Pittwater Life March 2017 Issue

1992 2005 2013
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 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 recent 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
PL’s MARCH SURF CALENDAR
March 14-25: WSL Championship Tour, Quiksilver and
Roxy Pros, Snapper Rocks, Qld
Two of the world’s biggest pro events kick off this year’s world
championship tour. We say “biggest” not because of the prizemoney
or entry list – they’re the same as any other CT event –
but because of the crowd. More people show up to watch, surf,
and have a holiday around this Queensland behemoth than any
event except perhaps Rio de Janeiro. The crowd puts a lot of
pressure on the pros, both during practice sessions (ever been
asked for an autograph in a surf zone?) and in the closely observed
heats, where every surfer’s every move is fully visible 50
metres away across the famed Snapper “superbank” sandbar.
Whatever else, the winners always earn this one. Watch it live at
www.worldsurfleague.com (app also available there)
NICK’S MARCH SURF FORECAST
If you reckon the heat’s switched off now, you might have cause
to think again. The monsoon trough that caused all that dead
air to build up in western NSW and pour like fetid syrup over
the coastal range on several too many occasions in January
and February is still there, and it would not surprise us at all to
see one or two more such occasions in the first coupla weeks
of this month. But we sense the back end of March will be
something different, as a late cyclone season takes hold of the
SW Pacific and sends down some extra-tropical magic. It’s
just a gut feeling, mind, but it’s encouraged by a strengthening
easterly tradewind band between here and Tahiti and some very
warm surface waters across the whole region. The whole thing
is just waiting to blow, and if it does, late March might be some
of the best surf this year. Watch for fairly calm days ahead of
that period, with light winds interspersed with occasional southeasterlies
and not a vast amount of swell. If you see any, get it
while it lasts.
Nick Carroll
dead, but like surfing, it’s
definitely middle-aged.
Nick Carroll is a leading
(*I should reveal here that I Australian and international
wrote for SURFING it its glory surf writer, author, filmmaker
years and was editor-in-chief
and surfer, and one
of Clyde Packer’s Californian of Newport’s own. Email:
magazine stable from 1991 to
pay for it. Print’s not quite 1997.)
ncsurf@ozemail.com.au
MARCH 2017 35
Surfing Life