Mar 5, 2007

A New Life for Waterski Mag

Sine, cosine...ugh...45 degree angles, proper hip turn...

Looks like our my favorite whipping boy is changing hands.

Waterski Magazine's controlling company, the incorrectly titled World Publications, is being purchased by a Swedish media company, The Bonnier Group.

The Bonnier group will be headed up by former World Pub President Terry Snow and Dan Altman, the COO of the dub p will assume the same position with the new company.

Bonnier Group purchased 18 of Time Inc's floundering publications a short time ago and now has added the 20 titles from WP to have a media conglomerate of...you guessed it, 38!!

The move makes sense in keeping with the theme of Bonnier's recent aquisitions, they purchased titles like, Field and Stream, Parenting, Yachting and several Transworld titles, which I believe, include TW Snowboarding.

Side note: Transworld snowboarding was my bible for my formative snowboarding years and brought the wicked attractive Victoria Jealouse into my life......in a way.

I snowboard for a living, you sit in a cube...sup?

One downer to all this is that part of the package from Time Inc was that they also picked up Popular Science, which by itself doesn't seem like a big deal, but you mesh their people with the Waterski Magazines people and we are going to get about 900 fucking articles about the science of slalom.

DAMN!!

However, this is a good thing for the sun-splashed residents of the sleepy Orlando suburb of Winter Park, FL, as there will be an additional 50 or so jobs available within the new company.

Here is hoping that the new company realizes the rules of multi-media and print media specifically have not remained static, there was a reason that Time sold you that stuff.

Print media as a stand-alone avenue is dead, or dying...much like the chicken littles on skifly say waterskiing is dying. Its not really dying, just the mode of information desemination is now immediate, and not, monthly, on my computer or phone or microchip implanted in my head or wherever the hell Google says so.

I am speaking to YOU, mr Waterski Magazine website editor!! Get your shit together and do something with your site!

Then again, with a portfolio of such niche mainstream genres as Spa or Islands or Caribbean Travel and Life I am sure there is a huge following out their for immediate web coverage.

This could all be proved wrong, but, taking the waterski world on its own, with the drastic shift from "traditional" waterskiing over to wakeboarding and that sort of life, you would have thought that waterski magazine would have jumped on board, so to speak, and provided heaping helpings of the new hotness.

Pandering to the private lake owning, short-line snobs is fine and dandy, just note the treadmarks on your back aren't from your X5, they are from the rowdy bunch of teen-agers with their parents credit card, a computer and disposable income.

Take this for what it is, print media is a tough industry. High overheads and fickle subscribers. Sure there is money to be made, leverage assets and printing costs and......zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Whatever, here is your chance to start all over, but embrace the change, embrace the sport as a whole, don't segment it out into slalomers v. wakeboarders v. boat drinking. Give us more waterski love and we will show more monetary love.

Its synergy baby, a symbiotic life-cycle, that's what we are about...riding the sybian..wait...thats a....you get the idea.

Links:
World Publications becomes Bonnier Corporation (OrlandoSentinal.com)

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