Another takeaway is that this is a GREAT place to do market research 
 
Some of the comments make me think I should take this more seriously than I have been. My original motivation was pretty simple..."found a cool thing, should let SONAR users know about it." (WilliamCopper, no product placement...the manufacturers found out the review was being run only when I sent them a copy for fact-check.)
 
As to positive vs. negative, I've often been asked why my reviews are generally positive, with the implication there's some sort of conspiracy or bias or whatever. The reality is I find out about most products at trade shows. If I check something out and it looks like it has a lot of potential, I'll ask for a loaner. I have no interest in spending a month learning something that doesn't interest me or seems dodgy. I'd rather turn people on to cool stuff they might not find out about otherwise than slam something which is probably getting slammed all over the web anyway.
 
I have written a few extremely negative reviews when I thought something was cool and found out the opposite was true. In two cases, the reviews were of production prototypes just prior to launch, and the companies pulled the products after getting a copy of the review for fact-check. This rendered the reviews moot so they were never published. In another, the company went out of business before the review was scheduled for publication. But there have also been reviews where I found a serious flaw in the product (usually software), and the manufacturer would ask if I'd be willing to delay the review for a month while they fixed the issue. I would always say yes. If they fixed the problem, the review would turn from negative to positive. So sometimes there's more to the review process than meets the eye.
 
As to publishing them elsewhere, maybe they should go on the Cakewalk blog eventually or something. Frankly I never thought that far ahead, I just thought it would add value to the eZine for readers. It's kind of a diary of "what I checked out this month that was pretty cool." I'm glad that by and large people enjoy it. I plan on keeping the process relatively loose for the time being, but will be taking the helpful feedback received here into account.

PilotGav
I've never seen this "e-zine" and I've been using/paying for Sonar since before it was called Sonar.

Here are the URLs for the issues so far.
Foxboro
Everett
Dorchester
Cambridge
Braintree
 
The eZine was introduced with the membership program. The motivation was to do something cooler than the usual release notes that accompany a new software release. They're typically around 20 pages and are free to anyone who wants to download them.
 
Quite a big deal was made about the eZine initially, and it's always mentioned in the Cakewalk forum posts announcing a new release. If you go to the SONAR landing page, "back issues" are available for download under the "Rolling Updates" tab that describes what's in each release. They're usually mentioned in the newsletter (but I had to enter an exception in my spam filter to receive it).