“We’ve gotta do something or it might circle the
drain and then one day disappear.”
Do you remember when the Australian reporter Sean
Doherty would spike each day of surf competition with a very sharp
onsite analysis for Surfer magazine?
Even at the time, nine years ago or thereabouts, boots on the
ground at a contest seemed excessive and so I asked Sean Doherty,
then, why he was the only person that actually reported from surf
events.
“No one else seems stupid enough,” he said through gritted and
slightly beige teeth. “The great conundrum in writing surf online
for chicken feed is that when you’re being paid $150 for a story
you fall into the trap of writing $150 worth of pure mediocrity.
The problem then comes when the Internet keeps your horseshit
contest report alive for eternity with your byline stuck to it in
40-point type. The trick is to write like your story is going to
hang around and either help you or haunt you forever. It’s the same
principle you should apply to all the menial jobs in your life…
lavish the detail on the small things and the big things take care
of themselves.”
Very wise words.
It was Sean Doherty’s commitment to
his craft that led him and pal,
the photographer Jon Frank,
to scoop up the remains of Surfing
World magazine in a fire sale three years ago and resurrect that
old treasure, working for free to keep surfing culture not just
alive but thriving.
An aside.
If you haven’t seen, met, or sighted a photograph of Sean
Doherty, you must let me describe. He’s a little under the old
six-foot measure (more than a little, but let’s be kind!), he has
the strong torso of a lifelong surfer (which is surprising because
he likes to drink), his crown is relieved of the burden of hair,
and as for his surfing ability… yes. He surfs!
And he’s good enough to combo a wave from barbe au cul,
as the French like to say, and enter and exit a tube. On his
passport are enough stamps for Hawaii to guarantee his bone fides
when it’s over four foot.
Anyway, Surfing World just had its sixtieth anniversary, making
it the oldest still-running surfing magazine in the world.
And, Doherty, each year, rattles the can, as he calls it, to
plump subscriber numbers to keep it all afloat.
You see, Doherty and Frank, who lives in Mallorca, off the coast
of Spain there for reasons too complicated to examine here, don’t
make a cent off the magazine.
All ad revenue, all subs, all newsstand sales go back into
making a surfing magazine whose only rival is the magnificent
Surfers Journal, which is made out of San Clemente, California.
On a recent warm Torquay afternoon, I find Doherty, now fifty
two, and about to bring his fourth kid into the world, readying to
move the entire squadron twelve hundred miles north to Yamba, and a
stone’s throw from Angourie.
We talk for a while about print, the apparent death of pro
surfing and why he keeps doing this thing.
Doherty, who works full-time for Patagonia, tells me that when
he and Frankie got the mag, the sale and its subsequent handover
consisted of two hard-drives with “scattered folders, bits of stuff
everywhere…super incomplete but with a lot of interesting
stuff from the (Swellian lord Vaughan)
Blakey era.”
Recently, they released their sixtieth anniversary issue and, if
you want a sign that there’s still some life in surf culture, the
magazine completely sold out.
“I’ve never sold out a magazine in my life, sold the whole print
run,” says Doherty. “It was 260 pages, fucking just about killed us
doing it.”
And, advertisers, he says, were lining up to be in it.
“Advertisers know that if someone is committed enough to pay
twenty bucks for a magazine, they’re committed enough to look at
what they’re selling. It breaks that online conditioning where
everything is free.”
The revival of Surfing World among surfers, says Doherty, is due
to what he calls “digital exhaustion. Surfing World is the opposite
of everything on the internet. We don’t cover pro surfing. There’s
a lot of long-form profile pieces, 20,000 words, 10,000, 12,000. I
think it’s a correction back. People are more open to long-form
stuff like that occasionally in a world where they’re bombarded by
small stuff every minute of every day. It’s just a big grassroots,
long-form celebration of surfing. There’s a lot of energy on that
side of the idealogical divide.”
Still, it don’t come cheap.
So Doherty and Frank would be thrilled if you could find
a way to subscribe or buy a copy here and there (Dave Scales of
Surf Splendor distributes in the US).
“Every year we rattle the can, get the violins out. We don’t pay
ourselves anything and we need to remind people that it’s still
there and needs a bit of love. The only thing stopping it from
getting bigger is energy and money.”
Doherty knows nothing lasts forever, magazines or surf culture,
but says, how about we keep it going as long as we can.
“We gotta do something with this,” says Doherty. “We gotta
evolve or it might just gradually go into decline, circle the drain
and then one day disappear.”
