At 10:39 PM 2002-07-24 , VE4XT wrote:
>Line scores have limited appeal -- primarily to us and us alone.
I don't agree -- when I was a new ham, I used to read the line scores for my
section to see if I knew any of the contesters who participated -- even though
I hadn't yet decided that I wanted to be a contester.
> Anything that will make it MORE LIKELY that a non-contester will read the
>results writeup is a good thing, no?
Not automatically, and especially not if it's a zero-sum game and something
else has to suffer in return. There's a whole string of unproven presumptions
inherent in trading line scores for more verbiage -- including the one that
implies today's new generation will *read* about anything rather than just
*doing*.
But my principal objection to this whole thing is from the "historical records"
point of view. If I want to recall what my friends and I did in the 1933
Sweepstakes I can go to my collection of QSTs and know for certain that I will
find it. There is no such guarantee attached to whatever the League is
proposing to replace the QST coverage with -- as those of us who have suffered
through a similar but much earlier decision to remove coverage of the ARRL
National Traffic System from QST have learned the hard way. The promised
alternatives -- listing of NTS "line scores" (statistics) in a separate
specialty field organization newsletter and equivalent editorial space in QST
for articles about NTS and traffic handling have not survived in any meaningful
way.
Coincidentally, I recently read a similar wail from long-time columnists in a
popular computer magazine to the effect that their archived columns on the
publisher's web site had been deleted -- perhaps accidentally but, in any
event, deleted nevertheless. Their philosophical ruminations about the
limitations of web-based archiving can be found on pages 156-157 of the April
2002 issue of "Computer Shopper" magazine.
Surely the day will come when alternative publishing methods will be as
permanent, as ubiquitous, and as easy to read in bed or on the subway as
hard-copy magazines have been. But "we (society and technology) ain't there
yet", and especially not the ARRL, which has convinced me by its recent history
that its "commitments" aren't always as permanent as its hard-copy publications.
Bud, K2KIR
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