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Angling mail

Wayne Botley

Wayne Botley

Senior Member & Supporter
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Sad news
 
Hardly surprising. My local corner shop reports that his newspaper sales are down 80% in the last 10yrs. I've not bought one since I got my first smartphone.
The weeklies used to be essential reading for me until I realised they were just recycling articles every 5 years or less.
Worst offender in this respect was Trout and Salmon. A monthly. I'll be surprised if it's still here next year.
 
Tbh I have not bought an angling publication in many years, as Paul said , recycled old news, pushing products, giving same old year after year, no value in them at all, especially when carp became fashionable, and carp puddles / commercials / match venues even more so.

I know that the angling media have to make money by advertising, but it was beyond a joke years ago.

When I was buying a sea angling mag by subscription, it started , way back , It became noticeable and one time I counted up the full page ads against the rest of the content, and it was 70/30 in favour of adverts , that did it for me, despite being a regular contributor for reports and short stories etc .
Websites are slowly getting that way too, adblockers help, but you cant adblock a magazine .

David
 
An angling aquaintance connected with the media told me a couple of months ago two titles were likely to be going soon. This was after Trout Fisherman merged with Trout and Salmon so potentially another one on its way if he was right.
 
No surprise in the internet age but still very sad. As a kid I read the Mail and Times every week and they were part of the bug. Happy days indeed.
 
Sad news, although wasn’t a massive fan of the AM. Even bigger shame that my last memory of it (and last one I purchased) will be ‘the’ Pete Reading edition.

I subscribed to the AT until about 18 months ago. That’ll be the next to go... Sign of the times....
 
Mark Walker said:
No surprise in the internet age but still very sad. As a kid I read the Mail and Times every week and they were part of the bug. Happy days indeed.
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I still subscribe to them both, with my edition this week there was no news on it finishing, let's see if the news is in next weeks.
 
The mass published angling press has turned into a joke and in recent years and the final nail in the coffin was when CAT, ditched their non-sponsored contributors and went product placement mad. I complained to the then editor, who told me that the old format with Horak, Smith and Miles as lead contributors, was no longer viable and that without the input of major advertisers the magazine was no longer viable!

Its getting the same way on YouTube too, with Korum etc, showering these guys with gifts, just look at the way some of them have gone e.g Life on the Bank and Danny'a Angling Blog....... may as well call them the Korum channel
 
That's a bit sad really. Maybe the AT will survive for a while longer as AM buyers jump ship to the AT.
 
Neil Blood said:
The mass published angling press has turned into a joke and in recent years and the final nail in the coffin was when CAT, ditched their non-sponsored contributors and went product placement mad. I complained to the then editor, who told me that the old format with Horak, Smith and Miles as lead contributors, was no longer viable and that without the input of major advertisers the magazine was no longer viable!

Its getting the same way on YouTube too, with Korum etc, showering these guys with gifts, just look at the way some of them have gone e.g Life on the Bank and Danny'a Angling Blog....... may as well call them the Korum channel
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CAT became an absolute joke and it was a good magazine before all the product placers. It didn't last long in the new advert dominated format anyway. The problem seemed to be that the authors who were sponsored were very poor writers compared to the original regulars, and took product placement to such extremes that I'm sure it had the opposite effect to the one intended. I remember one article by a Nash sponsored angler, can't remember his name thankfully, who even seemed to have a Nash handkerchief! It was almost every other sentence and would have been funny if it wasn't so pathetic. I never bought the magazine again after that, and while I won't say I didn't buy Nash line, it did put me off their products overall.
 
I gave up reading the weeklies years ago and CAT when it changed from being a good quality all round magazine, that wasn’t carp dominated into the product promotion vehicle that it later became. I now subscribe to Catch Cult and have to say that it is the best angling magazine that I have read in a long time. Every issue has excellent articles on all aspects of angling,with no bias to any single species or method, written by real fishermen with a passion for their sport. I cannot recommend it too highly.


Dav
 
One of the biggest problems that magazines of all interests have is the paltry fees they offer to writers. Before we left the UK I used to do a bit of freelance photography and was given the opportunity to illustrate an article for a fly-fishing magazine as the photographer the writer usually used could not make it. The writer then contacted me to see if I would be interested in partnering him permanently. When I looked into it the fee offered for a three page article with photos was £300. That had to be shared between writer and photographer and also had to cover expenses. When you think that the subject matter of these articles cover an area from Scotland to Cornwall there is a lot of travelling involved and sometimes overnight stays would be necessary. These fees were similar to what was offered to freelance contributors in other sports and interests.

If you were lucky enough to have the skills to write and take the type of photographs that were required then that £300 would just about cover the time, expense and trouble for each article. But not many people have both those skills and there are problems in getting some of the action photos as you can't be at the end of the rod and behind the camera at the same time.

Then there were issues over the production timetable. For example if you wanted to submit an article about October grayling fishing it would have had to be on the editor's desk by the end of August ready for printing late September. That means any seasonal articles have to be produced the year before publication. Even today the technology of magazine production has not moved on very much. I have just filed the text for the November edition of a monthly fishing article I write for an ex-pat magazine. It has to be in a month before publication. I will be writing the article for the December edition this month.

This is why so many magazines now are closely linked to sponsors or advertisers. They can absorb the costs better than freelance contributors. It is a sad state of affairs, but those are the reasons for it.
 
Stephen Crowhurst said:
It’s the same for most things tbh Clive, no one wants to pay for anything and as a consequence everyone’s wages stay flat. Wether it’s laying bricks or taking photos, it’s price first and quality third.
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Interesting analogy as I spent the first 30 years of my working life laying bricks! I wrote an article for the old Specialist Angler magazine back in the 80s for which I was paid £45. I was pleasantly surprised as I had neither requested nor expected payment. I was doing a writing course and wanted to get something published. So a few months later I submitted another article to the same magazine and it was subsequently published, but on this occasion I wasn't paid. I never really knew why I got paid for one article and not the other.
 
Alex Gowney said:
Interesting analogy as I spent the first 30 years of my working life laying bricks! I wrote an article for the old Specialist Angler magazine back in the 80s for which I was paid £45. I was pleasantly surprised as I had neither requested nor expected payment. I was doing a writing course and wanted to get something published. So a few months later I submitted another article to the same magazine and it was subsequently published, but on this occasion I wasn't paid. I never really knew why I got paid for one article and not the other.
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I found the workings of magazines highly irregular. I often had to write in to get my royalties.

A long time ago I wrote an article for a sea fishing magazine that had a section where they would print a reader's story and the lucky writer got some tackle. A couple of months after submitting the article I was amazed to see that a large part of my submission including some original light-hearted content had been plagiarised by the editor in another article. He'd basically taken the best bits of my story and worked them into an article of his own. Never did win the rod & reel :mad:
 
Used to love reading the angling weeklies as a kid when the likes of Richard Walker were writing about shotting patterns and the principle of floatation, proper insightful articles.

I gave up when the sensationalism crept in akin to the Sun newspaper and when perch became sergeants and barbel became Boris.

I had the good fortune of having a few notable captures in my younger days and having submitted the photos etc. I'd be contacted by a writer to give my account of the capture. The story that appeared in print would regularly bear little resemblance to reality. I still use some of the prizes that I won though including a Japanese Shimano Stradic reel!
 
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