I have been watching the threads regarding Eli Publishing, the new owner of the Journal foxTalk. I can only concur with others' reactions about Eli's marketing tactics as well as their destruction of what I had found to be useful VFP journal.

I have corresponded in the past year with Rainer Becker, the former editor of FoxTalk, regarding the German FoxPro user group's framework, Visual Extend, and he has always been extremely helpful. I recently shared with Rainer my frustration about what happened to FoxTalk, he sent me back a long note, and he encouraged me to paraphrase his comments and share them with others in the VFP community. Here are Rainer's comments about what happened to FoxTalk -- I had surmised that Eli had trashed the magazine:


You guessed correctly.... The new owner promised that all editors
and authors would continue to be involved with FoxTalk, but the
very first day after Pinnacle sold the newsletter to Ely, they
cancelled each and every contract with 30 days notice This
included contracts with editors and authors as well as layout
people and such. There is absolutely nobody left from the
original team. The new editor, Jonathan Rabson, is not known
to the FoxPro community, but as they then cancelled his budget
for authors completely, he had to write everything himself.
Many of the former well-known authors have still not signed
the new author contracts -- and it is not very likely that
they ever will.

The original agreement between Pinnacle and me was that after
a given period of time I will take over the magazine completly
and relaunch it with a new website adding access to our thousands
of pages of international/English content related to Visual
FoxPro. I already added the complete archive of FoxTalk to our
portal. But Ely ended this process. So there is nothing left
from the original plans I had announced at a Podcast with
Andrew McNeill last year.

....There is no way any more to take over and make it a
successful FoxPro publication. Instead I plan to publish
a series of books with the former authors of FoxTalk.


I find it amazing that a publisher would gut a technical publication and imagine that readers could possibly want to continue subscribing. In the case of the VFP community we knew and respected the people who had written for FoxTalk over the years. By the way, the same thing has happended to Pinnacle's SQL Server newsletter.

Steve