The internet didn’t kill surf mags – it just made them better
Today’s surf mags are more thoughtful, less reactive and designed to offer us things that the internet can’t, writes Roger Cox
For a while there, during the dark days of Covid, it seemed as if the printed surf magazine – one of the great cornerstones of global surf culture – might have been on its last legs. In October 2020, California-based Surfer, the so-called “Bible of the sport”, was forced to stop producing a physical edition for the first time since 1962. Its long-time US rival, Surfing, had already succumbed to the internet in 2017. If these two behemoths were no longer able to sustain themselves in the digital age, the thinking went, then perhaps it would only be a matter of time before mighty Australian titles like Tracks and Australia’s Surfing Life went to the wall too. And if they couldn’t survive, what hope could there possibly be for smaller, homegrown publications like Carve and Wavelength here in the UK? In the bleak midwinter of 2020, it wasn’t hard to envisage a very-near-future in which printed surf media would be entirely replaced by pale digital imitations, stuffed with soulless, cheap-to-produce clickbait, and with the work of the world’s greatest surf photographers doomed to never again grace a canvas larger than a mobile phone screen.
Fast-forward to the present day, however, and things are looking more cheerful. For a start, Surfer is back in physical form, having been jump-started into print life again in the summer of 2024, and with a 65th anniversary edition published last year. The Aussie and UK print titles mentioned above are all still around, too, and the immaculately-produced US publication The Surfer’s Journal, which combines achingly beautiful imagery with the kind of intelligent long-form journalism that wouldn’t look out of place in The New Yorker, quietly continues to demonstrate that if you make something consistently excellent then there’s a decent chance people will decide they want to buy it.
It’s not just a matter of existing surf publications managing to survive in print though – there are signs of green shoots appearing too. A couple of months ago, a friend handed me a copy of Patience – a new surf ’zine produced by husband and wife team Tom Bing and Sally McGee in Tynemouth, north-east England. Bing is a surf photographer while McGee is a surf coach and ambassador for the surf brand Finisterre, and in their introduction they explain very clearly where the impetus for their new project came from.
“The conversations surrounding the contents of this ’zine focused largely on a collective dissatisfaction with social media, particularly within the context of surfing, and a yearning for something more tangible,” they write. “It seems as though sometimes through these platforms, the humble surf photo is a thing of the past, pushed into algorithmic irrelevance. If you are a surfer or a photographer, it’s exhausting to constantly think of new forms of entertaining a following when what we really want to do is surf, spin a little yarn or capture an image of surfing that makes us want to quit our jobs and chase waves for the rest of our days.”
Patience, then, is all about about providing some breathing space for the sport’s storytellers – a place where they can spread out and express themselves, their ideas and images spilling over multiple pages if required – in contrast to the digital realm, where social media posts must fit into tightly-constrained, cookie-cutter formats.
At around about the same time that Bing and McGee were dreaming up the first issue of Patience, another UK-based surfer, Cornwall’s Joe Smith, was working on a new bi-annual magazine called Crush. With its second edition out now, Crush comes from a similar place of wanting to give people more creative freedom than they might find online. In his mission statement, Smith talks about the magazine’s “commitment to authentic storytelling.”
“We serve as a vibrant platform,” he writes, “where creators, photographers, shapers, artists and everyday surfers can come together to share their work and their voices.”
Meanwhile, in 2023, another Cornish surfer, Chris Thomson, launched the coffee-table-worthy Longboarder Magazine, published annually and aimed at fans of boards nine feet long and over, and in 2024 Spanish photographers Paula Ortega and Marina Mantolan teamed up with designer Zoe Difiore to create another annual mag, SHESEAS, aiming to “tell stories about female surfers, photographers, artists, shapers and entrepreneurs.” For those who value “the touch of paper and the impact of a compelling story,” they promise, “SHESEAS is more than a women’s surf magazine – it’s a collection of raw, authentic narratives.”
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Longboarder has now put out three editions, while SHESEAS is on its second. Clearly, then, none of the people involved in this new wave of printed surf media envisage the high-pressure churn of a monthly production cycle. Instead, the current generation of surf mags is more thoughtful, less reactive, and designed to offer us things that the internet can’t: namely, the kind of immersive journalism that, through the alchemy of printed words and pictures, can take you somewhere and maybe even teach you something. All of which can only be a good thing. As Bing and McGee put it in their introduction to Issue 1 of Patience: “Print’s not dead, it’s just more beautiful and more considered than ever.”
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