I've been kicking around an idea for the past few weeks and I wanted some feedback on it. In brief, the idea stems from reading various comments on news articles regarding the possible gill net ban in the Daily Astorian and other news sources. Many of us here are well aware of numerous studies showing that the economic impact of recreational fishing outweighs the economic impact of commercial fishing. Many of us here understand that the economic impact is greater even though recreational fishing gets a small fraction of the available catch. However, when new regulations are put into place or when quotas are shifted from commercial fishing many news articles seem to focus on the loss of jobs in the commercial sector with little thought of the jobs in the recreational sector.

Worse yet, in some of the comments I've read on the Daily Astorian people in support of the gill netting ban were described as "wealthy elitist sport fishing friends" of Gov. Kitzhaber.
I know a lot of recreational fishers and very few are "wealthy elitist sport fishing" people. I also know a lot of guides, owners or sales people in the boat and tackle industry and small business owners in coastal and river towns and very few of those people are making a killing in the sports fishing industry. However, many, many of them depend on the industry to make a living or to make a substantial portion of their income.

From a newspaper's standpoint, it's easy to find a boat owner or deckhand in the commercial who is not making a lot of money and to talk to them about job loss when regulations change or when quota is shift from commercial to recreational fishing. That "put's a face" on the commercial size of things but we never see articles on the recreational side of things - the guides and charter operators who are out of business due to declining runs, the boat builders who are out of business as less people chose to fish, others who sell tackle, bait, gear who lose income as recreational fishing declines and the hotel and restaurant owners who also lose. So it's my sense that even with studies which show the economic impact of recreational fishing is greater than commercial fishing, the average politician and average "Joe" doesn't think of recreational fishing as an industry that supports a large number of middle income jobs. E.g. no one outside of the recreational fisherman and those in the industry sees the faces of those struggling to make a living in the recreational fishing industry.

So, the idea I'm kicking around is a web site where a guide, boat builder, hotel or restaurant owner would go online and do the following:
1) Upload an image of them or better yet, they and their family or them and their employees
2) Provide their name
3) The location of their business or list of the areas in which they fish (if a guide)
4) Write a brief (a paragraph or less) description of how they make a living from recreational fishing
5) Fill out a very short survey that collects data (and set up so a person can chose to not enter any data fields they wish to not disclose). The data to be collected would be:
a) Annual gross revenues (this would not be publicly displayed and would be anonymized so it's not associated with the contributor)
b) Percentage of (a) attributable to recreational fishing (and for restaurants, marinas and hotels - the percentage attributed to commercial fishing of their facility)
c) Number of employees
d) Contact information
e) Whether they would be willing to talk to media about the impact of fish regulations or declining fish runs on their ability to make a living.

This would be used to:
1) Construct a website that provides a display of faces in our state that depend recreational fishing to make a living - each image would be clickable and would lead the the paragraph and other data (not including gross revenues). What I'd hope is that we'd have some many faces that when we tile the images each one is tiny and that the user would have to zoom in a great deal. The point would be that there's a lot of VERY real people making a living or a fraction of their living from recreational fishing.
2) Provide information to media about the size of the recreational fishing industry.
3) Provide organizations like CCA and PSA with a power tool to lobby legislators and others by showing them directly who is benefiting from this industry.
4) If we can get a high enough participation rate from those in the recreational fishing industry, we could also use the page to show a relative scale of numbers of people in the recreational fishing industry vs. those in the commercial industry. E.g. the image tiles could have a cameo profile to represent those in the commercial industry. The point of this would be to show that the number of jobs that are completely or partially dependent on recreational fishing far outnumbers those in the commercial industry but to do it in a way that the faces can be seen. This will make it very clear to anyone who views, that this is not a group of people who cater to wealthy elitists but rather many, many small business owners who eek out a living in the recreational fishing industry.

Is this crazy? A waste of time? Redundant with information that's already publicly available?