Still here
“You’re doomed!”
That’s what people used to tell us surf mag workers back in 1999, when the Internet was still fresh and the dot-com boom was in full flight. The hype was overwhelming. This was especially true if you were in America, the undisputed centre of all worlds at the time, including the surfing world. “Print is dead!” they said, practically vibrating with glee at the idea, or maybe just at the huge amounts of venture capital suddenly pouring into commercial web media. The revolution was at hand, and magazines would soon be no more. They would be swept away by a tornado of Virtual Reality, digital news bites, and free content cascading down the barrel of your phone line, rendering this archaic 14th-century media form obsolete, the way the thruster had once doomed the single-fin.
None of us had much of an answer, except to stutter some lame shit about how great the photos looked on paper. Like, it even sounded lame to us.
But you know here we all are, it’s 2019, and it turns out surf mags were not doomed after all. Some have died. Others have thrived. You’re reading one right now.
They still
