Accessibility killing outdoor news
Technology has changed the outdoor journalism business, but the outdoor journalism industry has not adapted.
Outdoor journalism is very healthy in terms of the number of people doing it and the myriad of outlets where outdoor content appears. In addition to conventional online outdoors magazines, which are really digests, there are all kinds of specialty blogs for any niche interest under the sun. There are pure bowhunting sites, but you can drill deeper to find sites for only Mathews or Hoyt bows.
There are scores of blogs featuring hunting and fishing adventures of people that make their living doing other things. The industry refers to them derisively as “hobbyists.”
Ultimately, it demonstrates the overall popularity of outdoors content, but it also represents the fragmentation of outdoors content that has obliterated the traditional business model of outdoor journalism. The Outdoors section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for example, is generalist. We dabble in a lot of things here, and we get really deep in a few things. Our speciality is telling stories about Arkansas people and places and covering the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Outdoor communication doesn’t exist as any industry anymore. The Southeastern Outdoor Press Association, once the citadel for outdoors journalism in the Southeastern United States, ceased to exist in 2022. One of its fatal failures was ignoring the ascendancy and then the legitimacy of online outdoors content.
The Outdoor Writers of America and the Association of Great Lakes Outdoors Writers have fared better, largely because they recruited Gen Y and Millennials as members and then promoted them into their leadership.
Slowly, they are addressing a few of the main problems with the unregulated world of online outdoors content. A persistent problem is that the online universe is unrestrained and ungoverned by traditional journalistic standards. It legitimizes ignorance and misinformation.
The problem that haunts mainstream outdoors journalists is that many prominent online outlets don’t pay for content, and many providers don’t expect to be paid for producing content. The ones that do pay don’t pay much. This has knocked a lot of professional providers out of business.
That paradigm has just about killed the outdoor photography market. A cover shot for Outdoor Life or Field & Stream used to be worth about $2,000. They and other magazines paid good money for generic stock photos to illustrate articles. Writers that provided their own photos got paid a lot more.
Now, outlets expect contributors to provide art for no additional compensation. And if Bob doesn’t do it, Jim will, which means Jim will get work and Bob won’t.
Smart phones enable anybody to take professional quality photos. I shoot most of my photos with an iPhone. My Nikon D7200 is always available, but I seldom use it because I seldom need it.
Shooting great photos with an SLR requires tinkering with exposure speeds and f-stops to get the right light saturation and depth of field. You shoot multiple exposures of the same shot at multiple speeds, two stops above and two stops below the sweet spot, as well as one or two at the sweet spot.
A smart phone makes all of those calculations for you. Then, you can edit the photo within the camera app to adjust warmth, hue, saturation, black point, shadows, exposure and contrast. You can crop the image and apply filters if you wish.
You can do all of this with video, too. It’s easy. An amateur can do it and provide professional-grade images.
Then, and here’s the most important part, you can post the image online in real time to a blog, website or social media site. And, of course, you also get feedback in real time. This development has revolutionized the news business, but it is the standard for outdoor journalism.
As a result, there is a veritable ocean of readily accessible cheap, if not free, content that illustrates everything from tying a Palomar knot to working a turkey slate call to disassembling and reassembling a Ruger Mk. II semiautomatic pistol.
Few providers have learned how to monetize this model. It probably doesn’t matter because economics don’t appear to drive the content end of the industry. That matters only to hosts, and they love cheap content.
A lot of it is great content, too. It’s a pity that creators don’t value their work more highly.