We are living in a golden age of bass fishing information. It’s not just that you can watch every minute of every Elite Series tournament, from 12 different angles, close-captioned for the language-impaired, narrated by those who truly know the sport. Rather, we’re going full steam ahead in the overlapping worlds of podcasts and YouTube. Each week, hosts and broadcasters including the Zaldains, Dave Mercer, Luke Dunkin, Randy Blaukat and Matt Pangrac take on the issues of the day. 

Actually, “take on” in an understatement. They grab the issues. They twist them this way and that way, inside out and right side back again. Then they dissect them further. If there’s a position to be had on something meaningful, someone, somewhere has expressed it.

I wish I had more time to listen. Generally I have time for one of these hour-plus long efforts each week, which means that I end up choosing based on the topic, the guest/s or the buzz around a particular kerfuffle. If I had more time to spare, I’d definitely listen to more. They’ve educated me about the sport I love, occasionally pissed me off, and more than once resulted in changing my opinion. The democratization of electronic media is, on the whole, a huge plus.

On the other hand, it has accelerated and perhaps put one nail in the coffin of the written word. We’ve never had much real journalism in bass fishing – there’s simply not a demand for it – but that demand has decreased along with (if not in lockstep with) the rise of the podcast. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I think it will have an impact on how the sport’s history is written. When I was on Matt Pangrac’s Bass Talk Live earlier this year, we discussed the “Greatest Beefs in Bass Fishing History,” and whether we were discussing JVD vs. Denny, Boyd vs. Carl, or anyone else, invariably we went back to BassFan’s contemporaneous daily accounting of the events to recall the details. The varying teams of Jon Storm, John Johnson and Todd Ceisner did and incredible job with the resources they had/have, and their work will stand as a monument to the times in which they wrote. 

Would we have that same attention to detail if those battles occurred today? Likely not from the tour-run media, and on the podcasts we get more opinionating than true journalism – not that they claim to be anything else. I think there’s still a need for an independent deep dive into a news-centric and semi-unbiased look at the daily events of the sport, but I’m not sure that the market exists, or that anyone is up to the task.