Many of you might not know that I’ve been writing a monthly column for Bluff magazine for the past year and a half. The editor of Bluff, Lance Bradley, approached me in mid-2013 to take over the poker tells/behavior column that Mike Caro had been writing. If you’d like to see some of the articles I’ve written for Bluff, here’s a link.
Anyway, I was honored to be asked. I’ve always respected Bluff; I’ve never heard anything bad about the magazine and I’d read some good articles in there. And there are definitely some publications I would not write for. (For example, I wouldn’t write for Cardplayer magazine, not after they disrespected the poker community by running ads for Lock Poker long after it was known that Lock was not paying customer cash-outs and owed millions to its customers. Details here.)
But I did have a couple concerns: 1) that I wouldn’t be able to regularly write high-quality articles, and 2) that my efforts writing original stuff for Bluff would detract from my writing for my blog and other publications. In the end, I decided that the exposure/credibility, combined with the article pay-rate, made it a smart thing to do. Although it definitely has taken away from my blog writing, I think it’s been worth it overall.
Just a few days ago, it went public that Bluff was ceasing print operations and would solely now be an online, digital publication. Basically, like a lot of magazines these days, they’ve found that being in print is too expensive and that subscription is low, and that there’s not much to gain from it, compared to the low overhead and apparently higher return of focusing entirely on digital.
In concert with that, I’ll also be going from putting out an article every month to putting out an article every 6 weeks. This will be a much-easier schedule for me, as I find the monthly schedule has been tough to make happen lately while staying original, and the nature of digital publications give me much more freedom to set that schedule, so that’s nice.
I confess I did enjoy occasionally walking through a bookstore, picking up a Bluff magazine, and seeing my articles, so I’ll miss that. But I know this is a good move on their part and I wish them the best.