Add Upstream to a crowded field of e-zines making their debut in 2010.
I liken the ezine conundrum to the current political spectrum, where Republicans and Democrats try to distance each other from the opposition, the administration, and their own party.
As each new magazine throws down their own unique brand, free of tired articles about indicator fishing, and espousing the “journey”, the “experience”, or “we’re not your Dad’s hobby” – I find the distinction losing a bit of allure.
It’s fly fishing that brought you to the dance, and I’d always assumed you should leave with those that brought you …
Numerous straw polls and statistics suggest the influx of new blood has been on a steady wane – and us current practitioners are growing older, wiser, and accumulating skills. We’re no longer the fresh faced novitiates who are struggling with wind knots and trying to makes sense of it all, and our impatience with the “same old articles” may stem from fluency with the technique – and having read six or eight already.
The existing print media takes considerable heat from nearly everyone, much of it well deserved, but I wonder whether they are the root of our dissatisfaction, or merely we’ve changed and are impatiently waiting for the literature to catch up.
Like you I read them all, yet have trouble verbalizing what I’d like to see – what prose or topic would make one magazine head and shoulders above the others and engage me completely.
The picture-based magazines ooze stunning photography and make me yearn to take better pictures, the “Red Bull” magazines make me wish I could chug an energy drink without making faces, and the “journey” magazines get me all maudlin then jar me with an ad for the technical clothing needed to fish bacon rind.
As fishing is such an individualistic exercise, what’s lacking is liable to be quite different from one reader to the next, but I’m still not seeing what I think I’m looking for …
I may be yearning for lost youth, where the mention of puce baboon bottom would send me in a frantic search to secure some, or that new knot that would fix all my monofilament ills, or new creek packed with giant voracious fish that I’d ignored enroute to some place further.
Older and wiser I recognize that fellow in the fog and half light would be the same fellow cursing me for low holing his pool, and the photographs are appreciated but skimmed quickly. The “Red Bull” crowd gives me the impression they discard their empties on the beach – while disappearing in a cloud of sand and hamburger wrappers. They’re skimmed and put to rest as quickly. The “journey” and “feelgood” attempts all feel good, until the advertising intrudes – and part of my journey includes a “tactical” shooting head and the “experience” of paying off a high priced venue or higher priced rod.
We want to feel your experience through your unique professional approach. If you’ve got a garden variety fly fishing story – we are not interested.
I suppose that once the graphite rod crossed the thousand dollar barrier, we were forced out of our hobby to join other pastimes whose professionalism includes the tools to ply our craft, and also the uniform – the accoutrements of social station.
Like golf being synonymous with double knits and headless hats … er … visors.
I welcome each new entrant into my reading itinerary, there’s plenty of lunch hours and ample time to digest each attentively, but I’m still unsatisfied, struggling with what’s missing and it may be nothing at all.
Cigars, food, dancing, Patagonia, what’s not to like?
Upstream magazine, fly fishing e-zine, fly fishing literature, garden variety fly fishing story, social station, fly fishing
“Yearning for lost youth” Eureka!
I knew there was a cause for my ezine angst, just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Funny, I thought I’d feel better knowing.
With some difficulty, my old PC navigated “Upstream,” and while this is obviously to be a high-maintenance, high-wire act of e-journalism , one can only predict the eventual plunge into cyberspace obscurity. High-end consumerism is here extolled, along with high-heels, high hemlines, tango, T&A, booze, cigars, steaks, wine and high priced real estate – with rivers running through it that few of us will ever fish. Which is the way the editors want it, of course. Hard to see how we are expected to curl up on the sofa with this glossy hard-edged mag.
Everyone is entitled to their “journey” – mine was mostly mosquito repellant and gas station food.
When anyone and everyone can publish because there are no costs of entry, the content probably gets more (deserved) scrutiny. It gets harder and harder not to feel like you’re in the middle of a stadium with 40,000 vuvuzelas pointed at you.
Great post.
Why can’t we all just get afishin’? I’m still stunned from my peak into that alternate universe. Great post!
Unfortunately, you’re not in the majority. Most of the people who routinely traffic fly fishing internet sites–whether blogs, e-zines, or ordinary forums–tend to be committed. They are as you describe: intermediate to expert anglers (or will soon be), and you’re exactly right. Those anglers do tend to absorb every how-to article quickly and move on.
But they’re not the market. The magazines actually do a pretty good job of researching who their readers are. It’s been slow lately but the best characterization of a fly fishing magazine reader, on average, would be ‘the perpetual newbie.’
Fly fishing magazines tend to get bought by people who are starting out and looking for an explanation of what to do. Think about the last time you started a new sport (for me it was upland hunting). What did you do? Probably bought a bunch of magazines.
Since you’re the type who’s also savvy on the web, you no doubt also hit a lot of [new sport] websites. But not everyone does that. In fact, the average guy still doesn’t.
I work with a bunch of average guys who like fly fishing. They don’t get on fly fishing websites. They are competent but still inexperienced even though they’ve been fishing for many years. They like to read the occasional magazine article. I cannot entice them to even consider all the stuff on the web. They’re too busy and the web is just not their go-to source for information.
Try pitching something crazy to a magazine some time. Gar fishing. Stand up paddle board fishing. Night fishing with lights underwater. Those are “new” and “different,” right?
But too many of the “new” ideas either cross some imaginary ethical line that editors worry will offend some readers (lights at night) or are too limited in their spectrum to interest the average coldwater angler (gar fishing). The editors are paid to prefer what their readers prefer. The readers prefer “yet another” indicator nymphing article because they’re *not the same readers who read the last one.*
There was a time when the print magazine market was way over-saturated, too. The herd got winnowed. That will happen again. There is a place for one or two magazines that specialize in high-end adventure writing, written by competent anglers who are also good writers (which is what I think you–along with many other very experienced anglers–really want). Unfortunately there’s just no money to fund that. No magazine writer is going to Argentina on his magazine paycheck (unless it’s a free promo trip, which carries strings). And the guys who can afford it generally aren’t writers.
My point is just that it’s not fair to blame the magazines themselves for the things you don’t like about them. They’re reacting to their market. If you want to blame someone, you have to look to our fellow anglers. And it will help a lot if you think about your desires and needs when you were new, because that’s who the magazines really serve.
At the end of the day this is all about numbers. There will always be more new anglers excited to read about indicator nymphing than there are experienced anglers who’ve had enough. Magazines are run by people who like to have paying jobs; they go where the greatest numbers are and who can blame them?
Zach, great response.
Certainly magazines are a “for profit” exercise, and must bow to whichever demographic the market insists is the largest, but like many other crafts I’d expect our small audience capable of supporting both traditional print fodder and at least one superior mag.
Something akin to multiple Newsweeks and a single New Yorker …
The plain truth is that we enjoyed the magazines immensely when we were relative newbies – hanging on every word – and believing each author a new messiah.
A couple of decades later we’d love to return to that innocence, where every issue had flies we’d never seen, materials we’d never used, and rivers we’d never fished – leaving the issue dog-eared and bookmarked next to the john, there to be reread many times.
Some of that discontent is likely envy, we treasured those moments and now they’re gone. Our only option to make winter less cold and the season arrive quicker is to write the damn articles versus read them.
I’d like to think somewhere, somehow a publication could address us old jaded vets – and assume its rightful place next to the throne, the source of all great reflection and ideas.
KBarton –
I completely agree; rationally, this market ought to have one high-end “expert” magazine featuring technique articles on spey fishing, rowing a boat, and sneaking into Cuba, plus ‘adventure’ travel writing like that piece that ran in Fish & Fly about the kid who crossed the godd*m Canadian Shield with one canoe and a fly rod.
Then you could have three or four introductory magazines–one on fly tying, one on general fishing, one on saltwater fishing, and one on warmwater.
Unfortunately, unless you or I are elected King of the World, we can’t make it happen (which gets back to Singlebarbed’s original point, I think). Everyone wants to be the cool kid. And even with a lot of financial backing, the “expert” magazine model has already failed several times (Wild on the Fly, Fish & Fly, etc.)
Speaking from the perspective of someone getting paid sometimes by these outfits, the “high end” magazines usually pay the least, if at all. The “bread and butter” guys don’t pay a lot by any means but they do offer enough to incentivize a few writers who also love the sport to take on an article or two.
I write primarily out of interest. Believe me, it’s not changing the bottom line much. But if you’re going to bite off an adventure, unless you’re independently wealthy, you have to have some scratch to fund it, which gets us back to what I was talking about in my original post.
Bottom line: markets are to a large extent self regulating. Punch in all the variables, and we keep getting the same magazine for a good reason: it’s what the market creates.
As a long time wannabe, unpublished collector of rejection slips, I am with you both on this one. (Should I consider myself published, since I sometimes comment on blogs?)
But, from my jaded perspective, the purpose of magazines is to sell the stuff that is advertised within. And, yes, fly fishing is a niche with a niche that is populated by enthusiasts who are often literate and wealthy. However, talent and/or thoughtfulness sometimes will out.
I love a well crafted book, essay or story and I tend to return to the source of any.Therefore, I miss Fish & Fly, but I’m glad that there are blogs and blogrolls for all the diversity, intellect and perversity that they contain.
I’ll take the perversity nod, leaving intellect and virtue for the others you read.
I’m inclined to think commiseration the easy part, and what consistently eludes me is what would be offered that would distinguish one mag from the rest of the herd.
I suppose if I was limited to two words I’d say, imbue and humor. Fly fishing being so much more than the act of fishing alone – and expert or otherwise it’s always humbling.
The Piney Woods is half the experience – and the “driven warrior” articles fail miserably at paying the requisite homage to beauty, piece of mind, contentment, and humor.
All them fancy words is lumped under the “imbue” label – and everything not mentioned is normally self depreciating and often funny as hell.
For me the trite professional has no place in the recittal of deeds afield, there’s too rich an experience involved to limit the oratory to droppers and poly yarn.
When we were newly introduced the sport was mysterious and forbidding; bugs, knots, reading water, lifecycles, tapers, and endless frustration – making victory all the more tasty.
I see nothing of that experience in the contemporary literature and it makes the narration trite and lifeless.
The magazine content need not be expert so much as friendly.
To stop and chat with a fellow fly fisherman has always been part of the equation, hale fellows well met, not the grim and standoffish angler gracing recent covers who is more concerned with racing ahead to block my passage or counting his fish in quiet competition.
A hobby can never be professional, as the words are opposed to one another. Both vendors and magazine copy seem focused on our journey to dominate the sport, rather than a quiet pasttime to decompress from all the stress and professionalism of our careers and work life.
Which is likely the source of my discontent. A little friendly and a generous dollop of humor and I’d be completely engaged.
Sorry for the delay…
Humor should be inevitable in any undertaking that requires mastering a skill. My incomplete mastery of both fly fishing and windsurfing come quickly to mind.
If I can’t laugh at myself or accept the good natured derision of others, it might as well be over. Some of my best fish yarns have been self-deprecating!
If we are reduced to just the search for the next, best gear, trip, fish or adventure, the spirit of the experience is lost. It shouldn’t be just a “work in progess”, but fun and occasionally funny.
I try my darnedest, when attempting another written excursion, to tell a story that is what I might say in conversation about the activity that I am describing; without getting smarmy. That ain’t easy and I mostly destroy the product or save it for yet another re-write.
Maybe, there is to much idealist in each of us.