Hmmmm. Not everyone is happy with the new NRA Journal, that's for sure. I received e-mails about it from five people the morning after I received my copy and none was a positive review.
The typo on the front cover of the Journal was not a good sign (the Chairman got it right on page 3) but I wanted very much to give the new format a chance.
Cheaper paper I can happily accept, if that means the overall cost to the NRA is down. Further, it is good to see some new advertisers, although some of the traditional ones appear to be missing; perhaps they are waiting to see what the new Journal is like.
The large number of articles on often less well covered topics and disciplines is welcome, even if some of them concern quite small numbers of NRA members. However, they should not come at the cost of proper coverage of such vastly important NRA mainstays as the Imperial Meeting, or TR as a large discipline, let alone the Palma Match.
While I am very interested indeed in learning about Strensall Range (but not so much about trespassers - how about a mention of when there's an open meeting there that we can enter, to help the range and the YRA prosper?) I was very surprised to find more text on that than on the Imperial and its thousand-plus competitors. And why was there such a small and strange selection of Imperial results? Could nobody be bothered to look further back than those that were posted on the scoreboards on Final Saturday, nor to ask anybody 'in the know' which the most important competitions of the fortnight were?
Where was the mention of Scotland's win in the National - their second in 46 years and their first National retention for well over a century?
Where was the coverage of the Match Rifle meeting and of who won the Elcho and the Hopton (rather than mere reference to the existence of the trophies)? Who won the county matches?
Or the Ashburton and the Schools Meeting?
And why oh why was there nothing at all on Glyn Barnett's spectacular, record breaking Grand Aggregate success? His shooting jacket had more coverage than he did!
Indeed Glyn's shooting jacket featured in no fewer than five photographs, as did its wearer Ed Compton. Ed is a lovely bloke and a deserving champion, but what about all the other competitors and all the other winners?
Similar was true of the article on the World Long Range Championships - it contained two photographs of the very happy Richard Jeens, which made four in total in the Journal, of which three were almost identical. It surely cannot have escaped the editorial team's attention, given that it was covered (albeit briefly), that the primary competition at the World Championships - into which three years of collective training had been poured - was not the individual championship but a 135 year old international team competition called the Palma Match. Yet the article contained no photograph of the team and barely any of its scores.
Indeed there is not a single identifiable picture of a shooting TEAM in the entire Journal, despite team orientation being the distinguishing characteristic of Great Britain on the world stage!
The article also attributed to the Captain a mixed metaphor that he won't have written, and managed to split the wind coaches into two people each, as "wind reader" and "coach". I am 'beside myself' :lol: about that!
There are further areas where some attention to detail wouldn't have gone amiss. A few fortunates were identified by their first initial in the team list for the Great Britain TR team to the USA and Canada, but a lot of people will be wondering which of the Jeens brothers, which of the Balls, Luckmans, McCulloughs, Purdys, Pugsleys and Youngs has been selected. Likewise which Alexander, Smith etc. is on the NRA Team to the Channel Islands.
All this does make me wonder about whether I should trust the accuracy of the articles about disciplines about which I know less and, for the first time in over twenty years, it makes me no longer look forward to the next copy of the Journal landing on the doormat.
I do hope that the important omissions will be rectified at the earliest opportunity and that the new Journal team will accept articles from experts in their respective disciplines. In this case I am sure Tony de Launay submitted one on the Imperial Meeting and I know that John Webster did so concerning the Palma Match and World Championships. I hope people such as they will still contribute, now that they know how little the new Journal appears to value the time volunteers put into such contributions. I also hope the Journal team will allow those who 'know their onions' to proof read, or check for sense, what the team chooses to write independently.
As I wrote at the beginning, I am very keen to give the new Journal, and any constructive new directions the NRA takes, a chance but I feel sure that the problems visible in this edition of the magazine will have to be sorted out quickly for many of us to continue reading it at all, and thus for the advertisers to benefit from our doing so.
