Well, it was an online poll. I'd imagine that if they had mailed out the poll on postage-paid cards in American Rifleman that the numbers would have been different...
...but I think the intertubes still would have been in the lead.
Of course, that's just oriented towards gun purchasing information. When it comes to news and current political issues, the monthly news magazine is practically dead.
Seriously, since we're talking about the NRA, how many of y'all used to get America's First Freedom rather than "Ducks & Muskets Monthly"? Yeah, me too. At least, I did until the rise of the new media meant that it had effectively become News I Read On Teh Intarw3bz A Month Ago. Compared to that, even a magazine that heaps praise on the Taurus Judge and spends more time talking about shooting at feathered things in one issue than I have in my entire life is useful.
22 comments:
Yup, dropped Americas First Freedom long ago for the American Rifleman. Still get American Handgunner and the occasional Shotgun News, but with the intarw3bz you can have all kinds of info at your fingertips ... both good and bad.
I don't even take the magazines. Don't have time to read them.
I remember waiting breathlessly for my copy of National Review, and National Geographic. Now anything I get in the mail that isn't a bill gets round filed posthaste
I'm not sure they would have gotten enough responses to get percentages less than 10%, given that the survey with the post paid envelope would have asked for a $100 gift, too.
I still get America's 1st Freedom and a bunch of similar magazines for browsing when I'm eating something too messy to risk dripping on a laptop.
Shotgun News.
Intel 3x/month, better than 6-9 months later...
Brian J.,
"I still get America's 1st Freedom and a bunch of similar magazines for browsing when I'm eating something too messy to risk dripping on a laptop."
The problem with 1st Freedom is it's all old news by the time it gets to you.
"zomg!!1! The Demo... er... Gun Grabbers are trying to pass a bill!" Yeah, Wayne, I know. I read about it at Instapundit four weeks ago, wrote my congresscritter already, and it got shot down in committee two days before this issue hit my mailbox...
I guess what I'm saying is that getting a monthly "news" magazine these days is like TiVo'ing CNN Headline News so you can watch it in four to six weeks....
My completely uninformed suspicion is that the magazine group doesn't want to go in the car of the internet group.
I still subscribe to one magazine. "The Horse: Backstreet Choppers" is, admittedly, not a gun magazine, but they do a good job of turning out a consistently good product 10 times a year (yeah, it's a weird schedule) and while there is similar content available on the web, it's definitely more of a dribs and drabs sort of thing there.
Honestly, it's an example that many magazines would do well to emulate, if they want to survive the onslaught of the web. I don't know exactly what the lessons to be learned there are, but as someone who has been on the internet for (*sigh*, dear god...) 21 years now, and acquires at least half of my information from same, I still buy the dead trees edition, and that's gotta say something.
I haven't subscribed to any magazines since I let my (free) subscription to Wired lapse after being a subscriber to that mag since issue 2.
Why should I wait around for someone to deliver a printed version of the internet to my door?
I take in American Rifleman out of nostalgia - my father is a Life Member and I grew up reading the mag.
That's about it - and I keep telling myself I need to look int the electronic delivery option
It is still too difficult to read using my laptop when seated on the throne in the house's smallest room. So print remains viable for uhhhh, niche markets.
I get American Rifleman in the electronic format. They should have kept their mag for women, although it wasn't as good as SAF's Women and Guns.
WV: rodle. What the Swiss sing while driving.
This is what I use for reading in the Littlest Room. And it works just fine. Weatherproofing (is desired) provided by Ziploc
I still get America's 1st Freedom and a bunch of similar magazines for browsing when I'm eating something too messy to risk dripping on a laptop.
That's what smartphones are for. :-)
I stopped paying attention to gun magazines, especially for actual information on actual guns, when it finally sank in that I had never, ever read a bad review of any gun in any magazine and was unlikely to ever do so. Certainly haven't paid for a subscription since then.
But you're right, Tam: If I read the NRA rag now I'd probably wonder where they'd been for the past month...
WV=poingedu. For when you simply must cure your poing's ignorance.
Joel,
"...I had never, ever read a bad review of any gun in any magazine and was unlikely to ever do so."
If you'd like to, I could name a couple magazines. :)
Both my wife and I are (NRA) members, so we get America's 1st Freedom as well as American Rifleman.
I enjoy reading Armed Citizen as well as some of the news calendar happenings.
I get Handloader, Rifle and Hunter electronically, and find that I don't read them as much as I do printed versions of other magazines that we get including AOPA Pilot, Trade-A-Plane and Pilot Getaways.
The financial rags all come in electronically as there are only certain things I'm looking for in them.
BUT, one of the prime number one reasons we continue to get America's 1st Freedom in the printed version is so we can leave it at places like our doctor's office, service retail places like Discount Tire where a lot of people wait with nothing to do and nothing to read, etc etc.
The electronic versions are good for those of us that are already in the choir. The printed versions are good to leave around for those we're wanting to join the choir and sing with us.
--AOA
As to "information" of every kind, the limitless volume and real-time nature of it on the 'tubes cannot be equalled, and any medium with the logistics problems of printed mags shouldn't throw good money after bad trying.
That said, there will always be a place, I hope, for periodicals that focus in-depth and with specificity on subjects of interest to a niche market. Not to sound too corny or dated about it, there's just something about the touch and feel and smell and comfort of a printed page whether magazine or book, and you can fall asleep reading on the couch and have it slide off on the floor with no electrical or economic repercussions.
But from the perspective of a retailer -and one would think this poll is really driving at this- I'd like to see a follow-up: "When shopping for a firearm, how are you most likely to purchase it?"
What's ironic is, just changing Firearms Magazines to Firearms Retailers, I suspect the sources and percentiles might remain about the same. For better or worse -and I think better- dead tree info sources ain't the only suppliers getting supplanted.
AT
I thumb thru QST every so often when I'm in the library, and there are a couple Masonic research periodicals I get; otherwise, there's nothing in the magazine world for me. Used to subscribe to Men's Health but I mean, c'mon - who am I trying to kid?
gvi
WV: roodske - 16-1/2 feet, unit of land measure in former Imperial Russia
Used to get "First Freedom" in order to leave them in Dr's offices; dropped it when I dropped my membership after the DISCLOSE deal with Shumer.
The car mags like Car Craft and Hot Rod are my last dead tree mags. The subscriptions run out in a few issues and I am not renewing.
The "tech" articles are listings of the parts that were donated with no real "how to" information.
"Budget Build" has come to mean something Lockeed-Martinesque.
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