[Chris O'Carroll]

Good news and bad news. I'm sorry about the latter.

Vicky understands now that we’re not running a bootleg version of her magazine’s weekly competition. It was important to me to clear up that misperception, so I’m happy that she now sees us as nothing more sinister than, in her words, “an online forum or chatroom where compers talk to each other about the NS comp and give advice to each other about the entries they’re working on.”

But.

She’s not happy about “a number of entries appearing which can be read in advance of the magazine’s publication and the obvious possible overlap with those published in the NS.” So anything posted here ahead of time is going to remain ineligible to appear in the magazine.

Without wanting to get all Pollyanna about the situation, I’m choosing to view this as a victims-of-our-own-success story. If we were posting a bunch of dud entries that didn’t stand a chance, this issue might never have arisen. But there’s the likelihood every week of people being able to read winning entries here before the NS judges have even selected them as winners. And Vicky’s not OK with that.

As baseball fans know, there’s never any point in arguing with the umpire about a called strike, no matter how the pitch looks to us. In short, the prohibition stands. If we want to be in contention at the NS, we can’t showcase or workshop our entries here. That takes the fun out of it for some of you, I know. My apologies for not having been able to negotiate a happier arrangement.

[Roger Slater]

Thanks for trying, Chris. But from what you said, I'm guessing that if Alex were to make the NS threads invisible to anyone who is not signed in, that might be enough (since it would be tantamount to our sharing our entries with each other by email).

[John Whitworth]

I wonder why Vicky's out of step with the other two. I can't help thinking it must have somethng to do with circulation though I don't really see how.

[Michael Cantor]

I'm not a participant, but i was going to make the suggestion that I now see Roger already has. Is it worth a crack at blocking open access to any NS threads (it only requires a simple code at the top of the thread) and then demonstrating to her that it's now only viewable by a few chatroom buddies and nobody else?

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

I wonder why Vicky's out of step with the other two. I can't help thinking it must have somethng to do with circulation though I don't really see how.

The Wikipedia article states of the New Statesman:

2010 saw sales of the magazine decline further but in 2011 paid circulation rose by 824 copies, the first rise for many years. In 2012, circulation rose again, by more than 1,000 copies, to 24,910. The figures do not include the Kindle or digital editions, which have an additional 2,000 subscribers.

No idea of how accurate that is. I did earlier tonight check out the Kindle version on Amazon, during a spree of subscribing to mags (only one this time) and buying cheap versions of collected works of writers/poets for my Kindle, and there was this note:

The Kindle Edition of New Statesman contains most articles found in the print edition, but will not include letters and competition pages or images.

And that last part left me thinking, meh.

[John Whitworth]

Interesting. The magazine has improved lately.They actually printed a poem a few weeks ago. That's the first one for many years. I'm not counting at the back where we improve the thing no end. I actually won something a month ago!

I think The Oldie sells twice as many and the Speccie three times as many. I subscribe to both.

[Brian Allgar]

Oddly enough, some years ago the NS used to put the competition results on the Internet, as the Spectator still does. I can understand to some extent their not wanting us to post entries in advance, but it's hard to see why they should object to our posting the results.

Perhaps they want to force everyone who follows the competition to become a subscriber? Well, I'm not going to. The postage costs of receiving the printed version in France are absurd, and the electronic version is of no interest to me, since I hate trying to read books or magazines on the computer.

Oh, I'd forgotten - I could always print the downloaded version ...

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Good news. Trying out the Kindle version of Spectator, and it includes the contests.

[Roger Slater]

Curtis, it's been a couple of years since I tried the Kindle versions of the Spectator, but back then I found it to be inconsistent. Sometimes the contest was included, sometimes not.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Ah well. The current issue of Spectator on Kindle does have the contest results and next contest, and it's a free first 30-day trial, so I may wait and see how consistent they are.