selling their readers short by keeping this kind of news compacted into 

 one spot in the paper. You're going to have a certain segment of the 

 public who expects the outdoors page every week. They're going to 

 turn to that and they're going to read it. I don't know how many 

 people pay attention to really in-depth issue coverage on those kinds of 

 pages. I personally am more than willing to devote a complete and 

 open, full-size newspaper page once a week to outdoors, hunting and 

 fishing type news. We have a couple of columnists who do a good job 

 for us on fishing topics. We deal with hunting seasons, fishing 

 seasons, whatever, and the entertainment type features about people 

 who are climbing mountains, skiing down mountains in the late spring 

 and that sort of thing. 



I think it's very important and I think that the outdoor writers in 

 the audience might be interested to know that most newspapers are not 

 set up in such a way that they can deal with very much free-lance 

 information. We have quite a few people come to the Herald Journal 

 who want to sell us an article. And they want to sell us an artice 

 that's 3,500 words long. Well hell, that's two-thirds or three-quarters 

 of an entire newspaper page. We simply can't do that. Outdoor 

 writers who are free-lancing and who are directing most of their 

 material to the national magazines are geared up to an entirely different 

 kind of writing than we handle in newspapers. I'm not saying that you 

 shouldn't ask whether or not a paper is willing to buy free-lance 

 material, but I think that if you do ask you had better be ready to 

 taylor the kind of writing that you do to the newspaper's format. But 

 again, most newspapers are not set up to deal with free-lance stuff. 

 They like to assign it to their staffers. Generally speaking, and this 

 is another big surprise I got from the survey we did, a lot of 

 newspapers in the Rocky Mountains have outdoors pages and more than 

 I thought have full-time outdoors editors. I don't know how they do 

 that. I don't know how they justify having one person spend all his or 

 her time dealing with outdoor news but they do it. And that's an 

 excellent situation as far as I'm concerned. 



As far as the hunting business is concerned, I think that there 

 has to be a balance in daily newspapers. And because we're looking 

 for a well-informed public, there has to be a better balance between the 

 issue oriented, the political stuff, the scientific stuff and the "me and 

 Joe" approach. In a daily newspaper you have a responsibility not only 

 to inform people, but you have to eritertain them. We have to publish 

 the damned horoscope. If we left the horoscope out of the paper the 

 public goes into an uprising. I resent, personally, that kind of space 

 utilization, but that's entertainment. Feature stories about hunting and 

 fishing I don't resent, but they are in the entertainment vein and I 

 think that too many of us are hanging on to the vestigial approach to 

 outdoors reporting, the first-person account of a great fishing trip 

 that's not really serving the public that well. It's good entertainment. 

 It's lively reading if it's written properly, but I think that people who 

 hunt and fish, trap, climb mountains or backpack deserve to be more 

 carefully informed about the issues that are affecting the kind of 

 recreation that they do. 



