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This is a dedicated thread for discussing article: Search for a (Writing) Star Update
If they're looking for writers, why the insistence on supplying images?
Product placement opportunities. If they (the hopefuls) can't get this right they'll never get anywhere in angling writing.........{
Images and writing go together; without good images to illustrate the point, the article never works as well.....
Tend to agree Alan, but good images can also enhance good writing.
One of my fantasies is to have a professional angling photographer follow me about on my trips just on the off chance that when I do catch something a bit special, it's recorded in all its beauty.
As an aside, for those into stunning angling photography, you can do no better than subscribe to Catch Magazine:
Catch Magazine - Fly Fishing Video - Film - Photography
Sorry, Squire, that came out grumpier than I meant it to; it's just that some of the very best angling writers were just that - writers who fished (Chalmers) or anglers who wrote well (Walker's "Rustic Runyon" pieces and a fair few bits of Plunket Greene's "Where the Bright Waters Meet" had me in stitches) - if they didn't have any pictures for a piece, no-one cared, or the publishers got them elsewhere.
They were mostly amateurs; Mottram a doctor in real life, and with his powers of observation, probably a fine one; Walker, of course, an engineer; Bazeley a teacher, iirc; Chalmers ("At The Tail of the Weir"), was a banker as well as a poet and author but I'm not sure he was actually that good an angler...
Sheringham was the only professional journalist/writer of the bunch that I cited so far as I know.
Nowadays, we have an angling media industry with people trying to make/get/keep jobs/careers going by feeding the angling public's "insatiable" appetite for ink; they need sales, and lots of 'em, and it shows; most of the cleverest, funniest, and most thoughtful, technical, and educational pieces I've read in the last decade have been written for internet sites, and rather more than half, by people with jobs outside angling. Paper magazines are struggling: getting more numerous and lower quality, but with loads of luvvly pictures. We're getting sated.
Pictures are, I feel, becoming a warning sign of no confidence in the quality of the text, unless they are so jaw-droppingly powerful that they could be on the cover of a "flagship" book. In which case, no-one cares much about the quality of the writing... at least, not that of the photographer or artist...