With Surfer Magazine about to celebrate its 50th Anniversary, we thought it was time to check in with the current Editor-in-Chief Joel Patterson.
We wanted to know a little about how Surfer has got to where it is now, how it is dealing with changing technology, and what it has coming up for its 50th Anniversary as well as the future of the magazine.
Tell me a little about the history of SURFER magazine and how it came to be?
SURFER was started by a surf filmmaker named John Severson as a supplement to his film “Surf Fever.”
The first issue was produced in January 1960 a couple weeks after John F. Kennedy threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination for the 1960 Presidential Election. Severson was also a writer, a painter, a thinker, a politician of sorts, and an unorthodox entrepreneur.
He printed 5,000 copies of the first issue (which was initially called “The Surfer,” but he removed the “The” a couple issues later) and sold them for 75 cents a piece.
They sold like hotcakes, and he quickly realized he had stumbled on something surfers loved. Orange County kids like 12-year-old Herbie Fletcher rode their bikes to screenings of “Surf Fever” just to get a copy, and as Herbie put it, “It changed my life forever. I thought, ‘(Screw) everything else. This is what I want to do.’ ”
Within a few years of the launch, half a dozen surf mags had sprung up Australia and the U.S.
In 1971 Severson called it quits, sold SURFER to For Better Living, and moved to Maui where he’s created art, surfed, and grown fruit ever since.
On page 2: Changes through the years
What are some of the biggest changes the magazine has gone through as a business over the years?
Its first major change was going from being a quarterly to a bi-monthly to a monthly to creating 13, 14 and even 15 issues in a particular volume.
The next big change came when it went from being a privately-owned, passion project to being owned by a large media company. Anyone who’s ever made that transition knows that’s a lot changes.
Other big changes have been diversifying the media experience for readers by taking on events like the SURFER Poll & Video Awards, video projects like “SURFER TV,” and an array of digital properties from Fantasy Surfer to Surfermag.com.
Plus, each new publisher has brought ideas and directions for the business that cause changes of course.
What are you doing to celebrate Surfer’s 50th? Parties, special issues …?
We just finished the 50th Anniversary special issue. It’s oversize, thick, with great paper, and it’s a real celebration of the magazine, and it’s full of SURFER’s successful endeavors … and a couple of “not so successful” ones. It’s on newsstands in December.
Chronicle Books is also publishing a hard-bound coffee table book that Sam George and Jeff Divine worked on called “Fifty Years of SURFER Magazine.” It comes out around the same time as the 50th Anniversary issue.
We’re also having a big party to celebrate the magazine’s golden anniversary at the California Surf Museum in Oceanside on November 21, 2009 as part of their California Surf Festival. I think the mayor of Oceanside is even going to declare November 21st as SURFER Magazine Day. Awesome.
As the internet becomes more prominent and print less so, what is Surfer doing to keep up with changing consumer demands and new technology?
Our Web site averages about 5 million page views per month from around half a million unique users, and FantasySurfer.com is our World Tour fantasy game that has a rabid following.
We also have an online community, SurferHot100.com, component to our Web strategy, and we work hard to provide as complete an experience as possible online.
It’s an evolving business for us, and I think we still have a lot of potential to grow and be relevant.
I still see print as a strong business, though.
It’s challenged, for sure, with the current state of the economy and the metamorphosis of media that’s been happening for the past decade, but we’re working to evolve the product to use the medium in the best way possible.
(Right: Surfer’s offices.)
What’s next for the magazine?
We just did a tweak to the redesign we launched last January. We did this to accommodate the realities of small page counts with the idea of getting more content into each issue.
We’ve also seen a change in leadership with Rick Irons stepping down and Tony Perez taking his spot as the leader of ASG’s surf division, so change is sort of in the air over here, and frankly, I love change.
So I think we’re excited to do some new things and continue to bring surfing to our readers in inspired ways.
On page 3: More about the leadership change and others in store
Tell me more about this change and what else you’ll be doing to spice up the magazine as far as writers, sections, online and your role.
Travis Ferré (Surfing’s Editor) and I are going to be taking on a lot more leadership of our respective brands, and while we have a lot of mutual respect, we have different interests in the world of surf, so yeah, I think SURFING and SURFER will start differentiating themselves organically.
There’s no master plan, but there is certainly room in the surf media space to be different.
As far as detail about “what’s next,” we’re going to be featuring a year-long instruction column written by Kelly Slater with new tips each month. He’ll be on our masthead as “coach” or “instructor” or something. He’s already written a few pieces, and they’re good and very detail-oriented.
We’re doing some design tweaks to our covers in hopes of some better newsstand performance.
We’re always on the search for great writers, but in the past year we’ve had a really eclectic, intelligent bunch writing for us, including Christian Beamish, Sean Doherty, Kimball Taylor, Alex Wilson, Brad Melekian, Belinda Baggs, Derek Rielly, and others along with our staff.
Plus we’ve got a couple new guys and gals coming up with pieces in our 2010 volume.
Online, we’ve recently redesigned our Web site, and the never-ending challenge is to populate it with great content. Our numbers online are second only to Surfline and growing every month, so we feel good about what we’re doing there.
We’re embarking on a ground-up rebuild of FantasySurfer.com for the 2010 World Tour, and it’s going to make the players’ experience exponentially better. We’re up to 20,000+ players this year, and we think we can double that with a couple initiatives we’re going to launch in 2010.
Lots on the boil.
