HankB said:
That's why I just roll my eyes at some gun writers (not you, Charlie!) who sneeringly refer to gun forums as "the Errornet" - or worse. Yes, there's plenty of bad information on the net - but most forums are self-correcting, and the " . . . work up in small, 2.0 to 3.0 grain increments . . . " mistake will be corrected quite promptly; within minutes perhaps, most likely hours. And after a few days, the topic will have been beaten to death.
When an error appears in a gun rag, it's going to be AT LEAST until the next issue before any correction is issued.
Hank -
Print is dying a very slow cancerous death, the kind where you wither away and never seem to actually completely die; but you get all the suffering. When I was writing for the gun magazines, I just didn't have anywhere near the fun I thought it would be, just too constraining. I didn't like having to "settle" for what I would write about; I wanted to write what I wanted to write about. Believe it or not, Charlie Petty was my nemesis but he didn't know it. I guess Charlie and I just thought a lot alike, but (no surprise here) Charlie was a bit quicker in his thinking. Seemed like every truly good idea I had to write about, when I called the editor he'd say, "Oh Charlie's writing about that very thing"…DOH!!
But it wasn't all Charlie, and it most certainly wasn't Charlie's fault. Him, like so many others had paid their dues and earned the right to get first pick over what they would write about. I wasn't, nor did I have any intention of being a full time gun writer, so I would always have to play second fiddle to the guys who where "active duty" to my weekend warrior; as should be. The other issue I had was, the other articles I suggested that fell on deaf ears was because it wasn't the direction that the editor wanted his magazine to go. Which is a neat way of saying, we have a very tiny appetite for the older stuff because it doesn't generate advertising dollars.
So that's why I set off on my own last November and (with the help of two business partners) created ShootersJournal.net, MY online "magazine". This is the future of firearms journalism and it is the medium that will continuously grow and grow while the print medium withers on the vine. With ShootersJournal.net I just MAY become a full time writer (I'm on the fence on that issue), and take my web magazine into some exciting places. My hope is to keep most of it free, but I MAY offer some premium subscription content in the future; we'll see about that. Thus far, I've been concentrating on quantity rather than quality. The quality is good, in fact I've received some very encouraging feedback and we're getting industry players interested in advertising, which will help us further develop the site. I have provided the baseline content, enough to give people something to read, now we enter into the next phase, a re-design of the look and feel, along with what is (to me) more interesting content with more high quality photos, and literary content of a higher quality. We've even began a very small forum to discuss the articles as they appear. Hope some here can stop in and check things out, and maybe even say hi.
