Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics What happened to Leupold?

In general, there are fewer writer-restrictions due to advertising in most magazines than there were a decade ago.

Have been in the magazine writing business for over 40 years now, and when I started making a living at it there was relatively little pressure from any magazine to mention advertisers products favorably. (That included the fishing market, where I also wrote for many years.) In fact, the bigger magazines had a policy much like newspapers: There was virtually no contact between the editorial and advertising departments. The editors tried to put together a magazine people would want to read, so the advertising department could tell manufacturers how many people would be seeing their ads. In fact, there wasn't much opportunity to mention products in feature articles back then, because they were mostly stories or how-to, not product oriented. The product stuff went into columns, but often in a more general way than today. A flyishing article, for instance, might discuss the advantages of graphite fly rods, but there wouldn't be much (if any) mention of specific brands.

Eventually, however, a relatively small gun/hunting publisher figured out they could sell a lot more advertising if the articles prominently mentioned advertisers products. Eventually this resulted in "stories" where a hunter slid out of X brand sleeping bag in the morning, pulled on Y brand clothes and X brand boots, then grabbed his ABC rifle with a DEF scope and left his GHI tent.

This worked for quite a while, and eventually many of not most advertisers came expect not only ads but feature-article coverage. But a lot of readers grew weary of it, one of the reasons for the decline in readership (along with TV and, eventually, the Internet). This is why, in recent years, the trend has been backing away from such stuff. You can't sell as many ads if there aren't as many readers buying the magazine.

As for Leupold, I still have quite a few, but mostly scopes at least a decade old, and the majority are M8 fixed powers, which for certain kinds of hunting are excellent. As an example, have had a 4x M8 on my lightweight 9.3x62 for around 15 years now, and it simply never changes POI. Even their variables almost never used to break, but since 2010 I've had to send so many Leupolds (both fixed and variable) that I eventually printed out a stack of repair forms so they'd be on hand.

To be fair, I haven't tested many of the higher-priced scopes Ilya mentioned, partly because I've been testing other brands, since there are so many new scope companies these days. Would like to try some, but in the past half-dozen years just about all the folks I knew at Leupold have either retired or gone to work elsewhere. Plus, I'm not writing about optics as much in general, especially after I "semi-retired" this year by cutting my paper-magazine schedule in half, and one of the casualties was an optics column. (Though it feels I'm still working almost as much, probably because of writing more for riflesandrecipes.com., which keeps growing.)