Blackwater,
You’re right in some ways, but overall couldn’t be more wrong.
The change in hunting and shooting magazines started in the 1980’s, when a relatively small magazine company in New York City decided they could attract more advertising by promising manufacturers coverage in articles. This worked, and they started selling more ads.
Before this, most magazines sold ads primarily by publishing magazines that attracted a lot of readers. Ads make up a big part of the profit in any commercial magazine, and the more copies any magazine sells, the more they can charge for ads. The old theory of publishing was to produce magazines people wanted to read, and more companies would want to buy ads because lots of people would see the ads.
The small company in New York, however, decided to please advertisers instead. This worked—at least in the short run—and some other magazine publishers noticed. One was a guy who’d made the Fortune 500 list by starting and buying magazines, and though he was already rich beyond the comprehension of most Americans, he even started charging money to companies—including hunting outfitters—for a mere MENTION of their company in an article. (As somebody noted at the time, he didn’t need the few thousand bucks this generated. Instead it was simply another way of keeping score.) Eventually his publishing company even guaranteed “editorial coverage” of any advertiser’s products in magazine columns and feature articles.
Even then there were still some magazines run the old-fashioned way, by trying to attract readers by running stories they wanted to read. But early in 2008 the Great Recession hit, and many advertisers felt the pinch and bought fewer ads. However, by the end of 2008 the shooting industry started recovering, due to the presidential election of the greatest firearms salesman of the 21st century.
Consequently, all of a sudden shooting industry companies didn’t have to buy many ads, because Obama was promoting their business for them. This accelerated after his reelection, and almost every publishing company in the business started trying to attract and keep advertisers by running more articles mentioning various products.
The eventual result of this trend, of course, was advertisers EXPECTING favorable editorial coverage, even if it wasn’t spelled out in their contract. It became almost impossible for any magazine company to operate without some sort of friendly agreement with advertisers. To refuse would only drive advertisers to other magazines.
One side-effect, of course, was readers like you didn’t like to read the magazines much, so dropped their subscriptions. They might buy one off the newsstand now and then, if an article interested them, but some readers aren’t going to subscribe to magazines where many of the articles are essentially ads. This became especially obvious in hunting magazines, where “hunting stories” turned into writers or even magazine editors taking a new gun or scope on a guided hunt.
Now, hunters and shooters aren’t totally without blame for all of this. As Americans become more urban over the last half of the 20th century, more wanted their equipment to handle more of the job, whether shooting tiny groups off a benchrest or killing a deer during their annual hunt. Most Americans don’t get a chance to shoot and hunt as much as we used to, because so many of us live in cities where shooting ranges and hunting country are farther away and more expensive. So we became fixated on buying a new rifle or scope to perform better during our little windows of opportunity, one reason shooting and hunting magazines have become less about technique than gear.
The Internet also had several effects. Information can be published and distributed much cheaper via cyberspace than printing it on paper, and we became used to (supposedly) learning stuff by Googling it, rather than reading long articles and then trying techniques on the range or in the field. We also became used to getting it free. Almost any time some Campfire mentions a good magazine article, somebody posts, “Got a link?”
This is all related to the shorter attention span of modern readers. In theory it should be much cheaper, and hence possible, to publish long, in-depth articles on the Internet. But despite what some old-timers say, most readers do NOT want to wade through the 3000-word articles that used to be published in print magazines.
Instead they want all their answers short and easy, and on a forum like this they often get dozens of one-sentence or even one-word answers. In fact, I bet a bunch of people won’t even read this post, because it’s over 1000 words long, just as many Campfire members don’t read anything other than a thread’s header before responding. In a way it’s like American voting: Everybody gets a say, no matter their level of experience or analytic ability—which is how the country ended up electing the greatest firearms salesman ever.
So yeah, shooting magazines have changed, but not because of the writers. Magazines changed because of the decision of one small magazine company to please advertisers rather than readers. Ironically, that company isn’t doing very well these days, because so many bigger publishing companies followed their lead.
Writers have never had much leverage in this business, partly because so many people can do it part-time. Quite a few publish articles just to see their name in print. (Photography is even worse these days, thanks to all-automatic digital cameras.)
Essentially magazine writers are like workers in a factory. Some get paid more than others, like the engineers at Ford, but telling writers to write totally different types or articles is like telling workers at Ford to build Toyotas. The decisions on what parts and vehicles to produce aren’t made by the workers, but by owners. It’s the same way in the magazine business.
Luckily for writers like me, who’ve been around for a long time, the Internet has made it easier to go directly to readers. While I still do a lot of magazine work, mostly for magazines that care more about readers than advertisers, a lot of my income these days comes from going directly to readers. But if you really want to affect the types of articles you see in many shooting magazines these days, don’t complain to the writers. Complain to the magazine owners, because they make the decisions.
