By Chris Philips, Managing Editor
This month marks several milestones for Fishermen’s News. When my brother Peter
and I purchased the paper in 2001, we inherited an experienced staff that
immediately retired, leaving us to hire an editor, a sales manager, and
accounting manager and a circulation manager. Over the years, we have assembled
a staff of talented individuals, and the paper you see today is the result of
their hard work.
Our first editor left in June of 2005, and I took over the
editorial duties. In August of that year, Jim Cole, who had been a friend and
professional colleague of my father’s for decades, approached me about a
project. Jim is an industrial designer and draftsman who has worked for the
country’s leading naval architecture firms for more than 50 years, and he has
always wanted to write a book on the historical fishing vessels of the Pacific
Northwest. He finally came to the conclusion that the best way to get started
would be to write a series of columns for Fishermen’s
News. I wholeheartedly agreed, and Jim submitted his first column of the
new series, Drawing on Our History, for the December, 2005 issue.
After several years of submitting columns, Jim’s real work
began in earnest in September 2010 when he and our lead book designer Marilyn
Esguerra started crafting Drawing
on Our History: Fishing Vessels of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, along
with editor Petyr Beck, of Documentary Media.
Jim Cole’s magnum opus is a gorgeous showcase of Jim’s life’s
work, and includes descriptions of the boats, from the earliest Native American
canoes to the most modern freezer longliners, with line drawings, pen and ink
sketches and beautiful watercolors. Anyone interested or engaged in the West
Coast commercial fishing industry should see this amazing book. Jim Cole will
be on hand at the Fishermen’s
News booth (220) at the Pacific
Marine Expo on Thursday, November 21st, between 2 pm and 4 pm, to sign copies
of his new book.
About the time we started working with Jim Cole, we found a
talented salesman, Bill Forslund, who has contributed greatly to our current
success. His hard work over the years has helped us grow in size and
circulation, and we remain the most widely circulated commercial fishing
publication on the West Coast.
With the help of our staff, our talented contributors and our
loyal advertisers, as well as the continued support of our subscribers, we have
grown to the point where it makes sense to have the circulation of Fishermen’s
News audited by an independent auditor, as our sister publication, Pacific Maritime Magazine is audited. This new audit simply confirms
that the subscribers who read Fishermen’s
News are indeed the people we
say they are. The subscription forms you have been filling out for years, with
a box to check your industry affiliation, will be checked to confirm that we
are indeed sending the paper to the industry. This will allow us to better
serve our advertisers.
More importantly, I’m excited to announce that, after 68
continuous years of publishing a tabloid newsprint publication,Fishermen’s
News is upgrading to a
four-color, glossy magazine, starting with the January 2014 issue. Peter and I
have been publishing magazines for 25 years, and we’ll put our production staff
up against any competitor’s staff in terms of style, efficiency and quality of
work – especially those who outsource their production overseas.
We hope you’ll like the new format, and we hope you’ll give
us feedback on what we can do better (and what we’re doing well). While the
format will change, we’ll keep all of our established contributors and continue
to provide the best coverage of the West Coast fishing industry, from San Diego
to St. Paul Island.