RIP
Surfer magazine, the “Bible of the Sport” and cultural touchpoint, has been officially mothballed after an iconic 60-year run. Word began leaking yesterday afternoon that the staff had been notified of impending furloughs and that the title, along with many other extreme sport titles in parent company A360Media (née American Media Incorporated) portfolio.
Founded in San Juan Capistrano, California, 1960, by high school teacher and surf film maker John Severson, the title was home to some of the greatest surf writers, surf photographers and graphic designers to ever toil under the glorious brine-filtered sun.
AMI had purchased Surfer, along with the entire Enthusiast Network, a little under two years ago. Staff was slashed but production continued until yesterday when the final decision was made.
Peter Taras, one of the greatest photo editors to ever do it, announced via Instagram:
It’s with great sadness that I write that today was my last day at SURFER. Between Transworld SURF, SURFER, and SURFING, that was half my life. 21 years between the three. It’s really hard for me to put into words right now the feelings. I’m a weepy mess. I taught. I was taught. I cared so much for all the creatives I worked with over the years. We were family.
Stab magazine, based near Venice Beach, California, erroneously suggested that the decision to take Surfer offline was tied to the staff’s recent decision to endorse Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. An easy assumption seeing that A360Media is President Donald J. Trump associate David Pecker but entirely without merit and wrong.
The sort of very poor surf journalism regularly practiced by fully grown men under five feet tall who furiously back-peddle, weeping, when gently confronted over social media by Ace Buchan.
In truth, Pecker was generally unaware of Surfer and the move to furlough staff and shut down the title, along with others in the Enthusiast Network portfolio, had been continuously broached at the upper levels of management for months.
The issue just on stands will be the final one.
The end of an era and sad for anyone who ever laid on a small twin bed in an overcrowded childhood room, flipped through page after page exuding the greatest life possible and dreamed.
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Making the contents page when I was 11 (mid-70’s) was a thrill that I don’t know if I ever really topped it. The very same magazine as all my heroes were in. I had been reading it since I was 3 or 4 (older brother surfed) so finally making the pages was a mind bender. Makes me want to make money and start to build my old lost collection back up. Greatest magazine ever.
omg Chas I just said check out the Fantasy Surfer forum, not shut the whole fuckin thing down lol. Yew!
I think you are great!!
He got my upvote
See…the thing about losing “Surfer,” or *any* print magazine, is that it inevitably leads to the loss of American innovation — what was once termed “American Exceptionalism.” It starts when you’re a kid and your “Surfer” or “Model Airplane News” or dad’s “Popular Mechanics” comes in the mail. You grab ’em and go off to your room, jump on your bed and thumb through each issue. Then your mind begins to work: what if that board was narrower at the end; what if that wing was made of a different material; what if that balsa board was chambered like that airplane wing? Then your mom kicks you out of the house for some “fresh air” so you get on your bike, meet up with a friend and you excitedly tell him what you read about. *He* gets excited too and pretty soon you’re working on something new together. To lose “Surfer” is more than losing the best of our past, it’s losing a path to innovation.
always looked for forward to the reef brazil ads on the inside cover back in the day
Good to know, but that really sucks for the staff.
You affected?
Surfer Magazine was my Playboy…….always so excited when each issue arrived in my mailbox as a kid. Some brilliant photography. It stomped on it’s ugly east coast sister “Surfing”.
Page 2 will live on forever.
You know this is largely due to the success of Beach Grit…don’t you?
Exactly. Well due to the proliferation of all these shit one man band ‘surf’ websites, Surfer got cut off at the knees. Mind you, if you look at the comments on this site there’s only about what, 20 regular posters so I doubt Beach Grit is what killed it off.
Opens up shelf space for a Beachgrit monthy rag.
Too bad, I still enjoyed the magazine, and the clips they were posting on YouTube were great, the recent one with Devon Howard was brilliant. Time moves on, somethings seemingly become obsolete, and you don’t realize what you have lost until it is too late! Give me a magazine over Instagram any day of the week. Remember when everyone gave up on vinyl, and then they realized that nothing was truly comparable?
Yeah the one of Devon riding that old Frye v-bottom was pretty darn neat.
Trump 2020!! Say no to the globalist commie Pedo Joe!! America FIRST
Ughhh… I guess it was just a matter of time for retards like you to show up and spam the comment section.
I thought they were already done. The real story is they lasted all the way to 2020. Covid-19 looks like the final nail in the coffin
Wonder what the Conservative owners thought of the recent backing of Biden?
Coincidence?
Remember at the end of the movie Office Space when the guy who had his desk moved to the basement, burned down the building. I think that putting a political endorsement on IG was the same. They already knew it was done.
Nah. Nobody knew. We actually care about things.
Gotta give you credit for doing it then, especially how OC centric the industry seems. Good on you.
I had nothing to do with it other than being an enthusiastic cheerleader for Surfer standing up for things that matter.
I agree with the stance they took. I guess it’s the nature of surfing, how in touch and reliant on the energy and beauty of the ocean we are that makes it different than skiing or whatever. Nothing like paddling out at first light through the kelp, on a foggy morning and looking over at an otter cracking a crab four feet away from you, with glassy six foot waves peeling down the point.
I doubt the corporation that owns Surfer sees it any differently than Powder Magazine, which is a shame.
One thing that really shocked me as I got more involved in writing about surfing was learning how many surfers don’t care that surfing takes place in a natural environment, or at least, have a radical disconnect between loving surfing and not giving a shit about ocean protections. As I’ve moved to writing about outdoor sports and culture more broadly, I’ve learned this is largely restricted to surfing. Hikers, backpackers, mtb riders, anglers, blah blah, are far more united in environmentalism and conservation than surfers are.
Yea weird. Maybe it depends on where you started surfing. Different experience probably in Huntington Beach etc.
Is that satire? Usually when something like this happens, there’s rumors, vibes, things just don’t feel right. Your saying it just came out of the blue, no warning, no nothing?
I mean, other than an awareness of ad revenue declining generally across media and an ability to imagine bad things hitting home, as far as I am told, it was a bolt from the bluest of blue.
There still the Surfer’s Journal.
There’s still the Surfers Journal.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE!
I will miss that glorious poop paper.
Oh fucking please, spare us the drama, this was long overdue. The music had already died right at the time when fakers like Marcus, Warshaw, George and other sad mediocre “writers” stepped in with their corporate advertising overlords. After the era of Sevo and Kampion, Surfer turned into an extreme apartheid advertising rag reflecting only a myopic California viewpoint with writers simply penning ad copy for the few chosen surfers who rode for the advertisers. Good riddance.
This is prob the dumbest take anyone will read about this.
Try to exit gracefully Housman. It’s all over. Done, Fini, Kaput.
Still need Bexy to weigh in.
I’m on the other page
Weird take on it mate. In the late 80s, Surfer Magazine was as thick as a phone book. Magazines don’t go broke when they are full of ads. I know Ben Marcus is mad as a hatter but it was a fine magazine. If you want to lay the blame it’s at the modern editors who were way too late to turn it into the newsagent version of TSJ, and instead turned it into a weird navel-gazing magazine that may as well have been a student newspaper with weird covers and self-indulgent editorials (compllete with stupid signature at the bottom).
As a subscriber for the past few years i’d open each new edition with a kind of sad dread, seeing what it had become. Yet TSJ still comes out each quarter with fantastic quality paper and photos.