is that the magazine will now be a quarterly with Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall issues, rather than a semi-monthly (six issues a year). The announcement was made in Leland's "From the Editor" column, which said (in part):

"The publisher of the Helper, Walt Fuller, informed me this morning that the Helper will now will now be a quarterly publication. It seems that income is down dramatically and if Everton Publishers is to thrive in the future, changes have to take place immediately. So—starting with this issue, the magazine will be published as a Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall Periodical. To make up for the change from bimonthly to quarterly, the magazine will be expanded— making an already hefty periodical even bigger. This issue does not reflect that change, but you’ll see it with the Spring issue. In fact, this entire issue is just as before, complete with footers all saying Jan/Feb 2009. It’s not—it’s actually Winter 2009. The printer has this issue ready to go—and we’re not going to hold things up by making several hundred changes to plates that have already been burned. This editorial page and maybe a few others will be the only pages reflecting the change.

"Going to a quarterly periodical will allow substantial savings. Also, those of us who work for Everton have agreed to substantial salary cuts. We’re committed to see this through, recession or not. Again, we ask for your understanding and support."

I appreciate Leland's openness in sharing this news with us. Most of us on a limited income understand the need to cut back on expenses in an economic downturn. If you subscribe to the print edition of EGH, one way that you can cut your own costs is to subscribe to EGH via the digital edition rather than the print edition. It would save a tree and reduce EGH's printing costs. However, I don't know how that would affect advertising rates if print distribution fell off - it's an interesting question, isn't it? If you don't subscribe to the print edition, but have considered subscribing to the digital edition, I encourage you to do it so that you can benefit from the magazine content and help EGH stay afloat.

Another bit of good news in the magazine is the explanation of "what happened" to Leland Meitzler's GenealogyBlog blog. He explains it in an answer to a query:

"This may sound crazy—but I don’t know what happened to it. Joe Edmon (who now lives in Honolulu) had 100 percent administrative control of both of my blogs. Since he and I started them together, I didn’t imagine that it would ever
be a problem. Anyway—something went wrong. They went down and after I flew to Honolulu and talked with Joe, they were up again for about three days... then down again. A few days ago, he gave me my admin rights and full ownership of the name Genealogyblog.com—with no communication whatsoever. So, I’m still badgering him for the data, but I think he must have done something that caused him to lose it entirely—and he doesn’t want to tell me, as it’s about five years of my life. The long and the sort of it is that I think I will be forced to start over. The blogs will be the same titles—
genealogyblog.com and germangenealogyblog.com. I really don’t want to start over, but I may have no choice. I will have the blogs up and running soon, one way or another."

And GenealogyBlog is up and running well, which I am ecstatic about because Leland's GenealogyBlog is a must-read every day for me.

One more interesting item - I used the link http://www.genealogicalhelperonline.com/ in the first line of this post (because that is where I found the digital editions of EGH), and when I checked it said "Everton's Genealogy, Uniting a Tradition of Excellence with 21st Century Research Technology" was coming soon. I can hardly wait!

2 comments:

GeneaDiva said...

Hi Randy,

I have nominated you for the Kreativ Blog Award. Please stop my blog at:
http://geneadiva.blogspot.com/
and pick it up.

Thanks,
Margaret

Becky Thompson said...

Randy, I'm a subscriber of Everton's online and have such a hard time finding the site to download the editions. Your link goes to the Coming Soon page. Can you give me the link where I can actually download my new edition please? You can send it to becky.jamison5@gmail.com.