Stop and think for a moment.
The print media once played a major role in our society. We got our daily news from major newspapers, and many cities had two of them; there were almost half a dozen weekly news magazines; there were magazines for homemakers, hunters, fisherman, model airplane enthusiasts, shooters, amateur photographers, amateur builders, auto enthusiasts, and on and on.
There was a lot of demand for the print media, and to meet that demand there was a large, varied industry, that industry was funded in large part by advertising, and that industry provided livelihoods for a large number of reporters and writers.
All of the great writers of old are dead and gone, and only a very few of them have been replaced by people from a new generation. Why? The industry is a thing of the past. Why? The demand is gone. Why? New technology has largely replaced the printing press.
Are there writers as great as Jack O'Connor? Maybe, maybe not, but if there are, does anyone think for a moment that their employers would have a business reason to fund hunts with the leaders of foreign governments, as one remembers with Jack?
No, of course not.
Want to know what's going on today? Well, if Newsweek and Life Magazine were still printed, you wouldn't wait for them, would you?
Want to know about the latest about auto pistols, or automobiles? You can find out before the coffee has finished brewing, and by the way, you can brew coffee more quickly today, too.
The world has changed. There is no way for dozens of magazine authors, the thousands of newspaper reporters, and the hundreds of photojournalists to make a living in those professions today.
There were quite a few gun magazines, and there were even more "outdoor" magazines, each with its own gun editor. Now there are very few indeed.
I saw an ad for a new auto pistol in a recent and very thin edition of The American Rifleman. That's all there was on it --one small ad. But it caught my interest, and I was able to find out all I wanted to know very quickly without waiting for a magazine article about it.
Welcome to the new world. It is a world largely without major newspapers, with few magazines, and therefore, without many well known writers. If you haven't noticed, it is also a world without service station road maps.
Things have changed.