"Randy Bauer" writes:
That said, I think every editor should have some latitude to make
changes. Today's Chess Life isn't all that different from when I first
started receiving it 30-plus years ago. The chess world has changed a
lot since then, and maybe it's time for Chess Life to do so as well.

I'm now of the opinion that the USCF should have simply shut down
Chess Life in the 1990's. It should have made a deal with ICE where
USCF life members would get Inside Chess subscriptions instead of CL,
paid by the USCF. USCF Operations dept got around $16/year per life
member for CL, so ICE would have had to get offered around the same
amount, which I think would have been workable. ICE had around 5000
subscribers paying around $40 a year for 25(?) issues, so they'd have
had to put together a 12-issue-per-year version of IC for this
purpose. There are around 10,000 life members and I think ICE could
easily have worked out a deal for 10,000 12-issue subscriptions at $16
a pop. Plus, regular USCF members would also be offered a similar
subscription through the USCF, if they wanted to pay for it, the same
way that my portable audio player came with a coupon for a discount
for a Rolling Stone magazine subscription. And part of the USCF-ICE
deal for such a program could have been that USCF got a page or two in
each issue for USCF-specific news.

The reason Inside Chess folded was because while there might be a
reasonable number of players who wanted to subscribe to a chess mag,
only the hardest core players wanted to subscribe to TWO mags, and CL
was sucking the air out of the room. With CL gone and with the LM
subscriber base, IC could have survived.