Carp Fishing In The UK

[poliphilo]

Do you know how many glossy magazines devoted to carp fishing are published in the UK?

The answer is at least six. I was in a queue at the post office this morning and I counted them.

They have titles like Carp Fishing Monthly and Total Carp and all have covers showing a grinning man holding an enormous fish. Perhaps it's the same fish. Perhaps they pass it around.

Name an interest or hobby- and it'll have a glassy magazine devoted to it. If its a popular thing- like genealogy or rock music or even tattoos- there'll be a whole raft of different magazines.

Who buys them all? How do magazines manage to flourish in an era when newspapers are closing? How many carp fishermen are there in Paddock Wood?

Comments

[matrixmann]

I'd say hobby magazines still are not like regular newspapers.
Circulating around a certain field, you don't find that much information about a subject online concentrated in one spot. The only exceptions to this are magazines dealing with computer topics (but that circumstance seems very logical).
Apart from that, getting to know something out of your subject otherwisely only works by joining forums or groups in social networks, but even then - people saying they're interested in a subject doesn't mean they can give you a lot of information about it.
So to say... Hobby magazines can still survive because their network around a subject is much smaller and the factual information doesn't circulate around that freely like, for example, politics where everyone can have a little knowledge and pump it up to a blubble, nothing needs to be true with that. You need deeper research for that and that's what no majority of people has the contacts for, the tangency with the subject and which the least of them has the time for to put it all in a readable collage.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There must be a demand for them, but it still amazes me that the market can sustain six very similar mags on the same subject.