"Shooting Sportsman" is a fine magazine and will continue to be so.
Vic Venters, Doug Tate and others have always contributed articles that are of interest to us, but maybe not all of us. Each issue of Shooting Sportsman will not be attractive to everyone, just as DGJ is not always on the mark to all of us.
However, these magazines have contributed to the love of double barrel and o/u shotguns that we all love and without them we would be less blessed than we are.
Keeping a magazine business turning a profit is a real problem in this age of the internet. They have to do what they have to do to stay in the black. If long time articles are not getting the draw that they had in the past, what can a editor do? I ask this question because I do not know.
It is not just the sporting and gun magazines that are in trouble. Look at what happened to the magazine "Southern Living". It is now a piece of trash from its heyday and will probably go boots up.
The new entry "Garden and Gun" is now a coloring book for ad writers, and I stopped reading it a couple of years back. It has some of the most beautiful and well done ads that I have ever seen. I hope that they can make it a success, but I do not know what their target readers are. If it is Millennials, then they are barking up the wrong tree.
I can remember in my 76 years when Sports Afield went downhill; something happened and it woke up and now is better, but not good enough for me to subscribe to it. It is still not like it was in the 1950's when I started reading it and it will never be; and I hope that it will not be. There was much about the 1950's 1960's and so on that I liked but there was much that I wish to forget.
I like fine wine, but I do not like sour grapes.
