In a digital age, high-end outdoors magazines are thriving in print
Titles like Adventure Journal, Mountain Gazette, Summit Journal and Ori are aimed at ‘people who just don’t want to be on their phones anymore’
IN AN ordinary industrial building off a busy Orange County street in California, a Seussian contraption, nearly 100 feet long, clattered to life. The room filled with the hum and squeaks of belts and machinery. There was the smell of hot glue.
Like passengers on a dark amusement ride, bundles of colourful magazine pages, printed a week earlier, began a wild, circuitous journey, through tunnels and up ramps, that lasted a few minutes. The bundles were somehow cut and collated. The long edge of each new 130-page sheaf was dipped into a pool of melting glue, then dropped into a U-shaped cover. After drying during a series of slow corkscrews, the new magazine’s edges were chopped smooth by guillotines and emerged through an opening. Unimpressed men stacked them into boxes.
Nearby, Stephen Casimiro held one of the 7,200 copies in his hand.
Casimiro, a former editor of Powder and National Geographic Adventure, is the founder and publisher of Adventure Journal, an unapologetically analogue magazine at the heart of an old-school trend.
He sifted through the pages. He smiled.
“People will have this in their hands, on their coffee table,” Casimiro said. “That was the idea. We’re all exhausted from our screens. We want something to savour.”
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There are sprouts of life, even profitability, on the landscape of print media and magazines, cratered by the pixilated bombardment of the digital age. High-end niche periodicals are popping up, but the trend might be most evident in a burst of small-batch, independent outdoors magazines like Adventure Journal, Mountain Gazette, Summit Journal and Ori. They are crowding into quiet spaces of narrow lanes – climbing, surfing, skiing, running and the like – where quality is key, advertising is minimal and subscribers are faithful. Most do not put their content online; this is journalism meant to be thumbed through, not swiped past.
The magazines are sometimes oversized and increasingly matte-finished, filled with edge-to-edge photographs and literary heaves. They can cost US$25 or more per issue. They are meant as much for the coffee table as the shoulder bag – designed to be collectible, not disposable.
Like vinyl records and micro beers, they are aimed at a small audience with appreciation for the craft. Most are at-home operations where the editors are owners, managing a web of freelancers and overseeing every bit of the production cycle. Like Casimiro, many are expats from the wreckage of iconic glossy magazines that lost lustre in an era of consolidation, venture capitalism and attention spans deemed too short to consume anything but algorithmic candy.
“The screen experience is so reductionist,” Casimiro said. “It just flattens the world, so that a Pulitzer Prize-winning story feels the same as spam. Some things deserve better.”
In Seattle, Ori founder Kade Krichko called it the “slow-read movement”. Near Lake Tahoe, Mountain Gazette owner Mike Rogge believes “we went too far in the digital realm – and now we’re pulling it back”. In New York, writer and climber Michael Levy has resurrected Summit (calling it Summit Journal), seeing a desire for curation.
“There’s a lot of really good stuff in the outside ecosystem, but it gets drowned out by the noise,” Levy noted. “I have no interest in just trying to churn out content.”
Back in California, where he began publishing the quarterly Adventure Journal in 2016, Casimiro, 62, considered the wave of titles that have followed his lead, mostly since 2020. “Outdoor boutique magazines are having a moment,” he said. “Absolutely, unquestionably.”
Then he deflected credit, to a few miles away and several decades back.
A feeling of timelessness
An office park in San Clemente holds the headquarters of The Surfer’s Journal. If the new breed of outdoor magazines had a family tree, The Surfer’s Journal might be the parents, maybe the godparents.
It was first published in 1992, before the digital age, by the husband-wife team of Steve and Debbee Pezman. Exiles from Surfer magazine, where he was the long-time editor and publisher and she was the marketing director, the couple saw mostly read-and-toss surf magazines aimed at teenagers. They felt a void for something meatier, for adults such as them.
The vibe they wanted was a surf-centric cross between National Geographic and Architectural Digest. A minimalist cover. A flat binding meant to stack or shelve. Deep stories, beautiful photography. An aura of timelessness.
The Surfer’s Journal persists as envisioned, now with about 28,000 subscribers (six issues a year for US$84, or US$25 for one) and eight “sponsors” (each paying US$70,000 per year). Thousands of other copies are sold in surf shops and bookstores. The company has expanded into books, a popular podcast and The Golfer’s Journal, with manicured green grass taking the place of swelling blue oceans. It has about two dozen employees, including those who handle circulation from company headquarters.
Debbee Pezman, now 69 and The Surfer’s Journal’s publisher (Steve retired in 2015), thought about the secret ingredients to success, then typed them into a one-page memo. Among them:
- “Never underestimate the intelligence of the reader.”
- “Be commercially quiet. Have sponsors, not advertisers.”
- “Pay attention to the details. Stay alert to the fact that erosion occurs subtly.”
- “Quality. Quality. Quality.”
What readers want, she believes, is not rooted in nostalgia for print. It is based on things such as posture and pulse rate.
“There’s a difference between ‘lean in’ and ‘lean back’,” Pezman explained. Digital content forces you to lean in, she added. “It’s harder on my eyes, my body. My muscles are a little tighter. A printed coffee-table book, including a National Geographic, is a lean back – I lean back on my sofa, open it and relax.”
‘It’s not nice scrolling through Instagram’
High-end magazines are not new, and their re-emergence is not exclusive to outdoor pursuits. A visit to an independent bookstore or a sprawling newsstand like Casa Magazines in New York or The Kosher News in Los Angeles unveils a universe of artful niche publications, from The Bitter Southerner to Catnip, Mildew to Whalebone.
“I equate my business model or my product to what you’ve seen happen with vinyl records,” said Liz Lapp, owner of Hi-Desert Times, a magazine shop in Twentynine Palms, California. “It’s kind of the same audience; people coming back to magazines, people new to magazines, people who just don’t want to be on their phones anymore.”
The surge is acute in American outdoors magazines, where esteemed mass-market titles such as Outside, National Geographic, even Sports Illustrated – along with a bevy of once-loved, deep-niche outdoor titles covering everything from climbing to skiing, running to biking, snowboarding to skateboarding – have struggled to paddle through the fire hose of online content.
“The brokenness of the media landscape is allowing these smaller publications to spring up and test the market,” Casimiro noted. “They can find an audience.”
Thembi Hanify and Mariah Ernst, 30-something veterans of surf media and marketing, also saw a fertile crack in the hardpan environment. They started Emocean after seeing, first-hand, a surf world dominated by white men.
“There’s this interesting cycle – big print outlets dying, but in conjunction with that, outdoor sports are diversifying,” Hanify said. “There is a gap for different stories to be told.”
Emocean has printed seven issues, about twice a year. The latest, 148 full-colour, matte pages on 7 inch-by-9-inch paper, is a mix of profiles, Q & As, photo essays, even poetry, skewing towards women and people of colour and the LGBTQ+ communities.
“There’s a thirst for being able to just be present with something in front of you,” Ernst added. “It’s not nice scrolling through Instagram. I’ve never heard a single person say ‘I really liked scrolling’ or ‘I really love reading things on my phone’.”
With Ori, Krichko – a writer and a former Powder intern, hired by Rogge – has launched a new kind of travel magazine. Instead of dispatching reporters around the world, he solicits contributions from local writers, photographers and artists. Inside the first issue last autumn were features from Mexico (street-food art), Nigeria (music), Colombia (bullfighting), Spain (rowing) and Hawaii (regenerative farming), among others.
“Ori has been built as the antidote to the algorithm,” Krichko, 35, added. “‘Read slow, scroll less’ is something we say.”
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