Steve Casimiro, formerly of Powder/Bike and currently the West Coast Editor of National Geographic Adventure, started his own website over the winter. A purely independent pursuit, The Adventure Life is starting to attract attention ... at least from me. It should be noted that while Steve is indeed a handsome hairless man, he has no affiliation whatsoever with Lex Luthor or DC Comics.
1. OK ... so you've been a writer for as long as I can remember and you've been a photographer for almost as long, why get into publishing now?
A bunch of reasons. First, I'm an old school print guy--my first job literally was a paper route (the Washington Star), which paid for my first 35mm camera, which I got at age 11--and it took a while for me to turn the corner on online as a credible media source. I mean, one of my first jobs was online--when I was at USA Today, I worked at an online news service startup in 1984 (!!)--so it's not like I'm new to it. But it took a LONG time until I saw it on equal terms. Once I did, though, I wanted to learn as much as I could and the best way to do that was throw myself into it. (BTW, I started shooting long before I started writing...)
Second, I've worked with almost every outdoor book there is. I was at Powder for ages, I started Bike, I'm now West Coast editor for Nat Geo Adventure, etc. But I've also written or shot for Backpacker, Outside, Men's Journal, Hooked, Bicycling, Mountain Bike, Skiing, Snowboard Journal, Ski...and as great as each of those publications is, none of them has quite the same perspective on outdoor adventure that I do. I wanted to build something--for awhile I thought it might be print, but it didn't turn out that way--where I could riff on the joys of powder skiing, the coolness of surf art, the radical nature of space exploration, and still give gear reviews, environmental news, and sick athlete interviews. There was nothing that brought all that under one roof. So I decided to do it myself.
Third, and this is probably a corollary to second, is that there are literally thousands of great outdoor adventure stories that are ignored or overlooked or not quite right for the big four books. Now, I'm very much a part of the NGA family. I've never worked with such a great group of smart and dedicated people. I love and respect the magazine, its work and mission, and the NG Society--the solving of the Everett Ruess mystery last week being just one example of the great work John Rasmus has guided. Outside is a good magazine. Men's Journal got a new sense of life under Brad Wieners. Backpacker does an excellent job year in a year out, its three recent National Magazine Awards testament to Jon Dorn's leadership. But they all have specific, defined editorial views which, combined with the finite space of print, can't help but leave out a lot wonderful little nuggets of outdoor life. Would any of them write about a wallpaper designer who incorporates bikes into his art? A Finnish artist who comments on climate change dressed as a snowflake? The worst songs to have stuck in your head when hiking? (Editor's Note: My suggestion for Suzanne Vega Tom's Diner did not make the cut, though it should have).
Fourth, most outdoor blogs suck. They're unprofessional, amateurish, snarky without being funny, or boring. The few smartly done, online-only media outlets are killing it in terms of readers. If I could pull it off, it seemed to me there was room for another site, if it was well-done, visually engaging, and thoughtful.
2. What sort of traffic growth are you seeing?
Oh, massive. I passed dollyparton.com in March and Facebook just last week. Google, here I come.
Yeah....
I'm averaging about 1,100 visitors a day. But I've seen huge spikes of visitors around marquee stories, as when Apple wrote about my review of outdoor iPhone apps on their Hot News page, followed by the classic dragon's tail shape as it mellows out. But I try to ignore the spikes and focus on what I think is my core daily visitation--that growth has been steady and solid, with a pretty good leap in the last month or so. Tossing out the spikes, March was around 300 a day and now I'm consistently getting 800-900 a day. 1,100 is true and accurate, but I think it's more important to look at the people who find the Adventure Life, like it, and keep coming back.
I guess that's pretty good growth, but I don't know--I don't have a lot of reference points. It looks like I've passed a few of the independent outdoor websites, but it's hard to tell--accurate public metrics aren't so easy to find.
3. It seems like you've really poured the gas on things since mid-winter ... is that true, or am I just spacing out again?
Well, you and I have talked about the Adventure Life since it was just a concept and before it even had a name. And you saw it in beta, so it might seem like it's been bubbling along. But I launched it in January. In February, Apple brought a lot of traffic. Then Shane McConkey died in April and the Adventure Life coverage was among the earliest, most directly reported, and most thorough, so a lot of outdoor people saw it then for the first time. And over the last four weeks my print deadlines have eased a little, so I've been able to get stories posted almost every day and then spread the word about them. Now it seems like there's a bit of buzz about it.
4. Where the hell are you going with this? Is this just a stopgap while the print industry gets it together, or is this the first step of InterCasimiro Enterprises?
My wife, god bless her, has yet to ask me that.
Print is dead, man. Magazines...forget about them. The world has changed forever and for the better and the sooner magazine people realize it, the more likely they will be to survive.
Here's the deal: What the hell is a magazine, anyway? In the old days, it was a bunch of guys sitting around in an office, throwing together ideas and discoveries in print and sending it out into the world. If you got four letters to the editor, it was a good month. You measured your success through newsstand sell-through, which has more to do with how hot your cover model looks and whether the grocery clerk has moved your mag behind Martha Stewart than any talent on your part. Renewal rates? That's reliant on how much cash you pump into direct marketing, whose brightest minds consider a four percent response a whopping success. You spend millions on raw materials, labor, and shipping, then sell your product for four or five bucks, of which half goes to the Mafia-controlled distribution network. Oh--and your product is stale in 30 days when the next one arrives.
Tell me again how this is a model for success?
As I learned at Powder Magazine, where a confused muzzleloading enthusiast would call one a year or so, a magazine is where you store stuff--originally arms and gun powder. And the problem with print publishers struggling to find their way online is that they still think about their products as print publications that somehow have to find a new home in this intranet thing. What they DON'T get is that they're really just communicators, stewards of ideas, instigators, hecklers, keepers of a certain kind of flame. They are the recordkeepers of a culture and sometimes the drumbeaters and sometimes the priests. So, to my way of thinking, a magazine is a voice, a worldview, a perspective that's different from all other perspectives and that, if it resonates and is true, will find a following of like-minded people.
And whether that voice is shared in print, electrons, podcast, micropublishing, film festivals--it really doesn't matter. The delivery mechanism, while important, is much less important than the voice itself.
So, where I'm going with it--I don't know, exactly. For the immediate future, I'm focusing on finding my voice, on developing The Adventure Life "worldview" (gack, pretentiousness alert), on finding people with whom it resonates. My immediate goals are to build traffic and work out some of the technical bugs, of which there are many. After that, I can start exploring commercializing it.
As I've said to any number of people, The Adventure Life is an experiment--I'm testing myself and my ideas. Can I sustain the investigation and writing and reporting every day? Am I still passionate about sharing this info? Can I convince people to come see it? Will they like it? Will they come back? How will this change my print work, my writing style, my work flow? How does the dynamic nature of online change how I approach stories? It's all so very, very cool and I'm having a blast with it. If it can support me and find a place in people's regularly bookmarks, absolutely, I would love it.
The first question most people ask is how I'm going to make money with it. Three times this week I was approached by potential advertisers. And just yesterday a major online retailer contact me about the possibility of working together. Maybe I'm naive or just plain dumb, but right now I'm just focused on the sustainability of the...voice. That seems to be falling into place and I'm still stoked, so eventually I'll start working on the money side. But I really want to have a great, professional, dependable site before I do.
5. I don't see any traditional ads on the site, but you are making money on this.... right?
See answer to question 4. But no--not now and now in the immediate future. Any time a patron wants to step up and help take the pressure off, though, the door's open.
6. Now that you've been promoting your own product for a while, do you have more sympathy or less sympathy for PR guys?
Both more and less. Selling something, especially to the hacks that pose as gear writers (present company included), is about as thankless as it gets. Good luck! On the other hand, if you're pitching something that people want, it's pretty exciting. The levers are there, you don't have to have a huge budget, you just need imagination and the ability to see which levers to pull.
Of course, I say that and I suspect I'm totally full of shit. Keep in mind I'm not actually selling anything, I'm just trying to get people to come see something for free. How hard can that be?
MidCurrent moves into the mainstream
MidCurrent founder Marshall Cutchin recently announced that his site hit 1,000,000 yearly visits in April (as measured by Google Analytics). According to Marshall, the site has been the largest fly fishing media channel in the world for more than two years, with traffic in the past twelve months growing by an additional 42%.
What did you do to celebrate your 1,000,000th hit on MidCurrent?
Can I be honest? I spent the day wondering why our Alexa numbers were so out of whack in the first quarter.
But perhaps you were looking for something more along the lines of: "It was still a 12-hour day, it just went a little faster."
One million sure sounds like a lot, anyway. Does that mean you are officially legit in the online space? Or is there still work to do?
We have a market reach that's five times that of Fly Fisherman or any other fly fishing print media (comparing uniques to rate bases) and about twice that of any thing else online. So if you think of it in terms of relative positioning/popularity/impact, we'd probably qualify as legit. Of course in the fly fishing marketing "universe" numbers like one million sound like a lot, but as Web media goes, we're small. It's more important to me that we reach the "right" million visitors -- the new visitors and the ones who depend on us to perform a service for them.
How do you know if they're the "right" million? Or, more importantly, how do advertisers know?
Click-through rates/conversions and brand reinforcement. For example, click-through rates on social media channels are among the lowest, and click-through rates on niche content sites can be among the highest. So CPMs on Facebook might be valued fairly at less than $1, while Forbes might be able to command $30 or even $50 CPMs in their premium online positions, given their brand strength and conversion rates. Strong brand environment results in the ad publisher being able to pass along its credibility to an advertiser's landing page -- so click-throughs result in longer time-on-site, higher per session value and lifetime customer value. Lots of companies -- though only a few in the fly fishing space -- measure all that. Even if our advertisers aren't tracking it that closely, we want to be sure we come out on top on all those scores.
And to answer your question directly, it never ends, it only gets more challenging with growth.
It sounds like an awful lot of work and big words. Do you still get to fish?
I wish there were smaller words to use too. I still sneak out early in the morning to catch tarpon when my schedule isn't nightmarish.
Was there ever a plan to have a print version of MidCurrent?
If the market wants it, we'll deliver it at some point. My own background is in print, so it seems like a natural way to reach those we can't reach online: smaller, less-connected audiences.
That's an odd twist, don't you think? A future where digital revenue subsidizes the print operation?
It's quite ironic, but I think the writing was on the wall when print brands started to weaken because of their resistance to online delivery. Consumers are vetting information in entirely different ways than they were just two years ago, and the change is accelerating, so it would be very hard -- or prohibitively expensive --to catch up at this point. You can point to media companies, e.g. ESPN, who have more or less kept up, but very few who started in print.
By the way, when I told my magazine publishing friends a few years back that one day magazines would be a "companion" to a Web site, they chuckled. Many magazine publishers today still seem to think that the Web is an interesting but unknowable medium.
LINK: Midcurrent
No news is bad news
"From what we’ve heard,” said an outdoor industry exec to me this morning. “It’s a rare company (that hasn’t reorganized recently). And if they haven’t, they should probably have their head examined.”
Judging by the number of LinkedIn and Facebook requests coming in, I think that person was spot on.
Unfortunately, if you're older than a decent bottle of scotch, then you've been through this before.
My personal PR dance with downsizing dates back to the final puff of the dot-com bubble (spring, 2000). As the freshly minted Emissary of the Buzz, my new hire bonus was a single round of "hey, look how much money we just raised" PR followed by 13 months of periodic bloodletting. Good times.
I kept a work journal back in those days (sort of like a blog, except it was written with "paper" and a "ball point pen." Check Wikipedia), and waxed long and poetic on that first downsizing.
That cut stung for a couple reasons. Primarily because it was deep and harsh. But also because it was a surprise.
I never got used to it, but I did embrace the reality that downsizing is just as natural as rapid growth. Every company believes it’ll never happen to them. But guess what? It happens to everybody.
* What's the point of downturn PR? The primary goal of PR in a downturn is to embrace the opportunity to fill a vacuum. Namely, if you don't provide a story about your brand, someone else will. In PR circles, they call it “getting out in front,” meaning that you’re taking the opportunity to lead, even when it comes to bad news. This can be ginormously helpful in creating confidence and goodwill.
* Who's your daddy? In any reorg communication, take your time on the front end. Think about the news you are considering releasing. Think hard. Consider the reaction of each of your primary audiences: your employees, your business partners and your consumers (via the amplifier of your primary media players). If you’re fortunate enough to have a decent PR team in place, you’ll find that the message required for those three groups is very much the same: short-term stability, long-term stability, and overall stability. Did I mention stability?
* What’s your biggest concern? Your biggest concern is not that the news will get out there – but rather that there’s more trouble ahead. You need to provide your trusty employees with a good reason to keep their resumes off of Monster.com. You need to explain to your business partners that doing business with you remains a good idea. And you need to provide some real transparency so that the media can trust that what you’re telling them is really all there is to know.
* Consider silence: After the third round of dot-com layoffs, when the media had stopped covering the death spiral, the CEO asked me if we even needed to do a press release on the next round of cuts. He had a point. Not every layoff requires an official press release. If you didn’t do one when you hired that new division during a season of 125% growth, you might not need one when you let them go. However, since you will need to have a concise document for both business partners and employees, and since the message is likely the same for the media as well, creating an internal press release in advance of any downsizing activity is time well spent. Be prepared. Nothing looks worse in a reorganization than being disorganized.
* Can I trust the media? Media coverage follows trends, just like everybody else. When things are good, stories of companies on the upswing dominate the news. When things are bad, the deathwatch seems to own the front page. But at the end of the day, the media are looking for the same thing you are … the chance to communicate a compelling anecdote to an eager audience. If you’ve been flying to close to the sun, then … sure … you may find yourself in the company of Eliot Spitzer. But if you truly believe there’s a silver lining in your story, then you owe it to yourself and your company to allow the media to find it.
Letter from Boston: The 2008 OIA Rendezvous
You are driving your family on an icy highway, and you lose control of the car.
As if gravity suddenly turns its back on you, the tires lose traction, the steering wheel spins, and your brain acknowledges the reality that you're going to hit something. Hard.
But you don't know what that something is going to be. So you hope that the coming impact is minor. That the impact is only a tree.
Only a tree. It's incredible to be rooting for impact with a giant fixed object that's sure to snap an axle and total the car and probably shatter at least two windows. But that's what you're doing. That's what we're doing. And that's the world as it stands right now.
Framed by an uncertain future, there was indeed something special about the election year OIA Rendezvous, completed last night in the grand city of Boston.
Structurally speaking, the format was no different than any OIA event held in the last decade. Speakers. Food. Booze. Speakers. Food. Nap.
But by virtue of the timing,... and I mean timing of the bad kind, the unexpected and staggering arrival of generational, game-changing shifts within mere days of eachother ... it was a truly remarkable and worthy event. Led by the most sobering, realistic, slap-in-the-face batch of keynotes and breakout sessions I have ever attended, I left the gathering inspired, energized, and (ironically) fully fueled up.
Undoubtedly, the speaker list was nailed down months ago: economics, politics, and consumer trends, as usual, were keynote priorities. They're ALWAYS keynote priorities.
But when the market is slipping, the election is tightening, and consumers feel more comfortable growing chickens in their backyard than buying a Costco card ... those keynotes were ingested and digested by a silent, rapt and concerned crowd.
The keynotes -- superstud Robert F. Kennedy Jr, economist Clyde Prestowitz, trendspotter Marian Selzman, NPR's Ken Rudin -- admitted their own uncertainty, comfortably turning to unscripted realism instead of canned powerpoints for impact, and left the gathering of CEOs with a head full of ideas about what the future might hold for those who live and love the outdoor lifestyle.
For all that's bad in the world today, and for all the things that scare the shit out of us as parents and business owners and friends, the big takeaway from the OIA Rendezvous was that outdoor world is more important, more relevant, and more essential to the future of our world than ever before.
Don't take my word for it. Just look around.