Here’s one to ponder… changes at the Field and Stream blogs

That’s funny, Petzal is the one blog I had to stop reading over there because on anything rights or politics related, he was about a week late and well more than a dollar short. Unfortunately, doing new media half-assed doesn’t work if you’re a professional media organization. You need to be first with the story, have a new angle, or offer up something insightful/entertaining. (Disclosure: I’m just not into their other blogs – they don’t do anything for me one way or the other.)

In general, very few in the industry actually understand what they can do with new media or what they need to do to create value. I actually started a series on good and bad new media efforts tied to SHOT this year. I stopped halfway through my profiles because I realized they were pretty consistently negative even when I was trying very hard to find things being done right.

With younger people by default turning to the web to find information and finding it easier to follow an RSS feed than find time to read an entire magazine every month, the traditional outdoor media’s failure to really be innovative in new media (as opposed to copying the trends about 4 years late) will be a contributing factor to future declines.

Philip

Interesting post
I’ve been an F&S fan for a few years and used to get it posted to me every few months, so while I’ve not read a lot of issues in comparison to someone who read it from the year dot, I have read every copy I’ve got LOADS of times.

As the worlds oldest outdoor magazine brand F&S are the rightful owners of the ‘virtual campfire’ outdoors people sit round while chatting on the internet. They should be the hub of the community. Sadly this is an opportunity the owners don’t even seem to be aware of, let alone be prepared to take advantage of. It wouldn’t cost a lot to have one of the nerds set the site up so our posts link back to our blogs, and to have someone cover the bloggersphere reporting on who’s posting what. They have the idea of giving points and freebies to people who get involved in the sites – but currently its a campfire within a ‘high fence’.

Pezal’s writing is always excellent – he really has that ‘voice’ thing down. However i’ve got to agree with Bitter, the dismal attempts to rabble-rouse are tiresome at best.

Phil Bourjailly has his moments, and certainly enough of them to warrant a blog of his own.

The trouble seems to be that F&S seem to think of online as an after thought to the magazine – not the chance it is to engage with the readership and keep the magazine relevant to both their aging core audience and the new audience that every magazine feature says is so important to encourage if we are to keep the outdoor traditions alive.

The ‘one year forage’ blog by Bill Heavey was a case in point: great idea (well I would say that) that was starting to get a readership and a comments when it was pulled. One commenter wrote to F&S and received the story that ‘bill has decided he’s more an article writer than a blogger’. Which sounded to me a lot like ‘we wouldn’t pay him’.

In defense of Chad Love, yes he does post a lot of ‘outdoor news round up’ stories, (his job) but when he writes his own stuff it’s a very different voice to the ‘gnarled old outdoor writer’ cliche, guessing from the bio picture he’s also the under 40′s only representative on the F&S blogs, and he’s funny.

Last whine – How can F&S be ‘the worlds best’ if its not available on newsstands outside the USA and Canada? Even now they do finally accept overseas shipping address for subscriptions I’m STILL yet to receive a single copy. It’s only been two months.

SBW

Very interesting discussion. It’s sort of a question of integrity. At some point, do you think that maintaining a critical thinking article/blog with unique insights and thoughtful prose generates the same kind of traffic? Clearly you have made the case that you will stop reading if it doesn’t change, but how universal an opinion is that?

They have to be smart enough over there to be tracking reader response, hits, traffic, retention and all of that. I wonder if they are getting higher numbers with the content change and that is driving the shift. If so, what does that say? Perhaps there are fewer people out there interested in original content and more just looking for quick responses.

I would hope that the original content would drive higher numbers and it worries me that maybe it doesn’t. In my business, I could get lots more clients if I sold out and provided cheap/free service. But those aren’t the clients I want. It’s a matter of integrity. I want to provide a high level of service, and that probably reduces my potential client list exponentially. But it doesn’t matter because those are the potential clients that I don’t want as clients to begin with.

Is it traffic for traffic sake, or is it quality readership that they are after? The trend you identified would suggest the former.

http://www.rodandriflerag.com/