A fairly eclectic collection of topics for a single blog post – there’s so much to do / read / fish / eat and so little time.
Wayne Mumford of WillFishforWork fame has a very nice post up about fishing for Grayling up on Rogers Lake in the Flathead (more or less the northwestern corner of Montana). That’s his pic above, and his post titled Arctic Grayling is a must read today; here’s the teaser quote –
The weather was typical for this time of year, rain, wind, enough sun to know it was there and thankfully no snow. The Grayling were definitely on. I won’t even say how many fish we caught; no one would believe me. How many times we were doubled up and trying to keep fish untangled I won’t say either; no one would believe me. It was one of those days.
If you’re not following Wayne’s blog, he’s a talented professional photographer, writes well, and has excellent taste in music.
We’re now only two days away from publishing the first of our Good Chi Weekly Journal newsletters. The format will expand and improve as we go, and our promised one sentence or less update of rivers in south central and southwest Montana and soon to be Yellowstone will be included. It’s FREE, will be delivered weekly, and all you need to sign up with is your name and a verifiable email. Hot damn, go to it – we’re astounded at the sign up over the past five days without an issue even being released yet.
On yet another note – there’s been a fair amount of discussion over the past several days regarding Amazon’s upcoming release of Kindle 3 tomorrow morning. The technical buzz is that the Kindle 3 will be bigger, about the size of a piece of paper, will remain black and white, and carry a bevy of new formatting options.
Yahoo Finance even interviewed mega technical blogger OM Malik of GigaOm who (at least in my opinion) correctly identified that the real buzz about the impending release of Kindle 3 has been the discussion of using it to replace textbooks (probably a good idea in many respects) as well as the ‘long odds’ potential that it could revive the ailing newspaper industry and perhaps even the broader world of ‘dead-tree’ journalism. That is a true ‘long-shot’, as at least in my humble opinion what ails newspapers is far, far more than a format issue – it’s quite simply (and yes, far over-simplified) a content issue.
In the interest of full and complete disclosure – I do not own a Kindle and don’t intend to (nor do any of my closest friends or family). In my decidedly traditional world, at least when it comes to books, books are meant to be held, dogged-ear, scuffed, and displayed on a decent shelf like an army of old, welcome, comfortable friends.
On the other hand, I agree with those who opine that the future for much of journalism is headed to online delivery. Newspapers are dying agonizingly slow, painful deaths much like the Western movie heroes of past decades – staggering down the street with four or five oozing wounds, stumbling, staggering, finally to fall dead in the dust.
Several of our team recently spent a very interesting two hours in a local bookstore’s coffee shop looking through a stack of a dozen or so ‘dead-tree’ fly fishing magazines. Almost (and I mean almost) every one had a piece or two of considerable value, though plowing through the pages and pages of tired advertising, the how to articles, pictures of the same faces in the same places left me somewhat uninspired (to say the least).
Give me a big monitor and the latest issue of Catch – now I’m inspired.
There’s been a fair amount of discussion (an inspired one recently on The Trout Underground) around the blogs of what the future might hold for the future of fly fishing media, specifically magazines. Opinions very widely on the issue as with most anything related to our sport.
My guess is you won’t be reading a future issue of Fly Fisherman on your Kindle. You might not be reading Fly Fisherman at all in a few years. Not to pick on Fly Fisherman – they’re just one of the bulwarks of the genre that we’ve all bought and read at some point in the past.
My guess is that you will be reading, viewing and enjoying new and innovative multimedia fly fishing ‘magazines’ over the next few months and years. Vanity projects will come and go. Enjoy the show; it’s going to be interesting….
