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crunch
Social climber
CO
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Aug 25, 2014 - 02:45pm PT
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good thread, mike m!
Agree that the mags have become less and less interesting. Used to go buy them all, read them right through. Loved the articles with topos and descriptions (and alluring photos) for exotic routes in obscure corners of Montana or Arizona or wherever. Sometimes they'd inspire for a new road trip.
What changed?
The increasing commercialization of climbing, the advent of gyms that try to attract families, guide services that are professional, reliable, safe, standardized.
and mostly the sponsoring of climbers. I've nothing against sponsored climbers in person but when climbing is their job, reading of their work-day routines/projects becomes predictable and dull.
Used to be that the leading climbers were driven, eccentric, wacky characters. Their exploits were exciting, their motivation fascinating to ponder, their writings (and photos) fun, enigmatic and inspiring.
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 25, 2014 - 02:54pm PT
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I think Crunch is onto something. Make those sponsored climbers work at what they are not good at. Getting paid to play should be some work.
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Baggins
Boulder climber
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Aug 25, 2014 - 03:16pm PT
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Not sure I see the connection between the quality of magazine articles and the eloquence, or lack of, of sponsored climbers. Very few articles in print are written by pro climbers, usually their exploits are being covered by another writer, or it is an interview style.
I agree that the interview style highlights of sponsored climbers are boring as fvck tho.
BITD climbing exploits were new and unknown, these days the usual thing of a well known climber being shipped off to greenland or africa or somewhere has become such a well-worn groove that nobody really cares.
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skitch
climber
East of Heaven
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Aug 25, 2014 - 04:01pm PT
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Remember when climbing magazines were great.
Nope.
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steelmnkey
climber
Vision man...ya gotta have vision...
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Aug 25, 2014 - 04:43pm PT
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I one time attended a discussion at the Banff Mtn Book Fest about climbing and writing and the woman , at the time head of acquisitions for The Mountaineers, said without hesitation she would publish boring writing from a famous climber before she'd publish interesting writing from an unknown climber.
That's just fukkin' retarded.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Aug 25, 2014 - 04:44pm PT
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Obviously you were doing Good work, Tami! What Whinney little tire biters those companies can be!!
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Trad Larry
Gym climber
Black Canyon, Colorado
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Aug 25, 2014 - 05:14pm PT
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Anyone who doesn't think that Rock and Ice is the best climbing magazine out there isn't paying attention.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 25, 2014 - 05:24pm PT
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Crunch What changed?
rgold … are we becoming a worse audience?
I don’t know about worse, but different, certainly, at least us old ones who have been there and done that, repeatedly… there is nothing new under the sun for us. In a way, we've changed. But when we first started, we were hungry for anything we could get our hands on that would inform us as to what adventures were out there and how we might engage in our own adventures.
My own reading tends to skip the familiar and seek the unique, but that’s getting harder and harder to find.
There are some universal themes that never get tired, mostly having to do with personal experience and different points-of-view of those things familiar. I’m interested in other peoples’ view of something I’ve done or thought of…
but that’s just me.
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 25, 2014 - 06:02pm PT
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My overall premise is that climbing magazines used to be better back in the day. It isn't that the people making them or doing the work nowadays are doing anything wrong as many of them are great writers and photographers. It's that the whole concept has somehow gone downhill. Too many adds, too much pandering to sponsors, and not enough actual climbing writing. Just because something has been written about one climb doesn't mean someone else can't give a very different perspective on the same climb and have it still be interesting.
I don't think the genie can be put back in the bottle, but some things could change. How about starting with putting one article in each issue by an unknown climber even if it's quite rough. They probably wouldn't even have to pay them, that seems right up their alley. How about partnering with supertopo pulling a story or thread that is interesting. Might improve the writing in both places. How about paying some of the awesome climbers from the past to write some interesting stories.
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ms55401
Trad climber
minneapolis, mn
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Aug 25, 2014 - 08:26pm PT
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those dissatisfied with mags might buy one of occasional Taco-poster Andy Kirkpatrick's books
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 25, 2014 - 08:31pm PT
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Kids these days.
No Jim b. they were packed with much more content, less ads, better paper.
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ms55401
Trad climber
minneapolis, mn
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Aug 25, 2014 - 08:36pm PT
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haha
I remember when Alpinist shrinked their product, and sprayed some canard about going green or using American labor
GODDAMN IT WHEN I WANT TO READ ABOUT BETH CALDWELL'S EXISTENTIAL JOURNEY TO SENDING HER PROJ I WANT IT ON WIDESCREEN DON'T GIVE A FUKK ABOUT TREES OR AMERICAN LABOR
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rick d
climber
ol pueblo, az
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Aug 25, 2014 - 08:42pm PT
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time to print is the issue.
the news is old if it happened last week let alone last month,printing photos is stupid easy, and the world is a smaller place with few new climbing areas.
...and people don't care.
all periodical print is doomed and advertisers know it.
and mike, I bought my last climbing magazine in 1986, bought issues of mountain up to the end, and reveled in the few issues of mountain review that came out.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Aug 25, 2014 - 09:59pm PT
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There ae several factors in play that thwart good writing in mags. First, no matter what people say, the big, important ascents are not debatable, and those are the ones many of us want to read about first and foremost. The lifestyle pieces are sometimes near and dear, but epic typically trumps cool. Second, many of those doing seminal ascents these days got sponsorship directly out of high school, if not before. And for an ambitious young climber, time on the rock generally trumps college, at least for a while. Ergo no college. Skilled writing is hard enough with an education, and becomes less and less likely for people schooled on Twitter and Facebook. So you end up with editors often doing much of the heavy lifiting by default, and quite naturally the pieces start feeling vaguely or blatantly selfsame.
JL
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Katie_I
Mountain climber
Wyoming
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Aug 25, 2014 - 10:20pm PT
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But at Alpinist, we don't only publish stories by sponsored athletes. I've worked with a wide range of talented writers, from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom are (or were, until we published them extensively) unknown. I do have a commitment to helping emerging writers, because that's part of our responsibility--to help mentor others, as we have been mentored ourselves.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Aug 25, 2014 - 10:26pm PT
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I always wondered why rags like Time and Newsweek could cover events happening only a week before, yet climbing mags have a lag time measured in months.
Are they still setting type by hand? Using a Gutenberg press? Or what.
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Katie_I
Mountain climber
Wyoming
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Aug 25, 2014 - 10:38pm PT
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It depends on whether you're trying to cover "news" or create something that's a fully developed "story." "News" can be put together much more quickly and posted online (the lag time you see there, which may consist of days, has to do with climbing magazines having significantly smaller staffs than Time or Newsweek does).
It takes longer to craft a story, both in terms of the literary work and in terms of the research, the fact-checking (which with climbing stories can involve a huge amount of reading and interviewing to get esoteric facts right), the selection of photos and the care put into the layout in print.
"The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time."--Walter Benjamin, "The Art of Storytelling," Illuminations
If your aim is to produce a work of art, it doesn't happen (generally) overnight.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Aug 25, 2014 - 11:07pm PT
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A few not necessarily linked thoughts.
The Alpinist website says its US$94.95 for eight issues = $11.85/copy, not $13. Which is less than twice the price of the monthlies.
A lot has to do with changes in the worlds of education, the economy, and communications. Simply put, it's now cheaper than ever to "publish" something, and information flows far more quickly. However, while the volume and velocity of information flow has greatly increased, the quality may not have. Lucid communication is a waning skill, for whatever reason(s). And there are fewer moderating intermediaries between writer and reader, for better or worse.
Ed H quoted:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end...
Perhaps the most famous travel book of all time, and perhaps the first. Anyone? This is important in that mountain writing is generally considered a genre of travel writing, by the literary mavens anyway.
Some of us not only read Mountain, we sometimes contributed to it, first to Ken Wilson, later to Tim Lewis, and then other of its editors. A few may have written for both Mountain and Alpinist, and perhaps other of the climbing magazines, journals, etc, so allowing some perspective. Ken was well known for his firm editorial views (chalk is evil!), his respect for facts, and soliciting a very wide variety of writers, many of them from other countries. When you consider the challenges of slow communications then, languages, and a bewildering variety of climbing venues, welding that into something lasting and entertaining was a formidable challenge.
So you'd write something for Ken, in say 1977. Something that you might rather not be reminded of now, but that's another story. Two or three weeks after sending it - if Ken was lucky, in a typed letter - you'd get a reply. Which often would politely dissect your report or essay, and ask you to do better. Which you did. That's what editors and other interlocutors have been doing since the dawn of time, wrestling and massaging writers and their writings into something readable and saleable.
There's absolutely nothing new about what Katie does - although her dedication to her craft is extraordinary. I do a lot of writing in various contexts, for some of which I get paid as such, and can safely say that. Sure, every editor and publication has her/his/its leanings in terms of what they're interested in, or at least think the readers are interested in, and how it ought to be presented. (The tendency of some publications toward endless, unnecessary, repetitive, redundant, superlative, excessive adjectives, chasing a noun - any noun! - to give them meaning, being an extreme case.) But such leanings are usually readily apparent. It's no secret that the New York Times is a traditional, somewhat conservative publication, with an east coast US perspective on the world, and a fanatic devotion to facts.
All editors put their own 'voice' on what is published, and how it is edited. The choice as to what will and won't be printed is as important or more so than the choice of how what is published will be edited. And the hapless reader doesn't usually know about the dogs that aren't barking. (Another snobby literary reference.)
The problems with travel literature now being that there's less and less that's truly new and interesting to write about, and that there's more and more information out there about it. When Mountain covered the first ascent of Kongur in 1981, the question for most was "where the hell is it?" Not an issue any more. We can in an instant learn just about all we could want to know. Plus people now have a lot more money for travel - the world really has gotten smaller. Leaving the publishers and so editor of a climbing magazine some unenviable choices. Go fully mass market, with lots of basic stuff with a large but not very sophisticated audience? Try to hang onto the traditional, balanced approach, knowing that the competition (often free) is ferocious? Keep a high quality approach, with a limited market?
Heaven knows where the world of publishing will be in five or ten years. But with the volume of information out there, about any conceivable subject, the role of editors if anything should be enhanced. As can be seen from the tedious rants here (politics! immunizations! terrorists! police brutality! arks on the moon!), an unmoderated discussion quickly deteriorates into infantile noise. Sure, it's important for us and for editors to be open to all views. But facts are sacred, and having people with the wisdom to somewhat filter what we eventually see, in whatever format. Just as we pay other professionals for their greater knowledge and skill, to filter out (e.g.) quackery from real medicine, so we should pay professionals to do so in publishing. If they're inept or slanted, it'll quickly become apparent.
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MH2
climber
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Aug 26, 2014 - 07:38am PT
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I like Alpinist. I like The New Yorker. I like turtles.
More turtle literature, please.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Aug 26, 2014 - 07:51am PT
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I don't think there has been much of a qualitative change in magazines over the past fifty years. Times change and what's being reported and the style of the reporting changes to.
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