Long Live BassFan

You may not have noticed it, but BassFan went away recently. I mean, it’s technically still there, but they’ve stopped adding content. That comes on the heels of several years of substantially reduced tournament coverage, so it was a slow drip – and not altogether unexpected.

That’s a far cry from what it was when it started a quarter century or so ago and you had to refresh constantly to find the latest news from the world of professional bass fishing. They were the only thing close to impartial in the sport, and the only thing that approached journalism. Over time, writers like Jon Storm, John Johnson and Todd Ceisner did an exceptional job of bringing forth stories and analysis without favor or bias.

Of course, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and the ‘gram were still either in their infancy or yet to be born at that time. People still consumed the written word. Now there are more ways to get your information, people read less, and many prefer the hard dopamine rush of outrage to measured analysis. It is what it is, but it’s bad for the sport. We all win when there’s someone willing to look at things through a clear lens, imposing at least a modicum of journalistic standards. We don’t have much of that today.

Of course, there’s a selfish aspect to it, too. Nearly daily I go back into the BassFan archives to find day-by-day coverage of past events. You want to know who led Day Two at Guntersville a decade ago, or the best daily weights or cut weights from the western swing? There’s no better – or easier-to-search – resource than BassFan. 

Of course, those who they covered critically sometimes didn’t like the site’s existence. In some corners it was called a “tabloid.” It was far from scandalous, though. It was one of the sport’s most meaningful opinion drivers. It served a valuable purpose at a critical inflection point. Moreover, in ten years the sport will be poorer if we don’t have a similar encyclopedic resource as a reference guide. YouTube and TikTok, at least now, don’t cut it.