I’ve been reading old editorials from Uncle Wayne, W2NSD again.

You know, those novellas that appeared in the front pages of 73 Magazine. I’m talking about the older stuff. From the 60’s. There’s a lot of history in that content, but there are also other details of note. For instance, periodical publishing must have been a more lucrative business in those days given the size of the publication. Some of them ran more than 150 pages of content with each having to be written, assembled, printed and then sent via postal mail to subscribers. Surely such a monthly venture was at least marginally profitable?

Wayne’s printed editorials could probably be considered a prototype of the online blog. He wrote about anything and everything without constraint. It wasn’t just about the magazine or amateur radio. No topic was off-limits and W2NSD covered a lot of territory in those pages. Sure, they were considerably longer than a typical blog post, but he was only able to broadcast his message once a month as opposed to more frequent postings that are typical of today’s blog. The point being the total monthly output from a single blog might approach the word count in one of those epic-long 73 Magazine editorials.

The difference from blogs is that these days most readers reject long-form editorializing. I’ve tried it here and noticed that the average time spent on the page of any post longer than 350 words is too brief to have actually read the content. It’s the old “too long; didn’t read” (TL;DR) syndrome that afflicts today’s attention deficit population who demand short, pithy blog posts. By contrast, 73 Magazine was a printed publication and readers could carry the magazine around with them wherever they went permitting them to ingest those Words from Wayne in bite-sized pieces over the course of an entire month.

No matter, I remain smitten with that old format. I find the wide assortment of topics that Wayne Green chose to share with his readers to be compelling proof that W2NSD was certainly not some one-dimensional caricature of a radio amateur. The many topics he touched on in his editorials, sometimes even outside the realm of amateur radio (gasp!) convinces me that he was an interesting person who could no doubt pontificate about many different subjects during the course of a QSO without resorting to the excruciating minutia of yet another damned EFHW hunk of wire. Good grief!