Inside Kung-Fu (CFW Enterprises) sold

[Banjos_dad]

or how about Keith Vargo?

seeing as its so popular for people to pop up here with threads titled alng the lines of "Why CMA is ineffective for use in the 57R3375"?

he had most of traditional karate foaming at the mouth with that line of sh1t over at Blackbelt for a couple of years lmao.

[GeneChing]

I only met Carridine once and it was years ago, long before I took my watch here.

[golden arhat]

i will stay loyal to this magazine as long as you keep up the standard of the articles and keep making them better
never sell out
never become anything that resembles ikf and never have adverts along the same vein as "do u want to know the secrets top fighters are banging down their doors to get"
or "do u want to attract women effortlessly"
or "i got into the best shape of my life without any work so can you"
the got qi girls are cool
but keep everything tasteful okay no stupid cliches

[GeneChing]

We appreciate your support. But I feel I must be honest with you. I feel that your support comes from our honesty. So I must say that if any of those advertisers that you mentioned approached me, I'd run their ad in a heartbeat. Why? Well, before you can sell out, you must sell. We make money selling ads. That's part of what pays the bills of the magazine. But, because we're under the Tiger Claw group, we don't advertise our competitors. Tiger Claw's our retail outlet is www.MartialArtsMart.com which funds this forum. Now Tiger Claw sells all sorts of gear, so this eliminates most all of the big money advertisers in the martial arts field. That makes it tough to sell outside ads. Tiger Claw does not sell "the secrets top fighters are banging down their doors to get" or "how to attract women effortlessly" or " how to get into the best shape of my life without any work" so we'd happily advertise them. In fact, judging from some of the Russian girls threads and the fact that so many of our members are in 'lonely hearts club,' I think that 'how to attract women effortlessly' ad might do very well in our magazine. It would be so mutually beneficial. We'd get some advertising dollars, they'd get some new clients and more of our forum members might be able to go back to discussing martial arts. Think about that.

You do have my promise to continually strive to improve the quality of our articles. One major advantage of not having so many outside advertisers is that we don't have to cater so much to them. Of course, we support our advertisers - it's a mutual business relationship. We could conceivably run the magazine without any outside advertisers at all. But that would leave little profit for us to make improvements - nothing to grow on - so we advertise others. Many of our advertisers are also our authors who are trying to support their practice through multiple means (writing, offering some product or seminars, promoting events). I've been supporting myself fulltime by the martial arts for about two decades now, and only a fraction of that ever came from teaching. So I know that to survive, one must work a lot of angles. I support the efforts of any professional martial artist as much as I can because it's a difficult economy. Life might be easier as a golf or tennis pro. But apart from that, we can take our research where we please. I confess I write occasional informercials, but at least I'm honest about it.

All martial artists must strive to be honest. Always.

[The Xia]

I'm going to toss this idea at you.
How's about a feature where you do a decent-sized biography of a famous Kung Fu master from history? It can be either for the ezine or the actual magazine.

[GeneChing]

Sounds like more work for me! Seriously, I think that's a fine suggestion but it's a little more than I can do right at this moment, and we don't have anyone in our stable of freelance contributors who I'd want to tap for such an assignment. Any columns we run are from trusted freelancers with longstanding records of being able to deliver the goods on time. We'd hate to start something and then leave it hanging.

BTW, speaking of IKF, anyone else notice the page count drop? This last issue (Dec 2006) is 96 pages. They used to be 136 pages. We're still at 114 (and a buck cheaper )