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.
I'm certainly not a gunwriter, but I'll opine that as MD said above, there are some magazines that you can tell care more about their readers than their advertisers and it's pretty easy to tell. For a great many reasons, mainly because I like to read and stay up on what is going on in the hunting/shooting industry, I subscribe to at least 15 different hunting and gun related magazines and religiously read them all. To me, it is obvious which ones cater to advertisers since I'm usually done with the magazine in an hour. The ones that care about their readers can take me days to finish and I make copies of the articles that I think can help me in the future that I file away for later reference. In these magazines, you will find writers that do make their opinions known and will tell it like it is. The caveat is that I think I can usually tell when these writers have been "assigned" a certain topic or product review and most of the time it is a very short, concise review without much praise. If this is the case, I know the writer didn't like the product much, even though he never said it outright. Unfortunately, that is the PC way most writers must have to operate in today's corporate world. At least that is how I see it.
In summary to Blackwater, pick the right magazine(s) and I think you'll probably find more of what you're looking for.
