The Golfer's Journal

The Golfer's Journal is the most ambitious of the current crop of golf magazines: a member-supported quarterly that has staked its whole proposition on long-form writing and photography, printed well on heavy paper, with no newsstand presence and almost no advertising to answer to. The wager is that enough golfers want the game written about with patience and care to pay for it directly, and a decade in, the wager has held. Tom Coyne—the writer behind A Course Called Scotland and A Course Called America—hosts its podcast, which tells you the company it keeps; see Tom Coyne Golf Writer Profile.

Around the magazine has grown the Broken Tee Society, its membership community, named for the readers who began posting photographs of broken tees after the first issue. It now runs a private forum, regional meetups, and a touring slate of member gatherings at courses around the country—a rare case where the community is downstream of the writing rather than the other way around. Among contemporary golf media the Journal sits closest to the way these notes think about the game, and alongside Fried Egg Golf Club it marks the editorial end of what the C&RBGC pays attention to.