Outdoor writers .. Anyone like 'em?

Just because people engage in an activity doesn't mean they want to read about it, and even if they did, their numbers aren't great enough to make a significant impact on circulation.

I grew up in a town where half the boys would be missing from school on the day deer season opened. But primarily they were interested in football, baseball, basketball and hockey. They enjoyed shooting Bambi, but they exhibited none of the obsessiveness in talking about it that fans of major spectator sports show. And of course the rest of us didn't give a shit. You got a buck? Good for you. Hey, did you see what Staubach did?

Spending space on participatory sports gives us less space to devote to the things most people most want to read about. In a perfect world we'd do both. But in a time of cutbacks, the fringe sports ought to be the first to go.

 

Sorry Ides, you'd be dead wrong about that. In fact, I'd be shocked if the MTBers, Tri-freaks and cross country skiers total half the number of fishermen and hunters.

That doesn't mean they should be ignored. If it's a good story, then the sport shouldn't matter. And it shouldn't be limited to just the outdoors page either.

 

I'm not by title an outdoors writer, but I write outdoors articles whenever the opportunity arises.
One of the best outdoors short stories ever written, by Corey Ford, "The Road to Tinkhamtown." I cry like a baby every time I read it:

http://www.afn.co.kr/archives/readings/tinkham.htm

 

Gotta jump in and defend my fellow road cyclist Idaho here. Some dense reading, but survey sez 83.9 million bicyclists, 72 million fishermen, 23 million hunters. Can't find stats about people who do road races or triathlons, but when you have 35,000 people pony up in Chicago for a marathon, multiply that by the thousands of smaller events from marathons to 5Ks in every little burg, that's a few million as well:

http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/trends/Nsre/Rnd1t13weightrpt.pdf

I also agree that no matter the sport, a good story should not be ignored, nor just dumped to an outdoors page.

And by the way, my vote's for a guy probably no one here's ever heard of...the late Jim Montgomery. Monty was a great guy, solid outdoor writer in Ohio by way of Texas.

 

But we have market surveys in which people tell us not whether they bike or hunt, but what they prefer to read about. Places I've worked -- even where the weather is nice and people spend a lot of time doing outdoor activities -- participatory sports did not rank very high in reader interest. Millions of kids grow up playing soccer, but so far they have not grown up into being people who A.) care to read about it in a daily newspaper, B.) buy tickets to professional soccer games, C.) send TV ratings through the roof on soccer broadcasts, D.) subscribe to soccer mags in great numbers. I used to be a distance runner. I enjoyed it till injuries took their toll. But I really didn't care to watch other people run or want to read much about them, even though there were some high-profile distance runners at the time, like Steve Prefontaine.

 

Changing the subject a bit:

I also noticed F&S has a smarmy attitude when it comes to addressing letters from readers... Like a few other publications, F&S opted for a hip, smart-ass attitude to respond to readers.
Don't like it and haven't liked for a number of years. I'm not sure it adds anything to the magazine or its readership.

Do any newspapers do this?

 

Maybe it's because newspapers haven't carried these stories in the past, so folks aren't looking to newspapers to have them. You want baseball box scores? You look in the daily paper. You want the fishing report? It's in Sunday's paper (or in agate in-season, depending on the paper). You want tips on hiking? That's what "Backpacker" is for.

We've tried to mix up the Outdoors page in Greensboro a bit - hunting one week, fishing the next, hiking/backpacking the week after. It's only a page, so we don't have much room to maneuver. We've got readers who expect the dead animals content, so we give it to them. But we're also trying to get folks who never read Sports to look back in there from time to time, and we figure we don't want to spook them with pictures of a 10-year-old posing next to his first kill. This summer, one of our photo interns shot a local guy who was racing mountain bikes in Boone. We've also done big pages on hiking. The variety's nice.

That said, if you have the chance to read Ed Hardin's outdoors pieces, do so. I'm not much of an Outdoors guy, but I dig his huntin' and fishin' pieces. (Full disclosure: I work with the guy.)

 

Why?

Seriously. These people you're trying to lure to the sports section ... either they're already buying the paper for some other reason, in which case the paper already has their business and whether they read the sports section or let the dog poop on it is irrelevant to the business, or they aren't already buying the paper and you're trying to attract them with something they can't even see unless you skybox it on A-1 every week, and even then you have to assume that they even care enough to glance at the newspaper as they pick up Doritos at the 7-Eleven. Which, to me, does not seem like a very targeted way to market a product, by appealing to the least likely customer, who may not even notice you're trying to woo them.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time. This is not a new concept and I thought it was questionable 20 years ago, too. You don't hear the food section saying they need to be more inclusive of anorexics, the business section to the unemployable, the real estate section to the homeless, the main news section to the apathetic ... oops, strike that last one.

This would be fine -- wasteful but fine -- if there were unlimited resources and if sports sections were already doing such a bang-up job of satisying their core audience. It is pretty unlikely that a newspaper's circulation is going to grow significantly no matter what it does. The emphasis needs to be on retaining the most likely readers, not chasing after the least likely.

 

Fatally, or just a flesh wound?

(Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

Those are poor comparisons. Hunting, fishing and outdoors activities have long been staples in the Sports section. It's just been in recent years during cutbacks, or because of corporate philosophies, that outdoors sections have been shrinking or eliminated through attrition of retiring writers.

Mr. Newsom, at least you're trying to gain eyeballs by doing something instead of giving up. Kudos.

As for the "dead animals content," that can be solved with a weekly "Send us your photo" corner for deer, ducks, bass, grouse or whatever and a short caption. It doesn't have to be a monster photo of Bubba with his tongue-lolling buck, unless it's a record or some mutant. Photos for hunting trend stories can be of kids and parents, a guy in a tree (or however they watch for the animals) and a smaller photo of the dead animal, if warranted.

 

Frank,

I respect everything you say and agree with most of what you say, but I part ways with you on this one.

We can get more people buying/subscribing to the paper if they come to believe there'll be something interesting in there beyond the normal drone of wins, losses and stats. Besides, those people will be there virtually no matter what we do, like fundamentalists sticking with the Republican party.

As for the Food section, I've heard this comparison before and I think it's bogus. We all eat. Seems like that's the one section above all that should have 100 percent readership. Trouble is, in the same way we've focused too much on hardcore sports fans, the food page is long been geared toward homemakers. I never look at a food page, but I guarantee you I'd turn to one every day if it had interesting stories or helpful insights about food.

Just my 2 cents...

 

How do you know this? I mean, this is not a new concept -- a paper I joined in 1982 was covering participatory sports with a weekly section when I got there and there was little outcry or circulation drop when they finally killed the thing. More recently, newspapers have tried this and no one's seen a leap in circulation. I've yet to see any evidence that adding recreation to a sports section translates into more readers.

 

Check this by Stienstra:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/05/SPDIR47201.DTL