20 Years of the Michigan Golfer
by Art McCafferty

Last year, I visited the World Golf Village and the Golf Hall of Fame at St. Augustine, Florida. It is a marvelous place and the Hall of Fame there is very special. In looking at the displays I was startled to see a cover for "The Michigan Golfer". The date on the magazine was June 1950. So much for thinking the Michigan Golfer magazine was an original idea.

However, the latest manifestation of the Michigan Golfer has had a number of original ideas. Our first coup was to go to a glossy magazine format in 1987. We had Treetops as our first cover and it really propelled us out of the pack of Michigan golf publications. Our second idea was becoming the first golf publication in the world on the Internet. We beat Golf Digest by three months when we debuted our site at the Novi Golf Show in 1995. Interestingly, our online readership is now challenging the readership of our printed issue. Last year, we had over 208,000 people visit our site for an average time of 9:21 minutes. Our busiest month was July, where almost a thousand people a day logged on to read the Michigan Golfer online at http://michigangolfer.com.

In 1998 we started the Michigan Golfer for Women. Each year we have increased the amount of content and ad pages. Our companion website, http://womensgolfnetwork.com has a nice following as well.

On March 9, 2001, six years to the day that we launched our online issue, the Michigan Golfer TV Show appeared on computer screens everywhere. Again, it was the world's first regularly scheduled Internet golf television program. Since our initial program in March, we have put up 33 different programs that have been viewed by over 25,000 people.

Last year, also saw the start of Michigan Golf News, a weekly newsletter we created in partnership with the State of Michigan. The newsletter goes out to over 1700 people each week. Starting from a press run of 8,000 Michigan Golfer Magazines 20 years ago, this year, we will witness over 600,000 golfers reading or viewing one of our golf products.

However, all those folks would not be reading and viewing our products if it were not for the quality of our golf content. Our 20th anniversary goal is to continue to deliver our readers and viewers terrific stories, good photography and videography. To that end, we want to thank our great writers in the past and those that will entertain and inform you in the future.

Art McCafferty, Publisher
Great Lakes Sports Publications, Inc.