Offroad magazines: US vs. UK

Over the years I’d developed an impression that the UK offroading magazines were superior to our US magazines. It wasn’t that I disliked the US offerings per se, but I did have a feeling that the UK mags were better than ours. But it was hard to tell how much of that was purely subjective, as it surely must be.

I decided to do a quick comparison of some of the basics, and see how many pages each magazine offered, and how long their articles were. I grabbed a random issue of each of the three American magazines I read regularly: JP, 4Wheel Drive & Sport Utility (4WDSU), and 4 Wheel Parts’ free Off-Road Adventures (ORA). To compare, I also picked up a random copy of three different UK Land Rover magazines: Land Rover Monthly (LRM), Land Rover Enthusiast (LRE), and Land Rover World (LRW).

To start, there was the obvious physical differences between the two sample groups. The Brit magazines were larger (8-5/16″ wide x 12-11/16″ high) than their US counterparts (7-7/8″ wide x 10-7/16″ high). They were also thicker and square-bound, while 4WDSU was the only square-bound US edition.

Here were the numbers for total pages, and for the number of pages of the longest article within each magazine:

• JP: 130 pages, 5 page article.
• 4WDSU: 98 pages, 6 page article*
• ORA: 98 pages**, 6 page article
• LRM: 162 pages, 7 page article
• LRE: 194 pages, 4 page article
• LRW: 162 pages, 6 page article

* 4 pages if you exclude the two-page intro photo ** 18 pages are their monthly 4WP ad section

The US magazines put out a combined 326 pages (308 if you subtract the ad block in ORA), averaging 109 pages each, compared with the 518 total pages and 173 pages average from the UK ones. Clearly the Brits were winning in terms of quantity.

The length of the articles came out the same for both sides of the pond. I’d like to have an actual word count for a better comparison, but I’m not gonna get into that much work.

Quality is very subjective. One thing that I felt that the Limeys did better with was adventure and travel stories, which I very much enjoy but the US magazines tend to be light on. 4WDSU recently published selected reader comments from a survey they had just done, and the examples cited showed that many readers favored articles about trails, travel and adventure. I also got an email today from a writer for a different US offroad magazine that passed along this tidbit from her editor, “His market surveys reveal, though, that his audience wants more adventure stories.” So again, advantage UK. It seems to me that the US readers like myself aren’t getting as much of those articles we enjoy.

Another subjective view is based on geography. Most US offroad magazines seem to be based out of Southern California. Most of the technical articles, product reviews and tests, and photos clearly come from that region. The UK magazine articles tend to come from all around their country (which granted is vastly smaller than ours), but also their travel reports tend to come in from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, South America and even the US. Every issue seems to provide international content, while between the three US magazines you’re lucky to see a handful of combined articles in a year that take place beyond our borders. While two of the sample UK magazines cover Land Rovers offroading in the US, I can’t imagine the day I’ll see a single article in one of our magazines about a Jeep offroading in Great Britain.

The US magazines aren’t just narrowly-defined in terms of geography. In my random sample of 4WDSU, every article and feature in the magazine was written by the same three guys, with the exception of one guest writer’s adventure article. My sample JP was not much better, with everything written by four guys with one guest article that was all of four paragraphs long. ORA had about 7 different writers, which was surprising given that the vast majority of their magazine is about aftermarket parts.

How did the Rover magazines compare? It was a bit challenging as they tend not to label who writes every column the way the Yanks tend to, but even so, LRE ended up with 15 different writers. LRW had 19 writers, as did LRM. The difference here between the foreign and domestic products was staggering!

It’s also interesting to note that while the US magazines might have a technical editor or similar specialist, they tended to write all sorts of articles anyway, and not all of the technical ones. The UK magazines, on the other hand, had resident experts of every type. There was the guy that wrote about military vehicles, the restoration specialist, the one that specialized in old vehicles, the mechanical guys, the ones that covered sporting events, etc. I believe that these specialists cover their areas of expertise better, and more thoroughly over time, and I strongly suspect that they add quite a lot of value in terms of reader loyalty.

I felt that all of the magazines did a good job with technical and service articles.

The American magazines seemed to devote many/most of their pages to covering aftermarket parts and upgrades, with considerably less intense coverage by the foreigners. Both ran a lot of advertisements. Subjectively, since I couldn’t bring myself to sit and count several articles from each by hand(!), the British rags ran smaller pictures and more text in their articles than the US ones.

One thing I thought was interesting was the coverage of military vehicles. All of the magazines did it to some degree, but again the Brits did more of it. While the US mags tended to cover build-ups of surplus vehicles, the English were also discussing overseas deployments and such. I thought it was interesting that the latter would run articles on tips and tricks their lads had used, for example, to jury-rig desert driving or battle damage in the field to get their vehicles going again. I’ve never seen anything like that in the US magazines.

Lastly, both countries do a good job of showcasing reader’s rigs. The UK mags do a much better job of showcasing interesting working vehicles from fire departments, forestry services, and other specialty vehicle users. Articles of this type are more rare here.

In conclusion, I think we’re being beaten in both quality and quantity. The US mags are good but the UK ones are better. I also can’t shake the feeling that the content of our magazines is being dictated by marketing surveys (or pleasing advertisers, or writers getting free stuff to play with) while theirs seem to be trying hard to cover every interest of an enthusiast audience. I really wonder if an American Jeep magazine very much like the English Land Rover magazines could take the market by storm. I hope that we get to find out someday… but I’m not optimistic.