And a discussion on the future (pun intended) of snowboard magazines.

I fear this particular article may be a bit too, well, geeky for the general public to appreciate. Or perhaps I myself am displaying the same amount of disconnect that this very interview is protesting against. Hmm… I think the latter is bang-on, but it’s a topic that been on my mind a lot lately, and it’s my column, so I’m just going to go for it.

At first I set out to do a retrospective on one of my favorite photographers, Dano Pendygrasse. Dano is known as, “the man who put Whistler on the map with his images.” I always liked that title, even though it sounds a little cheesy. After I interviewed him I realized that we talked about way too much good stuff to not turn this into a piece on industry scrutiny and modern publishing trends in snowboarding.

You see, the thing with Dano isn’t that he’s good at shooting and loves snowboarding – because he is and he does – it’s that he’s been around. He was around when there was only a handful of riders in Whistler, and for a time he probably knew almost everyone that snowboarded in the world. A few years ago Dano was hired to photo edit Future Snowboarding Magazine and left Whistler for California.

I was perplexed by the magazine that wound up coming out of his hands. But as always, Dano and his fellow editors had a larger agenda than my little mind could fathom, and Future was actually doing something beneficial to our sport. This summer, a bomb was dropped when it was announced that Future Snowboarding would be shutting down for good. Dano has since moved back to the west coast of Canada and now lives with his fiancé in Vancouver, BC.  I finally got a chance to catch up with him recently, and have a nice little conversation about the magazine, where it was going, and why it failed.

What happened to Future?
I don’t want to talk about it.

I’ve been reading your blog a lot lately, and it would appear that you enjoy taking walks along the seawall with your fiancé and your dog… pretty exciting.
[Both Dave and Dano laugh.]

Why the hell aren’t you living in California anymore? And what happened to Future?
Well, those things aren’t related. My leaving Future happened a year before and it had been planned six months before that. We brought Crispin Cannon in to take over the job as photo editor. It takes a lot of energy to launch a magazine, probably more then I thought, and I didn’t spend any time outside the office in California, and as a result I didn’t really enjoy living in California. It was only in the last few months I had kind of realized that, hey, Encinitas was dope and my house was dope, but it was kind of too late and I had already decided I was leaving. But then Crispin came in and we got him trained and got him going and I went and lived on a beach in Honduras for a summer and Future was trucking along. I was still on retainer as a photographer so, yeah, I lost a pay cheque too when it closed.

So what Happened to Future?
Well, all the Future employees went into a meeting on a Tuesday morning, and typically if something goes down with the magazine, someone will come down from the San Francisco office, which is the head office. It was kind of an unscheduled meeting and they all went in and the hammer got dropped and they closed the whole thing.

And that’s the explanation that every one got, and this is all second-hand ‘cause I wasn’t there. Even though Future Snowboarding itself was doing well, and it had become profitable and the website was doing well and it was gaining advertising, the idea of Future Action Sports had never really lived up to the expectation of the company. So at this point, three or four years in, instead of having several magazines that they could leverage, they only had one. And having one title isn’t enough to justify having all the office space and the staff and everything else that was involved, so instead of investing the money that they were claiming would be around 10 million to actually flush out the idea of a Future Action Sports group, they just folded.

When Future came out, I asked myself, do we really have room for another snowboard magazine? I’d like to get your point of view on that question.
I think that the wheels were in motion to start Future when The Snowboard Mag came out and it was kinda too late to not start it. So even though The Snowboard Mag launched a year before Future, the prep to have Future going was already rolling. To be honest, at that point four was too many and at this point two is too many. The way publishing is going right now, I think that Snowboarder and The Snowboard Mag will be lucky to survive. Transworld will probably manage to hold on and everything else will probably evolve in a different way ‘cause paper publications are just doing horrible.

It’s funny, ‘cause at the time, when Future was coming out, I really expected it to be something more like The Snowboard Mag. And I was very surprised to find out that it was quite the opposite.
One of the things that we set out to do was to provide a voice for all the people that snowboard that don’t obsess about the core. And that’s about 85% of snowboarders. A very small amount of people actually know who any professional snowboarders are beyond, say, Shaun White. Most people know who Craig Kelly was ‘cause he was around when they started, or whoever the big guy was at the time, maybe it was Jaime Lynn, maybe it was Peter Line. But they don’t know who Kevin Pearce is, and they don’t know who Mason Aguirre is and they don’t know who any of the younger faces coming up are. They certainly don’t know who Andrew Geeves is, as much as they probably should.

The point of the matter is that the people spending money in the sport weren’t reading magazines anymore. Future set out to kinda walk that fine line where we were still cool enough for the young kids, but had enough information for the people who were buying products. At the beginning we went way too far one way and then we brought it back to a place were it was working. To be honest, that was the bottom line: bringing in new readers. When the other mags were kinda cannibalizing each other, we were finding a whole new audience. When it closed there were people out there writing blogs about how much they missed Future Snowboarding.

What The Snowboard Mag set out to do was to make a magazine that the core of the industry loved. They did a great job of it, and as a result the industry is totally behind it. However, there’s a total disconnect with the industry and the people who are snowboarding, and the people in the industry couldn’t give a ***… and that’s fine, you know. They’re running things, let ‘em run things. But they are totally alienating most of the people who buy their product. In fact, most for them have no idea who buys their product; they think that everyone who buys their snowboards and their gear is 14 years-old and lives in Salt Lake City and it’s simply not true.

I guess not everyone wants the same mag.
There was just a ton of push-back from the industry because most of them don’t have experience outside their belief system, so that can’t conceive of things they don’t know first-hand. Most of them come from a snowboarding and not a business background, which again is fine, but there are a lot of alienated snowboarders out there who just don’t have anything to do with that, they just don’t buy magazines. They pick up a Transworld once a year, flip through it, think “this sucks” and never buy it again.

Or maybe they’ll pick it up once a year, think, “hmm, this is cool” and never pick it up again.
Sure. Anyways, Transworld has become a much better magazine. One of the first things that happened when we started was the girls from Transworld came up to us at the trade show and were like, “holy ***, what are you guys going to write about? You used like all the ideas we’d write about in a whole year in your first issues.” We took that as a great compliment; they thought it was an insult. They thought we were blowing our load and we were like, “awesome!” That’s the whole thing you know: we are a bunch of really smart people with lots of ideas and we are going to continue to have lots of ideas. But then at the same time, Lee Crane, who’s been in this industry forever and has a pretty long view of things, was like, “Dano, there’s a reason snowboard magazines look the way they look, because that’s how people want them to look,” and I totally disagreed with him and I was all up-in-arms. And you know, he was the first person I talked to after Future closed and I was like, “yeah, you’re right.” The people he was talking about were the snowboard industry and the people I was talking about were the consumers, and they’re just not the same. But I believed that the consumers would win out, but the consumers never win out.

There were a couple covers there that I felt were a bit… iffy… as far as I was concerned. Do you have anything to say about that?
I was forced to choose photos where the action took up, like, 60% of the frame.

Forced?
Well it was the dictated policy of Future ‘cause it worked on the newsstand. And as you know, not very much snowboard photography looks like that. [laughs] We just don’t shoot that way. I would actually submit a photo and it would get pushed in even tighter. Then it just got to the point were we would make so much fun of that. I had mocked up covers were it was just goggles and nose. [laughs] It was just so tight.

The first one I was actually allowed to get looser on was that brightly colored house with Zach Leach. That was the first time I was ever allowed to have some freedom. If you look at everything before that, it was super tight; the guy’s huge in the frame… ‘cause it works well on the newsstand. And it worked! Our newsstand sales were awesome. We even discussed doing split covers with, like, an industry cover and a newsstand cover to appease both sides. I had no latitude with choosing shots. I mean, the worst part of my month was choosing covers! I hated it. It was the worst part of my job.

That just opens up a whole new can of worms that I would just love to talk about for hours…
Well, it’s an interesting mix between wanting to do something that meets all the integrity of your artistic standards, and wanting to do something that’s successful and having to live up to a whole bunch of standards from someone who has no interest in snowboarding, but just has interest in publishing. Future is a successful publishing company: they know how to sell magazines. The first thing they said when we had our big off-site meeting was -- we were talking about “our industry, “our industry” -- and they were like, “well, what’s you industry?” And we were like, “snowboarding!” And they said, “No, its not. Your industry is now publishing. You have to look at publishing as your industry.” And if you look at it from that perspective, it’s true. I wasn’t in the job of selling snowboards; I was in the job of selling magazines. However at some point it’s really frustrating to put something on the newsstand that you think looks really shitty.