Jerome, my response was not intended to be condescending but if anyone pretty much attacks the running of the club and then misquotes and misinterprets responses, I am going to react.

We are specifically an IRS 501(c)(3) tax exempt, educational, not-for-profit organization.
As such our requirements are not the same as a charitable foundation. I agree we are not forced to publish a glossy quarterly in paper format but there is certain correspondence within (or accompanying by form of flyer) the quarterly which we are obliged to provide on a far more frequent timescale than the annual pamphlet that may satisfy your bodies' requirements.

I am a CPA. I merely demonstrated to you that if we were solely in the business of magazines then we would be generating a profit, and for the purpose of that I am quite correct to lump together any relevant expenditure and income. The club makes a surplus, not a 'profit' and in any event our requirements are only to maintain separate balances for General Fund, Life Member Fund and Museum Fund.

I remind you that this thread started from a discussion several years ago, at a time we were not generating a surplus, and at that time, we investigated all manner of cost cutting scenarios including that of reducing the magazine in some way or other, and sought the opinions of many in order to make our decisions. It came to light that, as I stated, a large proportion of the membership considered the magazine was a major factor in their annual subscription, and that a similar proportion of people were not regularly on-line, which meant that not only would an on-line version of the magazine not be a suitable replacement, but we wouldn't be able to communicate everything else we are obliged to by that method either. One purpose of the magazine is to communicate, and while those people who are on-line might consider certain things to be 'filler', for the majority it is the only way to get that information to them.
I did not at any point state that any & of the membership would leave the club if the magazine was altered so please don't deliberately misquote me.

As a BoD, we were able, when this discussion originally took place a few years ago, to identify sufficient other un-necessary expenditures to put us back in an annual surplus museum without the need to alter the magazine in any case.

I pointed out that Doug probably did over-state the magazine cost in as much as not reducing it for the advertising revenue gained from it, for which yes, it is a basic accounting principle that you would include. In any event, it has to be looked at from an opportunity cost point of view, we need to provide written communication to the full membership regardless for a number of things like voting, notice of annual meeting, meeting minutes, the educational seminars to be held at the convention, so we would have a substantial annual cost for this in any case. The additional cost of doing this via the magazine medium is probably only a couple of dollars per magazine, so please let's not get carried away with this "magazine is a drain on resources" once again. If the financial stability of the club were to change then of course we would have to revisit it, but for now nothing is necessary.

Now as I have some experience of printing/publishing (not just from the price guides) I will explain that a publication like our magazine is typically printed '16 up', i.e. a sheet of paper rolls off the press with 8 pages per side printed on it, which is subsequently guillotined into pages. Printers charge per sheet of 16, so the cost of producing something with 50 pages is the same as for 64. Because of the fixed set-up costs, a reduction in size of a full 16 pages makes very little difference to the overall cost either. If there is, for example, insufficient article material submitted (likely in a non-convention reporting issue) then additional filler pages may well be added to round it up to the next number of pages divisible by 16. I assure you there is no additional cost in doing this.