Ed Jones, the founder and 15-year publisher of the online fisheries news site FisheryNation.com, passed away Jan. 7 at age 71 after a lengthy illness.

Jones’ last posting on the news aggregation site was Nov. 22, said James Lovgren, a retired Point Pleasant, N.J., fishing captain and longtime contributor to FisheryNation. The future of the website is uncertain, said Lovgren.

“Most people have no idea how much time Ed spent trying to help the industry, despite little financial support from them; he did it because of a respect he had for us, the working fishermen, and a knowledge of what the government was doing to us through suffocating regulations,” Lovgren wrote in a Jan. 10 public email to the industry. “He did work for a number of years on a lobster boat, and that is where he acquired his love of the industry and the ocean that supports it.”

Jones’ online handle was “Borehead,” a reference to his career in the construction business when he owned and operated a bore machine, using it to run a pipe from the Rochester landfill to the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Living in Rochester, N.H., Jones “found his true passion in the commercial fishing industry,” noted a family obituary. “He created FisheryNation.com, a website dedicated to giving people a firsthand look at what was truly happening in the industry. He poured his heart and soul into the site, creating a space where people could speak openly, share information, and feel heard.”

Jones is survived by his life partner, Carol Hogan-Bredmore of Rochester, his daughter, Jennifer Jones of Belmont, N.H., and son Edward Irving Jones IV, Hollywood Beach, Fla.

Jones’ passing was the loss of another voice in commercial fishing media that has shrunk along with fleet numbers over the years. It follows the recent last issues of Commercial Fisheries News, for 53 years a print newspaper and then online publication primarily covering the Northeast.

Another well-known commentator, Nils Stolpe, 79, passed away on May 16, 2025. Stolpe, who contributed to a FisheryNation.com, National Fisherman, and other outlets, also founded FishNet USA with links to industry news and his own writings.

An independent fisheries consultant, Stolpe in the 1990s worked with the New Jersey Commercial Fishermen’s Association and helped form the Garden State Seafood Association, where he was their communications director. Nationally, Stolpe helped connect fishermen working in different regions and sectors through their common interests in industry issues, including the onset of catch shares and limited access management, Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization in the 2010s, and industry’s shifting conflicts and common interests.

Stolpe’s investigative and writing skills helped bring common cause to an industry renowned for its big personalities and endless debate.

“We’ve always been our own worst enemies because we can’t get along with each other,” said Lovgren, who collaborated with Stolpe on a range of issues. That streak of individuality is both a strength and a weakness, he added: “That’s why most of these fishing associations never last more than a few years.”

Stolpe was an early skeptic of federal government plans to incorporate wind energy as a component of U.S. offshore energy management, dating back to the late Bush administration and the Obama administration’s early “all of the above” energy strategy. 

The conflicts Stolpe foresaw, such as resistance by Mid-Atlantic surf clam and scallop fishermen who feared losing their grounds to turbine arrays, became a core of the industry's anti-wind power sentiment. That pressure, growng for years through U.S. fishing groups and the mainstream media, ultimately manifested itself in the second Trump administration’s ongoing legal battles with wind developers.

"His innate inquisitiveness, investigative skills, and intelligence, combined to make him one of the most knowledgeable people in the fishing industry," Lovgren wrote in a May 2025 appreciation of working with Stolpe for 35 years. 

"I consider Nils to be a guru for his dispensing of knowledge to others, but he could also be considered a Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain who made things happen," Lovgren wrote then. "He didn’t like the spotlight, and unfortunately, the fractured sectors of the fishing industry never coalesced into a united national organization despite his best efforts."

The loss of individual chroniclers has tracked with the now well-documented “graying of the fleet” as veteran captains and vessels gradually leave.

“The industry media is taking a beating,” said Lovgren, who has written extensively about the business during his own career over nearly 40 years. It’s an open question of who in this current generation can make a viable livelihood catching America’s seafood, and who will educate the public about where it comes from.

“Who’s coming to replace them?” said Lovgren.