Talent was not lacking at the magazine. The editors of NGA and its writers will likely land in other high places in the outdoors world. But in the new media world, I think it will be most interesting to see where the demise leaves people like the magazine’s West Coast Editor Steve Casimiro. He is truly a Swiss Army Knife of outdoor journalist. He writes features, reviews gear, takes photos, and has his own website, www.theadventurelife.org, including a following on Twitter of 20,000+ people. If there is anyone equipped to take advantage of the “social media space” it is Casimiro. He has enormous street cred in the industry and grasps the importance of reaching out to his audience. Yet at the end of the day, I would bet that only 10 percent at the most of NGA’s readers have any idea who the guy is.
Will advertisers rush to support websites and blogs by the likes of Casimiro? If they have impressive metrics, maybe the companies will come. But most bloggers I know have faced enormous challenges in actually making any money for what they do. Casimiro and his breed may have “brands” amongst industry insiders. But do they have the kind of readership that could compel a Garmin, Canon, or Salomon to spend money on sponsoring the site? I sincerely hope they do.
The real problem, from where I sit, is that magazines like NGA, Outside, Men’s Journal, and Men’s Health simply do not offer content that I cannot already get on the Internet. Magazines that thrive on service writing are destined for the bathroom, and that’s about it. A secondary problem exists in that marketers are more flummoxed in how to spend promotional dollars. Website? Hire bloggers? Make YouTube videos? Underwrite a core sports tweet-up? Sponsor a pro team? Suddenly, buying an advertisement in a magazine seems so, oh, 1998.
What kind of magazine still “works”? Truly beautiful, art-book style magazines like Frequency, Surfer’s Journal, the Ski Journal, and Alpinist, to use four examples. Yet, those magazines have their problems, too. While the presentation is superb — glossy-stock paper, perfect bindery, and generally clean art direction — the content itself leaves a bit to be desired. In their earnestness to be “core” and everything that NGA and Outside are sometimes not, their stories are overly insider and simply, in many cases, not that well written. They are crafted by dedicated B-listers for the most part speaking to their tribes.
The best skiing story I’ve read in the past five years did not appear in Outside, Powder, Skiing or The Ski Journal. It was a 15,000-word opus by New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten on the intense rivalry (at the time) between Hermann Maier and Bode Miller. The important distinction here is that it was not a ski story, it was a New Yorker story — seamlessly constructed, meticulously researched, and, despite the fact that there were no photos, the reader had a very clear idea of what the ski racing in the scenes was like. I have read that story two or three times since, and it really stands up.
So what, then, if we could combine the outstanding journalism of the New Yorker with the beautiful imagery of National Geographic, and carry it forward into the adventure world? That was the promise of Larry Burke’s Outside magazine, and you can go back into the 80s and 90s and see some stellar examples of award-winning story packages. I seldom ever saw features of that type in NGA, and that is why I often paged through the magazine at the store — and then left it on the 7-11 shelf.
—A version of this article appeared on Inside Skiing Blog. Steven Threndyle is a writer in North Vancouver, B.C.
