It may be counter-intuitive, but over the past few years magazine circulation has INCREASED in most areas, despite the ever increasing use of the Internet. Why? People are eager for information.

This is apparent in the number and quality of shooting and hunting magazines. And when I say quality, I don't necessarily mean "good." There are far better magazines in the genre now than there ever were before--and far worse. This because the shooting/hunting public is so eager for information that we support (buy buying and reading) some absolute junk, written by semi-literates who often are spoon-fed article "information" by the advertisers.

Is this a bad thing? I can't say, but it does demonstrate that printed magazines are a growing rather than shrinking business, because there are far more magazines than decent content to fill them all.

Instead of seeing the net and magazines as separate entities, we might look at them as parts of the same whole. The net is much more conducive to instant, short bits of information, and I used it all the time myself for just that purpose.

But for an in-depth look at a certain subject, print is still king. There's no way I can go into the detail about a subject here that I can in a 3500-4000 word magazine article that's taken most of a week to write and most of a month to research. On the Campfire I can barely touch the surface.

For the same reason, no matter how knowledgeable some folks who log onto the Campfire and other sites are, there's no way they can match the amount of inside information some professionals have.

(Note how I said "some" professionals. There are quite a few who just repeat what others have written, never do original research, or even publish opinions when they've never done any research of any kind on the subject.)

There's no way, for instance, that the average rifle loony will ever get to tour several ammo, firearms or optics factories, spend several days in a hunting camp talking to the technical guys from the Big Companies, or spend days inside the shop of top custom riflemakers. The world just doesn't work that way.

So we have two complementary ways to get information. I even use the Campfire this way. I could spend the next five years personally asking people how they've been treated by the customer service departments of various optics firms. Instead I posted a question here, and within two days had 60+ responses. The synopsis of those responses will show up as an article some day, on paper, which hopefully will help shooters make more rational decisions about purchases.

So both cyberspace and paper'n'ink are part of the same information superhighway.

MD