About Shooting Gazette

Shooting Gazette

Shooting Gazette was a British monthly magazine devoted to driven game shooting, published from 1989 until its final issue in May 2021. Founded in Lincolnshire and based for much of its later life at Stamford, it covered all aspects of driven shooting in the United Kingdom and abroad, offering advice on gamekeeping, interviews with leading figures in the shooting industry, and reviews of new shotguns, shooting clothing and equipment, together with a substantial gundog section. It was the official magazine of the Countryside Alliance Shooting Campaign, was edited from July 2004 by Will Hetherington, and passed through the hands of EMAP, IPC Media and TI Media before its owner Future plc discontinued it in 2021. This profile is written in the past tense, because the magazine no longer publishes.

The batch record for this directory listed the magazine under London. Its verified history places its founding in Lincolnshire and its base at Stamford, Lincolnshire, and that is the geography used here.

Founding in Lincolnshire in 1989

Shooting Gazette was founded in Lincolnshire in 1989, originally as a quarterly publication, then called The Shooting Gazette. It became a bi-monthly with the October/November issue of that same year, the first step in a progression that ended with it established as a monthly. A new magazine for the driven shooting world arriving at the end of the 1980s entered a well-defined field of British country sports publishing, alongside long-established titles such as The Field and Shooting Times, and it set out to serve one sport within that field in depth.

That specialisation was its founding idea. Rather than covering country life generally, The Shooting Gazette concentrated on driven shooting: the organised shoot day, the birds, the guns, the keepers and the dogs. Everything in the magazine's later, mature form, from its gamekeeping advice to its gundog reporting, followed from that single-sport brief adopted in 1989.

What the magazine covered

Shooting Gazette covered all aspects of driven shooting, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. Its contents included advice on gamekeeping, the practical management of shoots and their habitat and birds, and regular interviews with leading figures in the shooting industry. It reviewed new shotguns, shooting clothing and equipment, the tools and dress of the sport, for readers who bought, maintained and used them.

Its own descriptions to readers presented it in warm terms, as a kind of local paper for the global shooting community, put together by people with a passion for the sport, and as driven game shooting's journal of record, aiming to capture the experience of standing on the peg on a winter morning. Digital edition listings promised guidance on every aspect of shooting, from where to shoot and how to be a better shot, to buying a gun and etiquette, the social code that governs a formal shoot day. Stunning photography and specialist writers were the stated means to that end.

The gundog section

A distinguishing feature of Shooting Gazette was its gundog section. It offered advice on training and breeding, and reported on gundog trials around the country. The magazine's digital descriptions called it the leading gundog section in the sport, and dedicated issues, such as a gundog issue noted in its 2019 contents, gave the dogs extended treatment in their own right.

The prominence was logical. On a driven shoot the dogs, picking up and retrieving, are as much part of the day as the guns, and many readers kept, bred, trained and trialled gundogs as a pursuit in itself. A magazine that treated gundogs as a department, with training guidance, breeding advice and trials reporting, served that part of its readership with the same specialisation it brought to shotguns and gamekeeping.

Gamekeeping, guns and equipment

Two further departments defined the magazine's practical value. Its gamekeeping advice addressed the people who rear and manage game and run shoot days, a professional and semi-professional readership whose work determines the quality of the sport the magazine celebrated. Its reviews addressed the consumer side: new shotguns tested and assessed, and shooting clothing and equipment evaluated for readers spending significantly on both.

Alongside these stood the interview strand, regular conversations with leading figures in the shooting industry, from the gun trade to the estates and organisations of the sport. Features celebrated places and institutions as well: the magazine's London issue in May 2018, for example, was devoted to the capital's gunmaking names and the people behind them, and its Yorkshire coverage profiled the shoots, hotels, grounds and gun shops of a famous sporting county. Game cookery, too, appeared among its subjects, reflecting the place of game as food in the culture around shooting.

Editor and circulation

Will Hetherington was the editor of Shooting Gazette from July 2004, a tenure of almost seventeen years that covered the magazine's passage through IPC Media and TI Media to Future plc and its eventual closure. Long editorships give magazines their character, and Hetherington's name is the one attached to the title in its reference records for the whole of its later life.

Its recorded circulation, from the Audit Bureau of Circulations for January to December 2013, was 12,532 copies across print and digital editions. That figure places Shooting Gazette in the world of the specialist monthly: far smaller than a general consumer title, but reaching a defined, committed audience of participants in an expensive and organised sport, exactly the readers its advertisers in the gun trade and country clothing market wanted to reach. Its ISSN was 0957-4182, and its website was shootinggazette.co.uk.

The Countryside Alliance connection

Shooting Gazette was the official magazine of the Countryside Alliance Shooting Campaign. The Countryside Alliance is the campaigning organisation for rural sports and communities in Britain, and its shooting campaign defends and promotes game shooting. An official magazine relationship tied the title to that advocacy world.

The connection fitted the magazine's position. Shooting Gazette was not a neutral spectator of its sport: it was written by and for participants, published guidance intended to improve standards and conduct, and aligned itself institutionally with the body that campaigned for shooting's future. For readers, the magazine and the campaign were parts of one sporting culture.

Publishers: EMAP, IPC, TI Media and Future

The magazine's ownership history traces the consolidation of British magazine publishing. EMAP traded the title to IPC Media in 1996 in exchange for Classic Cars, a straight swap of specialist magazines between two of the industry's largest groups. Under IPC, and its successors, Shooting Gazette sat in a portfolio rich in country and sporting titles, which in the TI Media period included The Field, Shooting Times, Sporting Gun and Country Life.

TI Media, as IPC had become, was acquired by Future plc in 2020, Future having proposed the acquisition in October 2019. Shooting Gazette thus became a Future title in the final year of its life. It was discontinued by Future plc in May 2021, with the May 2021 issue as its last: the cover of that final issue is the one preserved in its reference records.

The world it served

To read Shooting Gazette's own accounts of itself is to meet a complete sporting world. Its pages assumed readers who shot through the winter season, kept dogs, knew their keepers and their gunmakers, cared about the etiquette of the peg and the quality of the hospitality, and read about where to shoot next. The magazine's preview and review coverage extended to the sport's calendar, including events such as the CLA Game Fair, where game cookery demonstrations, gundog and shooting displays and hundreds of trade stands gathered the same community the magazine served in print.

That completeness explains both its longevity and its vulnerability. For thirty-two years it served a stable, identifiable community well enough to hold a five-figure circulation as a monthly. When its final owner reviewed its portfolio in 2021, however, a single-sport print monthly, however loyal its readers, was an exposed kind of publishing property.

Closure in May 2021

Shooting Gazette was discontinued by Future plc in May 2021. The May 2021 issue was the final issue, closing a run that had begun as a Lincolnshire quarterly in 1989. No relaunch followed, and the title's web presence passed with it, although the subjects it covered continue to be served by other titles in the same former portfolio, notably Shooting Times and Sporting Gun, and by the Countryside Alliance's own communications.

The closure was part of the pattern of British specialist magazine publishing in the early 2020s, in which large groups acquiring portfolios of print titles reviewed them closely and closed those that did not fit their plans. Shooting Gazette had survived three changes of ownership group over thirty-two years; it did not survive the fourth.

Legacy

For the directory record: Shooting Gazette was a monthly field sports magazine, founded in Lincolnshire in 1989 as The Shooting Gazette, a quarterly that became bi-monthly the same year; traded by EMAP to IPC Media in 1996 in exchange for Classic Cars; edited by Will Hetherington from July 2004; based at Stamford, Lincolnshire; the official magazine of the Countryside Alliance Shooting Campaign; and discontinued by Future plc, which had acquired its owner TI Media in 2020, with a final issue in May 2021.

Its legacy is as the specialist journal of British driven shooting for a generation of sportsmen and women: the magazine that treated gamekeeping, gundogs, guns and shoot-day etiquette as subjects deserving a monthly of their own, and that chronicled the people, places and equipment of the sport from 1989 to 2021. Complete runs and back issues continue to circulate, and its name remains attached, in its readers' memory, to the peg on a crisp winter morning that its own descriptions so often invoked.