Sometime in the 1980's one of the smaller magazine publishing companies figured out they could sell more advertising in their gun and hunting magazines if the articles mentioned lots of products from the advertisers. This lead to other magazines doing the same thing, and the result was fewer hunting stories. Today a lot of "hunting" articles are actually thinly disguised articles about new guns, ammo, scopes, etc.
But part of the reason this worked was more and more American hunters were living in cities and suburbs, and at the same time good public-land hunting was shrinking, especially in more populous states. One basic rule of outdoor sports is that when people can't actually do them as much, they tend to obsess over equipment between trips. Many increasingly urban American hunters actually seem to prefer gear-oriented articles, because they want to make sure their relatively few chances at game are successful.
I made most of my living writing hunting and fishing stories, both narrative ("Me and Joe") and how-to until the 1990's, when the transition toward more gear-oriented articles really took over. I started doing more gun writing and now they're the majority of my income. There simply weren't enough "hunting story" markets left to get by, though I still publish a few a year.
