This thread has cheered me up tremendously. You get going in the right direction and get some good discussion going and you learn a thing or two, that's what it's about.

Matt, on the writing thing... I have done a few articles over the years.

I did one on saltwater swimbaits for freshwater bass for Inside Line back around 99/00. I wrote the article and the editor at Inside Line (Bubba) did some edits to it before publishing. I was a little disappointed at how heavily it was edited but the content was still true to the message, and I was always proud of that article (it's the same one that is on the site here in the freshwater section).

The next one I did was an interview style article for West Virginia Game and Fish Magazine with a nice gentleman named Brian Sak. Mike Shaw was also featured in that article. It was about swimbaits, and I thought it went well, just low key.

More recently I did another interview style article for In Fisherman's 2005 Bass Guide about kickboat and float tube fishing. John Lake was also featured. Terry Battisti wrote the article based on our interviews. It came out pretty well but I was upset about the fact that the editor at In Fisherman completely fabricated a quote for me, something about a women's rowing team. We had a lot of trouble with photos on that deal too, like Nico and I brought my boat and my kickboat to a lake one day and fished for like 14 hours to get a few fish for photos (Nico got a 12.6 that day) and we shot off a bunch of pics, and they just didn't come out very good. We basically went to great lengths to try to get photos of a big fish, and we got the fish and took the photos but it didn't come out, which was frustrating.

The last article I did was the Bass West article, again with Terry and also featuring CV. I thought the article came out pretty good and it was only edited slightly if at all. The funny part was they put a pic of this dude (Hano Hano I think is his name) from Arizona in the article. So when you look at that article, that guy in the pic is not me or CV. This was laughable, but still irritating.

So... the whole article thing has been a mixed bag for me really. What I really don't like about it is the potential for your message to get distored through editing or misquotes, or putting a pic in the article of someone that is not you etc. So for now I am going to just keep my articles here on the site, where I can say what I want and know that it's exactly how I want it to be. Sure it won't be so perfectly edited and I'll make punctuation and spelling errors, but ... for the guys who are serious, they'll find it anyway.

The internet is so much more avant garde than print media anyhow. By the time something makes it to a national magazine, guys have already had it for a year and if it's to do with big baits or california type stuff, it's probably been talked about here. So why not just come on here and find out about it the minute it happens :)

On the question of getting paid, no I have never recieved money for interviews or articles. Money is available depending on who you are and who you're working with but I just haven't cared enough to persue it.

-Rob