RIP Field & Stream

I think we missed it, because the first I heard of it was today when my library was notified it is no longer printing.

I did find this from back in October: The end of an era… Field & Stream/Outdoor Life to be digital only

The still have a website (on Wordpress) that offers a newsletter. Beyond that, their Twitter feed has been silent for two months. So RIP.

 

This started in early 2017 when F&S and OL went to six issues, fired a lot of sales staff in a huge shakeup and shuffled editorial deck chairs. Ousted a longtime editor for a younger digital-focused guy. Made other shuffles. When Bonnier sold the publications and a couple of others to the current owner group - which had only digital companies and no print - the final nail was hammered.

I grew up reading F&S, OL and Sports Afield. They were the Big 3 in the industry, along somewhat with Fur, Fish & Game. Sports Afield shit its bed when it tried to become some kind of Outside-wannabe heli-gliding adventure magazine in the 1990s and lost a giant chunk of its subscribers. It scrapped that and returned as a big-game adventure mag, which it still is and is in print.

 

I grew up with subscriptions to Field & Stream and Outdoor Life.
More recently, they have been my go-to in waiting rooms (where you can still find magazines).

RIP

There is a generation of people who don't know the joy of going to the mailbox and pulling out the latest copy of their favorite magazine - and they never will.

 

Yep. I remember running home from school because I knew my Sporting News would be there.

 

My first year of college, my roommate and I split subs to Sporting News & Inside Sports (think we got Sports Illustrated too) and had the local paper delivered to our dorm door every morning. This was only 28 years ago. May as well be 2,800 years ago.

 

I'd actually be ticked off at the mail delivery guy if it was a day later than normal. I kept every single one of them -- from Sept. 1971 through the late 1980s -- until I got tired of hauling six moving boxes of Sporting News every time I changed jobs. Now I wish I had saved them.

 

Ain't that the truth. I've got enough hoarded stuff from my misspent youth as is, but I'm on a FB page for a favorite band and seeing all the old magazine clips I read has me wistful for the stuff I *didn't* save.

 

I wish I kept a one. I ditched those Sporting News long ago- and not happily. They just seemed like the first candidate to be put out to pasture.

 

Bonnier is horrible. Really glad that interview didn’t work out — although if it had, I might be “working” for PADI now (the SCUBA training agency bought Bonnier’s diving-related titles Sport Diver and Scuba Diving in 2019).

 

1) Had only one roommate who was enough into sports to be willing to do the same.
2) Our paper was clearly in the tank for the archrival ... not kidding. Was owned by a family that made no bones about its bias. Yet it didn't stop from setting up kiosks near the dorms at the beginning of semesters in hopes of fleecing broke college kids out of money they didn't have.

 

I have boxes - B-ox-EZ multiple times plural - of Grand National/Winston Cup Scene and Winston Cup Illustrated upstairs.
Oddly enough, the boxes are the cases that cigarette cartons came in.

 

I decided to donate them to the high school library as a gift from an alumni. The "librarian" looked at me as if I had dropped a stink bomb in her office. My wife had to berate her to write me a thank-you letter, which was basically "thank you for the issues of Sports Illustrated."

I'm certain they wound up in the dumpster that afternoon.

I haven't been back to my old school since. Dumb asses.