We could all learn something from surfing magazines

Earlier this week, to my great surprise, a colleague dropped the latest copy of Surfing World on my desk. I haven’t read a surf mag in years. So, naturally, I did.

My gosh, how good.

As a kid, I subscribed to Surfing Life pretty much all through school. Me and my brother were avid collectors of Tracks, the famed surfing bible that often took weeks to read thanks to Nick Carroll’s wonderfully vivid essays on surf trips through Bali, Fiji and endless secret locations across Australia. Those magazines fueled a lifelong obsession with surfing that continues to this day.

If you haven’t picked up a surf mag in a while, I’d highly recommend it. The travel essays live on through Carroll, the photography is incredible and the economics, somewhat baffling, still make sense. Surfing World’s latest edition has nine double-page spreads before you even get to the editorial. That’s enough to make Vogue, Elle or Marie Claire blush. There's support from the likes of Patagonia, Rip Curl, Ocean & Earth, Stone & Wood and O'Niell.   

But the writing… these old surf dogs still have it. The romance of travel, the spirit of adventure, the thrill of the unknown, profiles of a new generation of insanely talented surfers… it's all still there, beautifully written, wonderfully photographed and gloriously AI-free.

While the number of editions each year have been cut down to four, there’s a podcast (a surprisingly good one too) and social media content for days to keep us all engaged and enthralled.

Reading though the 180-page issue and then going down a rabbit hole of surfing content on Instagram and Spotify, reminded me just how important magazines like this were to us as kids. It was a community, almost like a secret society a select few of us knew about.

It also reminded me about how to serve an audience. Yes, print is definitely not the king it used to be, but there’s still something special about it.

I worked in magazines for more than 15 years. My first gig at AdNews was driving blueprints to the printers. It was a blast. Whenever we had something big in the works, we’d all shuffle off to the printers to watch the edition roll off the presses.

Even during all my years publishing mags in Hong Kong – waking up at 5am and heading out to the industrial districts of Tai Po for the noise and the machinery. It’s not napalm, but there’s nothing quite like the smell of fresh ink in the morning.

There’s also seems to be something of a resurgence taking place in print - especially among younger audiences.

Just last week News gave new life to Glamour, printing an issue as part of the launch of what is now a social-first magazine. Also last week Monster Children returned after years in the wilderness for issue no. 75.

Those who lived around Sydney in the early 2000’s might remember Monster Children.

Part magazine, part creative agency, part cultural tastemaker. It helped pull together skate, surf, art and street culture, occupying much the same irreverent territory as Vice in its heyday. And who can forget the likes of Oyster Magazine, Summer Winter, Black+White, Juice or Russh. 

What is particularly compelling about Glamour and Monster Children is that they have framed their new issues as cultural objects worth keeping rather than disposable content.

And it's not just the cool kids. This week we’ve seen Are Media make the commercial argument that trusted editorial brands can create valuable relationships through print, events, memberships and experiences.

So, what’s my point in all of this? I guess what I’m trying to say is that great publishers don't just produce content, they create something people want to belong to.

Surfing magazines understood that decades before anybody started talking about community building, brand ecosystems, audience engagement or, God forbid, authenticity.

Somewhere along the way publishing (along with most sections of the media industry) became a conversation about traffic, impressions, engagement rates and how much content we could squeeze out of increasingly small editorial teams.

Meanwhile, a bunch of old surf dogs are still getting on planes, chasing waves, taking extraordinary photographs and writing stories that make you want to sell everything you own and disappear to Indonesia for six months.

Maybe they've got the right idea.