Pano vs Roundel

[ccm911]

A friend of mine dropped off a few issues of Roundel, the BMWCCA magazine.  After reading three pages, my thought was, "Why does Pano suck so bad?". 

The Roundel made owning a BMW so much fun!!  I mean, the Pano seems to be nothing but a glorified sales brochure for the latest P-Car models, along with some mind numbing esoteric articles about the same race cars, issue-after-issue.  On the other hand, Roundel had articles about older BMWs, How-To sections, and like four full pages of Tech Questions.  I loved it so much that I went ahead and joined the club.  Oh, and I also saw Nicole Dymant mentioned in the letters section, for having turned four BMWs past the 200K mark!

Which leads me to ask - Does Porsche Panorama suck by design?  I have met so many cool folks in the Porsche club that it seems disturbing that this is the best we could do.

Am I the only one that thinks this way?

[Phokaioglaukos]

Loooong time editor of Pano is changing soon. Make your thoughts known to the President.

(Roundel is one of my two favorite car magazines. You need not be a BMW owner to be a BMW CCA member and get Roundel.)

[cjbcpa]

I agree. In general, I find Roundel to be superior to Pano. There seems to be more readable content and not as much dry content. I think Excellence is a better comparable to Roundel.

The format may be part of the issue. Pano seems sized to take advantage of postage regulations whereas Roundel makes no pretense about being a magazine with a similar volume of advertising to boot. Maybe this provides the funding for a more robust magazine?

I think the letters to the editor section needs work. The constant whining by BMW owners about BMW the corporation is be tiring. You never see and rarely hear that in Porsche circles. Makes me even happier to be driving a P-car.

I'm hopeful that since the new editor of Pano comes from Excellence, maybe we'll see some moves in that direction.

CB

[Phokaioglaukos]

I heard once that the small format of Pano was intended to allow it to fit in the glovebox of a 356 without folding. Might be apocryphal, but....

I read every single letter in Roundel, and get a good laugh, and then I read all the columns. I save Mike Miller's tech column for last. Rarely do I read a Roundel article. In contrast, I read just about everything in Excellence.

[ccm911]

What Pano needs is a complete rethink. If one were to read Pano, they would think that there is no real interest in the older Porsches, save for race cars and concours. It is far too dry, and just filled with so many uninteresting articles that it is almost not relevant to what is really going on out in the world of Porsche. And they are quite spare in the tech questions section, which is a shame, because that is a section that is actually useful.