Are the new owners of 128-year-old Field & Stream any different? They might be, and not just because they wear trucker hats. 

Country musicians Morgan Wallen and Eric Church have stepped forward as the famous faces of an investment group that acquired the hallowed sporting journal last year. They’ve positioned the purchase as an act of cultural preservation—Church considers the magazine part of the “fabric of America”—but they’re also hoping to profit from the multigenerational authority of a beloved brand and the outdoor-recreation boom. Notably, their strategy takes advantage of the power of their celebrity, and treats media as just one part of a multifaceted business model.

When Field & Stream’s previous owner, digital media group Recurrent Ventures, parent company of the Outdoor Life and Popular Science websites, folded the print edition four years ago, it ended more than a century of continuous publication. One of Church and Wallen’s first moves has been to restart the presses. Their first issue hit newsstands in June, with stories about bluegills (“America’s Gamefish”) and South Dakota’s prairie wetlands, and an illustrated cover featuring a leaping trout.

Field & Stream hotels, music, and more

Church, 47, admits that the decision to buy the publication was at least partly emotional. “Field & Stream was an indelible part of my childhood. That was my Bible anytime we went fishing,” he says. His memories of the battered old copies his grandfather kept in his Chevy pickup were a “big part of why, initially, it was so appealing” as an investment.

But the business model that sustained his grandpa’s Field & Stream is obsolete. That’s why Church and his partners have also acquired the Field & Stream retail brand from Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s the first time that both the media and retail rights have been under single ownership, a consolidation that could open a lot of doors—hotel doors, for starters: Field & Stream Lodge Co., a 50/50 joint venture between Starwood Capital Group and AJ Capital Partners (the company behind university-themed Graduate hotels), was announced last year. It will offer affordable lodging on the outskirts of national parks and other outdoor-recreation hubs. The brand’s first property will be unveiled in late 2024.

Starwood’s billionaire founder Barry Sternlicht and AJ founder and CEO Ben Weprin each own a personal stake in the brand, a shared interest that should lend that licensing deal an element of “reciprocal support,” according to Field & Stream president Doug McNamee. The media brand could create how-to guides for lodge guests; the lodging brand could incentivize guests to become subscribers.

In his previous job as president of Magnolia, the hugely successful Texas-based lifestyle brand, McNamee ran a multistream operation that could serve as a blueprint of sorts for this one, including a quarterly magazine that, he says, “set the pace” for associate ventures in retail, hospitality, and TV. He would love to cut a direct-to-retailer deal like the one that Magnolia founders Chip and Joanna Gaines currently have with Target, which sees them translating their home renovations brand into a product line that includes everything from bath towels to badminton sets. But he says he doesn’t expect any big decisions to be made on that front for a year or more.

“Our greatest value today is more as a curator, not as a maker,” McNamee explains. To that end, Field & Stream has refocused its affiliate-marketing program on the hunting-and-fishing space. It has also begun courting fans of country music and southern rock in a way that you won’t find Orvis or Outside doing. The inaugural Field & Stream Music Fest will take place in October in Winnsboro, S.C., and feature live shows by Church, Lainey Wilson, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Scheduling conflicts prevented Wallen from headlining.) The performances are just one element of a weekend that will also include rafting, fishing, shooting competitions, and an outdoor-gear expo.

Even if the desired 60,000 attendees show up, the hybrid event is more of a “brand play” than a moneymaker, McNamee notes—an experience that connects Field & Stream to outdoorsy music fans and advertisers who are eager to reach them. The publication’s “digital community” currently includes 300,000 email subscribers and 1.7 million monthly unique visitors, and is most heavily concentrated in the South and Midwest. “The historical Field & Stream consumer is middle America, middle income. It’s the guy that works the blue-collar job, and we need to be respectful and proactive in serving that core audience,” McNamee says.

A hook-and-bullet magazine 

That’s where the print magazine comes in, even as a potential loss leader. “It’s not the easiest or most cost-effective thing, but I think it’s the most valuable thing,” Church notes. At first glance, the relaunched version looks very different. Whereas his grandpa’s monthly Field & Stream could be rolled up and stuffed into a pocket, the new one is a 160-page biannual with a newsstand price of $25. It also has 75% less advertising than before, which helps to position it as a premium product and a worthwhile perk of membership in the brand’s so-called 1871 Club, the top tier of which costs $95 a year and includes branded swag, partner discounts, and “First Dibs” on tickets to the annual Music Fest.  

The new edition features a celebration of classic bass lures, a survey of top archival Field & Stream covers, and a survival story reprinted from the June 1969 issue. The whole package strikes a nostalgic chord: for a time when sons went fishing with their dads and more people relaxed by sitting down with a magazine.

And maybe also for a time when the NRA taught marksmanship and hunting skills, not “Freedom.” Unlike some hunting media, Field & Stream studiously avoids politics and the culture wars. This is not Donald Trump Jr.’s hunting-oriented Field Ethos, a “lifestyle publication for the unapologetic man.” Field & Stream editor-in-chief Colin Kearns said that gun coverage will remain limited to firearms that are designed for hunting (which does include some handguns). “We always have and will support second-amendment rights, but that’s not something we cover, because our audience doesn’t want it,” said Kearns, who’s worked under four different owners since joining the editorial staff in 2008.

Has lifestyle media left the hook-and-bullet crowd behind? According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 39 million people (15% of the U.S. population 16 years and older) participated in recreational fishing and 14 million people (5.5% of the U.S. population 16 years and older) participated in hunting in 2022. And yet the Esquire that went quail hunting with Jimmy Buffett in the ’90s now treats camouflage as streetwear. Hunting (more than fishing) is increasingly controversial and linked to the debate over gun control. In 2018, Dick’s began restricting firearms sales after the Parkland school shooting. Though praised by many, the move turned some hunters against the Field & Stream name, perhaps forever. It also foreshadowed a new direction for Dick’s, which subsequently eliminated its hunting program and launched Public Lands, a socially conscious retail concept that competes more directly with the likes of Patagonia and REI.

Church seems baffled by Dick’s decision to ditch a storied brand like Field & Stream in order to create a new one from scratch, and is eager to win some of those disgruntled customers back. “I’m happy that Field & Stream is something that we can get back to,” he says. “If you created your brand based on a political statement, that’s fine, right? That’s okay . . . But [with the historical] Field & Stream, that was never something that you felt.” Too many brands, he adds, are “reacting too much to the environment.”

“What’s great about [the outdoors] is [that] it doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat, Republication, agnostic, not agnostic. Your interaction with the outdoors has nothing to do with those things . . . it’s actually a departure from those things,” Church says, adding that people “get way too politicized, way too tribal” about music, too.

That might sound naïve, but the 10-time Grammy nominee knows a thing or two about crossover appeal. He’s played the Grand Ole Opry, the high temple of country music, but has also covered songs by The Grateful Dead and sold out Madison Square Garden five times. (He’s also the rare country musician to have criticized the NRA, which he called “a bit of a roadblock” in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas shootings.) Musically, at least, he’s got a track record of bringing disparate camps together.

Wallen is a more divisive figure, even if this comes down to a single incident: the emergence, in 2021, of a video of him drunkenly using a racial slur. Though Wallen promptly apologized and sought to make amends, the lapse could be seen as an example of the riskiness of hitching a brand to a celebrity. (Wallen made headlines again in April, when he was arrested for throwing a chair off the roof of a Nashville bar.) Then again, maybe not: Wallen’s fans stuck with him as his songs were pulled from the radio, sales of his album soared, and Billboard named him the top country artist of 2023. Maybe the great outdoors offers more room for growth than some people realize. Wallen, who only agreed to be interviewed by email, certainly seems to think so. “The ability to tell a story is what Field & Stream is all about at its core and that opens all doors for where this brand ultimately can go,” he said. “As far as I can see, the sky’s the limit.”