The Alternative Angler – Them and Us?

Never mind smelling the flowers, don’t forget to take time out to see the satirical side of fishing life and grab a laugh along the way as well. So here’s a regular column from Kevin Perkins to remind us that life is for laughing at, or taking the p*** out of, whenever we can.

Them and Us?

By them, I mean the legitimate angling press (for want of a better term) and by us, I mean those who haunt the murky underworld of fishing websites (and by that, I probably just mean me). I have no great desire for fame and fortune. Fabulous wealth for scant reward would be nice, but it isn’t really necessary for me to survive. I missed out on the chance of further education, so I have no great academic qualifications to bolster my standing in the community.

So what do I do? I had tended to bumble along life’s path until some five years ago, when for some unknown reason I sent off an article to FM. I don’t now why I had written the thing, as I’d never, ever, done anything like it before. Well that’s not strictly true, I had sent off a couple of ‘Victor Meldrew’ like rants to the local papers, regarding the nepotistic goings on amongst some of the ‘marry your cousins, eat your babies’ types in my area, which to my surprise, were printed. This resulted in me having anonymous crayoned letters shoved through my letterbox by twelve-fingered villagers who had an ever so slightly opposing viewpoint to mine, and suggesting I might like to leave town (Pah! I was moving anyway……..).

A couple more speculative articles were despatched to FM, and lo and behold, they got put up as well, and an almost secondary career as an article writer lurches into life. But now it is confession time, I must admit to trying to be unfaithful. Every now and then I get ideas above my lowly station in life and offer one of my inane ramblings to the editors of the angling press. And every time I do, I get the same response back from on high that what I am having the temerity to offer up is ‘not for them, and is not the sort of thing that their readers want’.

To give you a prime example, the following is the actual wording of a reply I received earlier this week: “Thanks for getting in touch. I’ve had a look through the articles you sent, and whilst they are well written and you obviously can write, unfortunately, the contents are really not the kind of things we are looking for at the moment.”

From this, it seems I can take comfort in that this particular editor thinks I at least have some faintly passable scribbling ability, but what I write about is of no real interest. I take it that the ‘at the moment’ is a crumb of comfort tagged on at the end, and in reality it means ‘never’.

The missive continues: “Rightly or wrongly (you may consider the latter) we are, in the main, looking for articles that have some direct tactical/technical content. This content can be included in stories to illustrate the tactical/technical points”. I glean from this that he is looking for ‘how to’ or ‘I did this’ articles to fill his magazine, which is invariably what the content consists of, from cover to cover, month in, month out, apart from the very important advertising of course.

From this I take it that there is a rigid, almost formulaic structure to acceptable articles, which must possess said tactical/technical content, or rather, it must include ‘I went fishing to such and such venue, using this bait and that tackle and the results were…..’

And that, dear reader, is exactly what you want to see, week in, week out, month in, month out, apparently. It must be so because that is what I have been told, repeatedly.

Is there a whiff of cynicism in the air, maybe? But if all those editors are correct, then I am obviously wrong in writing the articles that I do for FM. My pitch to these editors is that although what I write is different, that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Is it really such a risk to allocate half a page every now and then for someone (and no, it doesn’t have to be me) to offer up something ‘different’ from the norm? Will circulation plummet because of it, will the letters page be stuffed full of complaints from anglers demanding an instant return to what they were used to, or rather what they have been told they should be used to?

I suspect that in these editor’s eyes it’s a case of stick with what you know, and don’t step out of the comfort zone. Personally, and that’s very personally, I am tired of seeing the same type of articles regurgitated for edition after edition. There are articles where I see the same old faces holding what appear to be the same fish and I just switch off and don’t bother to read them. And by this, I am not a ‘flicker’, I actually buy the papers and magazines, and probably recycle them without reading even half the content.

The occasionally different article, something like a day in a fish farm, or water treatment works, perhaps out and about with an EA bailiff, (sorry, dreaming!) a view of canal anglers from a narrowboat, a piece from twitchers who are anglers. The engineering that goes into a modern centrepin reel, how rods are made and the different cloths, resins and mandrel profiles involved, things like that would perhaps simulate an upturn in readership by broadening the appeal of the publication. But unless these editors are made aware that you want something slightly different, you will continue to get what you are given, and like it.

So where does this leave me? If my incoherent ramblings have far too narrow an appeal for the majority of anglers, then it follows that I have been knocking myself out for the past five years, just to keep half a dozen or so of you on FM amused, then more fool me. In order to broaden my appeal, the (trying to be entertaining) articles have to stop, I must conform to the proper writing guidelines, and ensure that my efforts are packed with technical and tactical details, because that’s what the angling public want.

Or is it?