Thread: Nz outdoor hunting

Originally Posted by Tahr

Greg Gargou's article on light weight gear was excellent.

I picked up the mag mainly for this article, and the rest of the mag is just a nice surprise of good reading.

So there is an untapped market for a "straight shooting" unbiased hunting magazine focused on receiving 95% of it's revenue from the consumer? Would you want monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly issues? Approx. price $19.00-$39.00 an issue? Would you buy it?

Originally Posted by Dangerous Dan

So there is an untapped market for a "straight shooting" unbiased hunting magazine focused on receiving 95% of it's revenue from the consumer? Would you want monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly issues? Approx. price $19.00-$39.00 an issue? Would you buy it?

Yes

Yes if un biased.

Probably not. I doubt it would be possible even with the best intentions.

Originally Posted by R93

Probably not. I doubt it would be possible even with the best intentions.

Yes there is that...but If one wanted to build a reputation on being ruthlessly honest there is a market.

There are some misconceptions about the writing of NZ outdoor articles, one in particular is about the gear reviews turning into advertisements.
It is not so much that products are supplied to magazine and that they then are obliged to write laudatory advertisements as 'reviews', although I suppose that might happen in NZ. It is more a case that only positive reviews get published. Most readers just don't want to read about bad reviews of gear.
There are also a lot of personal gear that gets reviewed as well, most of it probably, things that the writers pay for with their own money and think are worthwhile. If your writing about your own stuff, then you will be writing a positive piece also. You bought it yourself after all. By default it sort of ends up this way.

My pet problem, is that I personally hate reviews of gear. I hate writing them so I mostly don't, and I hate reading them. Hunting magazines nowadays have way too many gear reviews. Regardless of whether they are positive or not, the magazines just come across as catalogues. All of the current magazines are guilty of this. Maybe people all want to read 64 pages of gear reviews, interspersed with advertisements. Who knows, but I really don't.
The editor of NZ Guns and Hunting became aware of this a while back and to his credit has been trying to address the issue.

I would rather read hunting stories. Unfortunately writing compelling hunting stories is more difficult than it sounds, and a large part of these type of stories are supplied by contributors who are hunters, but not necessarily accomplished writers.
In other countries you have enough of a market that hunting writers can work steadily, provide quality work and magazines don't have to rely on what is essentially enthusiastic amateurs. Overseas, the downside of this is that these hunting writers are provided with hunts on private land so that they can provide enough of their talented material. Again, readers can get blasé about every article being a great trophy, all of it shot too easily behind probably fenced private country.

We mostly don't have that problem in NZ, but the kiwi hunting magazine equivalent of those kind of provided-for-reader-consumption-articles, is the gear review. Gear reviews are easy, you don't have to shoot anything necessarily so you don't have to depend on successful hunting trips to get articles out. That's another reason why there are so many of them I reckon. And when editors are relying on amateur writers for their hunting stories that may be of variable quality, you can rely on gear reviews from regular contributors. They are solid dependable bricks that reliably fill up space. Gear review are easy, and editors are convinced that readers love them.
Other magazines have come up with a lot of how-to articles. I am leery of them also. Yes, let's have some, but a certain newer magazine has way too many. Like one of those Ladies Home Companion digests from the Depression.

I may be getting older but I find the desperately original attempts on the part of a couple of magazines to generate eye catching layouts, with variable fonts and sizes, excitingly mixed bold and italic type, unexpected layouts around pictures and contrasting headline colours...so confusing visually that I have trouble figuring out which column of type are articles and which bits are some kind of advertisement, so I just keep turning the page until I see something I understand. Last magazine of theirs I tried I ended up paging right out of pages. Couldn't stop.

Unfortunately story lengths have been reduced lately - probably so more gear reviews can be included.