Sporting Journal Radio is now The Fish Hunt Forever Podcast.

Change is hard. It’s even harder when it’s something that’s been a big part of your life. Sporting Journal Radio is in it’s 13th year and has done a show every week for 676 weeks.

That’s too much math for the amount of coffee I’ve had so far today. But, it was time for a new podcast name.

The Beginning

What started out as an idea at Game Fair between Matt Soberg, Ben Brettingen and myself, has grown into a trusted source for outdoor content.

Since I had a radio background, we created the show as a partner to the Minnesota Sporting Journal Magazine. Special thanks to the De La Hunts and the KK Radio Network in Park Rapids for airing it on a bunch of their stations right away. WDAY in Fargo and KNSI in St Cloud soon followed. We ran it for a few years before I was hired to host Northland Outdoors TV. One of the stipulations of that hire was that I had to stop publishing the magazine. Without that component, we changed the name to Northland Outdoors Radio to reflect the new show.

One year into a 3 year plan, the people in corner offices decided to pull the plug. So we had to go through a name change again. Since we’d expanded into North Dakota, we decided to drop “Minnesota” from the name. Sporting Journal Radio was born (again?).

A New Podcast Name Again

Anytime you make a name change, it takes awhile for people to catch on. Even the radio affiliates continued to run promos that said “Northland Outdoors Radio.” After some time and lots of emails, things were running smoothly once again.

The First Outdoor Video Podcast?

Then 2020 hit. Global pandemic. Social distancing. Zoom meetings. While most of our interviews are remote anyway, we weren’t greatly affected. We did however, notice the change in the way people were consuming content. Podcasts had gotten popular and video podcasts were starting to pop up.

I didn’t know of any video podcasts in the outdoor space yet. Things were happening at a rapid pace, despite everyone sitting at home doing nothing. Michigan was banning outboard motors. Signs were being put up at access in Minnesota telling you to stay 6 feet apart. At a boat launch. OUTDOORS. What was happening??

Remember when guides could start having people in their boats again?

I began doing daily videos. Filming myself with updates that went out over social media. I feel like we were actually one of the first outdoor podcasts to start doing video. As things calmed down, I went back to the once-per-week schedule. Dan Amundson graduated from Bemidji State and started working for the show, eventually taking over the role of producer.

A New Podcast Name and a Radio Network

While we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our radio affiliates, more and more video podcasts were starting to pop up. Some of the bigger outdoor podcasts were building studios and buying cameras. Everyone’s budget went way up as the production value became a more important part of the show.

Our focus shifted to be more video friendly. We incorporated more video elements to make this more of a “tv” show versus “radio.” Our format was structured to be more long form in the style of other podcasts. We still had to fit our show into the radio format, so it became a hybrid. Radio listeners still had hard breaks with local news and weather. Podcast listeners enjoyed more freeflowing conversation that goes longer than what you hear on the radio. If you were (un)lucky, you even got to see our ugly mugs on our YouTube channel. Despite the popularity of swearing in podcasts, we have to keep it clean for FCC broadcast. Although we do believe in keeping our show clean for all audiences anyway.

We dove into YouTube headfirst and realized that it wasn’t going to be easy. We tried uploading just segments. We explored categorizing our segments into just fishing or hunting content. We had “subgroup” names for them. Figuring out the algorithms and best practices took some trial and error. Ultimately, we settled on full shows and YouTube shorts to keep things simple.

Why Did We Choose a New Podcast Name?

While the show was growing and staying ahead of the changing podcast landscape, we still ran into people who were a little confused by the name. To build a show that’s more podcast friendly, yet still have the word “radio” in the title, didn’t compute to them.

According to AI: “A name is incredibly important as it serves as a fundamental aspect of personal identity and shapes how others perceive and interact with an individual.”

If our name doesn’t accurately represent what we do, we won’t succeed. The other issue was with the “Sporting Journal” aspect. For older sportsmen and women, that name paints a clear picture: A respected outdoor media outlet, most likely full of outdoor writers, spinning yarns of days afield and sips of coffee on a brisk fall day. There’d be an tasteful illustration of an over/under opened across someone’s shoulder as an anxious pointer looks ahead.

In today’s world, for younger generations who grew up on YouTube, “Sporting Journal” might mean something completely different. In fact, I had one encounter recently with a host of a new outdoor podcast who wasn’t familiar with what we do. When he was told our name, he asked if we talked about football and baseball. Ouch.

We’d been kicking around the idea of changing the name for a couple of years now and this interaction sealed the deal. If you’re not engaging with everyone you can, you can miss them forever. It makes it very important that your name spells out what you do in the simplest terms.

We created the “Fish Hunt Forever” brand with the idea that our podcast would ultimately get rebranded as part of it. It reflected our values of hunting and fishing and working to preserve those traditions. Then our numbers started climbing. We were getting big views on our reels and shorts. The SJR500 was getting really popular.

Did We Risk Losing Momentum with a New Podcast Name?

Did we risk losing this momentum if we changed the name?

We had a huge turnout at River Bend Resort for the Rainy River tourney this spring. We thought this might be a great time to change the name, since we had a big audience. But, with all the success we were having, we ultimately decided to hold out until the right time.

With Fall quickly approaching and with it the transition to hunting season, we decided that it’s time. Now the fun begins.

A New Podcast Name To-Do List

Changing all the names over on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and X. Oh, and don’t forget about YouTube! We had a dilemma: Do we continue with two channels? One for podcasts and one for videos? That seems confusing. Since YouTube has incorporated a “podcasts” option, we can start focusing on building one Fish Hunt Forever channel for everything.

This week, we announced the change. onX has been a great partner of ours and since Ben Brettingen was scheduled to be on the show, we figured it was a perfect time to do it. This will be the last podcast on the Sporting Journal Radio YouTube channel. Starting next week, new shows will be on the Fish Hunt Forever channel.

We have big plans to keep creating the best outdoor podcast we can. We appreciate all of you who have been with us from the start, including Joe Henry from Lake of the Woods Tourism. He’s been on almost every week for…12 years I think?

Thank You To Those That Have Supported Us

We have many other sponsors to thank who’ve stood by us over the years. Saskatchewan Tourism has been a great partner, along with Tazin Lake Lodge and Trails End Outfitters. Haybale Heights on Devils Lake has been with since 2018. There are a lot of other sponsors we’re thankful for over the years. We do have room for more so if you’d like to be a part of this growing brand, let us know. We’ve expanded our video arm to include many tourism destinations and can create marketing materials such as high-res stills, reels/shorts, and hype videos.

We’ve started traveling to destinations all over the world, creating content for the tourism departments, while creating vlog-style videos and films for our channel. We document the travel, recommend lodging and eating options and showcase the opportunities that are there. We call that a “Win-Win” in the biz.

Thanks for continuing to support us through this name change and make sure you subscribe to Fish Hunt Forever wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube. If you followed or Subscribed to Sporting Journal Radio, you shouldn’t have to do anything, other than subscribing to the Fish Hunt Forever YouTube Channel.

Thanks for listening/watching/supporting!