Pittwater Life June 2022 Issue

Surfing Life
with Nick Carroll
Print wipeout: are surfing
magazines a dying trend?
2005 2013
Surfing Life
1964 1975-76 1984 1992
No doubt you’ve heard it
before. “Print is dead.”
This reductive sorta
judgment has been bandied
about in media circles, in
surfing as much as anywhere,
for over a decade now.
But in late January (2017),
when SURFING magazine
actually closed its doors,
surfers worldwide got a bit of
a shock.
The California-based
SURFING had been in
continuous publication since
1964. As one of the two
biggest surf mags in the world
for much of the past 53 years
(the other one being close rival
SURFER), it defined the modern
trend toward high-energy
high-performance surfing for
generations of readers.
At its peak in 1989, it sold
over 120,000 copies a month,
employed 38 people fulltime
and a couple of dozen
part-time, and booked up to
half a million dollars’ worth of
advertising per issue, much of
it from the surging young lions
of the new surf industry of the
day: Gotcha, Quiksilver, Body
Glove and many more.
A social and economic
powerhouse, in fact! Yet the
rise and decline of SURFING
magazine tells a bigger story,
about how its subject and
readership has swung with
social change.
When it began publishing as
‘International Surfing’ in the
early 1960s, modern surfing
was still in its birth throes. The
Baby Boomers were still almost
just that, babies: a third of the
US West Coast’s population
was under 21 years of age.
The lightweight foam and
fibreglass Malibu surfboard
was on sale everywhere to
these kids, with their new-car
mobility and desire to explore
the world.
Like those kids, SURFING
took a while to figure out who
it really was. In 1967 it briefly
left SURFER in the dust, rolling
with psychedelia and the
shortboard revolution, before
settling into a bi-monthly
groove – a sort of stoned
stability that matched its
10,000-odd readers.
That lasted until 1975,
when the tendrils of the new
pro surfing movement began
to snake their ways into
California’s surf consciousness.
SURFER, the self-proclaimed
“bible of the sport”, turned its
nose up at this tomfoolery,
but SURFING’s young editor,
Dave Gilovich, saw a chance
to do what all good editors
do – separate your mag from
the competition. SURFER might
be the bible, but SURFING’s
tagline read, “The Hot One!”
In 1978 the mag was bought
by Australian emigre Clyde
Packer. Clyde signed off on a
monthly publication schedule
and gave his young staff its
head. They dragged in brilliant
LA designer Mike Salisbury
and turned SURFING into a
bright, brash showcase for
the surf stars of the 1980s.
And everything lit up. The
magazine kept finding new
48 JUNE 2022
The Local Voice Since 1991
readers – the “echo boomer”
generation, who wanted to
reject everything their boring
1960s parents had stood for.
In that late ’80s boom time, its
average reader age got down
to just under 17. SURFER’s
publisher tried to disparage it
with the nickname “Teen Beat”
– but that was just what the
advertisers wanted to hear.
The recession of 1991
hit that whole construct –
advertisers and readers – hard.
But magazine sales stayed
bravely above 70,000, and
rebounded with the emergence
of sensational Kelly Slater
and his generation of young
wizards. SURFING spent the
1990s perfecting the role of
conduit between Kelly and crew
and their expanding fan-base –
still youthful, yet less brash and
more given to opening up new
areas of surf, like Indonesia’s
Mentawais chain and Tahiti’s
Teahupoo.
1999’s dot-com bubble had
everyone predicting the End of
Print. But the dot-com bubble
came and went with little effect
on magazines – specially not
on the sharp niche press like
SURFING. What did change was
the ownership. A terminally ill
Clyde Packer sold the title and
its associated publications to a
big New York publishing house
for just over $20 million.
In one way this sealed
SURFING’s fate. Magazines –
all media really – exist in the
tension between ownership
and readership; once you’re
a niche publication in a big
corporate structure, things
are bound to go south. A few
years and acquisitions later,
SURFING, SURFER and a third
younger rival, Transworld
Surf, were all under the same
corporate roof, forced to share
The Local Voice Since 1991
offices and even ad sales
staff, trying desperately to
chase readerships that were
diffusing just as the mags
themselves were congealing.
Then came smartphones
and social media, and
that pretty much killed off
SURFING’s raison d’etre – its
role as conduit. What kid in
a shrinking kids’ surf market
needed “The Hot One” to
check John John Florence’s
latest clip? What surf star
needed a mag when he or
she had Instagram? The
publication went back to
eight per year, and sales had
declined to something close to
its 1975 average of 10,000.
In the end – a very 2017
end – SURFING was killed via
corporate rationalising. It was
it or SURFER, and “the bible”
sounded better. One of the
staff was game enough to
offer just over $3 million for
the title, but the corporates
knocked it back, clearly
thinking it was worth that just
to prevent competition.
In SURFING magazine’s 53
years, Australia and the US
saw 256 separate surfing titles
come and go. Only a handful
still exist, mostly surviving on
niches within the niche: mostly
older or more artisanally
minded readers, who like the
physical feel of a publication
and who have the money to
pay for it. Print’s not quite
dead, but like surfing, it’s
definitely middle-aged.
(*I should reveal I wrote for
SURFING it its glory years and
was editor-in-chief of Clyde
Packer’s Californian magazine
stable from 1991 to 1997.)
* Nick Carroll is on leave;
this column first appeared in
our March 2017 issue.
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Surfing Life