dassa,
Contoversy has been part of publishing business models since the invention of the printing press. It's also part of the core of 24hourcampfire.com. Luckily, Rick doesn't have to pay members to write controversial posts, because they do it for free.
Yes, F&S is no longer a print magazine. I was not surprised when that occurred, because apparently none of the several successive companies that have owned it since the 1980s recognized the trend toward specialty magazines (and eventually websites), which would dominate the market. This would essentially kill outdoor magazines that tried to cover "everything"--hunting, target shooting, fishing, camping, boating, etc.
Field & Stream and Outdoor Life are prime examples--but one of the companies that owned Field & Stream also aided the demise of both magazines by purchasing Outdoor Life--a direct competitor. Don't remember exactly when that occurred, but do know that in the 1990s the offices of both magazines were across a hallway from each other, in a huge downtown New York City office building. Exactly how this was supposed to work to either magazine's advantage was something of a mystery. I would guess it had something to do with advertising sales, since back then Madison Avenue was still the core of the ad world.
During this period the ownership also failed to recognize that the days of producing such magazines from the middle of a huge city where people who really like to hunt, fish, shoot, etc. would refuse to work was also a losing proposition--especially after modern electronic communication made it easy to edit magazines from any place the Internet worked. Several of the specialty magazines that were killing F&S and OL already allowed their editors to live wherever they wanted to, so tended to be able to hire editors who knew more about shooting, hunting, fishing, etc.
I started writing for F&S in the late 1970s, and became a staff writer in the late 80s, when the magazine was at its peak, selling something like 2 million 150-200 page magazines a month. By the early 2000s the downhill slide was underway, due to competition from specialty magazines, plus the Internet. I resigned, even though F&S was still publishing paper magazines every month, because specialty magazines were growing--and offering just as much pay.
A good example is the third general outdoor magazine that existed back then, Sports Afield. Like F&S and OL, it was also starting to lose money in the 1990s, but was then owned by the Hearst Corporation, which tended to refuse to admit one of its publications was failing. Hearst kept pumping money into SA, until even they realized it was a victim of specialty publications. (Somewhere in there Hearst also turned SA into a backpacking, mountain biking, etc magazine, which resulted in it losing even more money.
They sold it to Bob Petersen, the guy who started Guns & Ammo, one of the first specialty shooting magazines, and also Petersen's Hunting, which became one of the leading specialty hunting magazines. Bob gave up on it within a year or two, selling it to the present owner, who turned it into a specialty big game magazine, the reason SA still appears in regular print editions.
But even specialty publications regularly run articles intended to stir up controversy, which is easy to do among people who hunt and shoot, because so many have strong convictions (and emotions) about their favorite firearms and cartridges. And controversy tends to provide publicity--as it did here, and quite easily.This instance, however, probably won't help F&S,much, because the magazine still clings to trying to cover hunting and fishing--the primary reason it started down the long road to becoming a quarterly on-line magazine, and sharing some writers with Outdoor Life. But this thread did result in a lot more "hits" for the Campfire, which helps Rock Bin.
