April 08, 2025
By In-Fisherman Staff
In-Fisherman Editor in Chief Doug Stange sits down with host Thomas Allen for his second interview reminiscing about the early days of In-Fisherman magazine. Doug talks about the evolution of the content, cover art development, writer acquisition, and much more. Doug shares a lot of exciting and entertaining stories about the days of old and brings us into the modern age of In-Fisherman magazine. You’ll not want to miss this edition of In-Fisherman Storyline.
Truncated transcript:
00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:18.000: You're listening to In-Fisherman Storyline. North America's top voice in multi-species freshwater angling. Here is your host, Thomas Allen.
00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:29.000: Doug, thanks for letting me chase you down to do another one of these. I'm excited to dig into more stories. As you are, I can tell.
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00:00:29.000 --> 00:01:09.000: So the last time we talked, we got the story of your early days in Iowa and your time with Toad Smith, and those are clearly important elements to what transpired In-Fisherman. But what I really want to start talking about is the early days putting together a magazine. I mean, today everything's so instant, so fast, right? We have email, we have text message, you've got all these FTP sites and everything's–you get people responding to assignments quickly and whatever, but back then, how did you make an assignment? Who did you know? How did that work?
00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:54.000: Well, it was a people intensive process because–Okay, so I–you know, I mean, how far do you want to go back? You know, say '81 was when I got here, and at that point the staff was relatively small, but it increased in the next five years, so by the time '86 rolled around, I think I was working with a staff of like eight here, so–and you had just more people doing more things because–and the magazines were bigger, you know? We were putting out–the classic magazine today is 68 pages, and that's what it boils down to. That's what you have, you know?
00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:21.000: The formula is advertising plus subscriptions plus newsstand sales, and most magazines didn't make it, and we–okay, so another story there. But–so you had this large–relatively large editorial staff, like four or five other editors, or three–you know, let's say four, by the time we got to '89 probably, but we also had editorial assistants, you had to have people typing. That was an intensive process.
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00:02:21.000 --> 00:03:01.000: Were they typing because stories would come in handwritten, or were they just copywriting? Rarely handwritten, but a few would come in like that, but typically it would come in–eventually you might get a disc, but basically you'd get a hard copy-typed article, so then that–you might either would edit on that, or you'd give this to the typist to type on legal paper. Legal paper, typically it was double-spaced, and then you would edit hard–you know, do hard editing on that with a red pencil, and give it back to the typist, and she would turn out another–crank out another copy.
00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:35.000: At some point, we always had in the old days, in which you still need to know, and I can't believe that magazines get by without copy editors. You've got people who are intensely engaged in the details of what's on this paper, and you cannot do adequate justice to the process of actually doing the–you know, whether it should be where he or she, or what–you know, all that process. So, but we'd–you have to, so that's where we are–we're at today, but it's a dangerous process to be without a copy editor, I can assure you…
