New Zealand Engineering 1999 July

Editorial

Peter King
Managing Editor

New Chapter

This is the last monthly New Zealand Engineering. There will be no publication in July but a larger, more colourful issue in September.

The change to bi-monthly, first foreshadowed in this column over a year ago, has not been a simple one. First we needed your opinion which we asked for last year. The response was overwhelmingly positive. It seemed members felt a chunkier but less frequent magazine would make a better adjunct to the weekly electronic magazine which is now received by half the membership.

But that was just the start. Maintaining advertising revenue with a less frequent product is tricky and involves a lot of careful thought and work. Determining what more can be added to the magazine, where it can be reliably sourced from, in what time-frame, and at what cost are matters which are no different to the processes engineers use in re-tooling any other production process.

We do not expect to get it right with the first issue. From years of watching software development projects fail I have learned that "big bangs" are best avoided. The first bi-monthly issue will therefore be the first step of a journey on which you, as a reader, will be invited to lend a hand.

But the IPENZ Board meeting which endorsed the plan for this transition was perhaps more notable for a wide-reaching proposal by the President, Sir Ron Carter, regarding technical information and the break-down of the IPENZ subscription. The board has long recognised that, with a few exceptions, IPENZ cannot, in a rapidly globalising world, provide technical information to every discipline of engineer in IPENZ’s diverse membership. Sir Ron’s proposal acknowledges this and offers a possible solution which could also improve the value of membership. This proposal is now being investigated by IPENZ staff.

I mention this because there are still those who somehow believe that New Zealand Engineering today can and should be the same as New Zealand Engineering twenty or thirty years ago. I personally disagree. In an environment where engineering is more specialised than it has ever been, increasingly the subject of commercial rather than government dictates, where the internet provides access to an enormous global information resource at the click of a mouse, New Zealand Engineering must be a different publication.

Engineers the world over complain about their lack of status. In my view a magazine which is accessible to any intelligent person and relates the exciting stories of engineering in its many different forms is one of the means to address this. It should not, however, be the only one. Engineering firms also need to use other magazines and media to get their stories out. They need to spend money on PR and promotion in the same way the big accountancy firms spend money. Nobody might think accountants are responsible for clean water, new energy technologies, Skyhawk refits or the like, but I have seen accountants advertise this in New Zealand business magazines. Who is telling the world otherwise?