Making friends with surf mag editors !!! I know the public likes controversy and watching(reading) people interacting negatively towards one another. Enjoy my being chastised and critiqued by one of Americas greatest writing talents, Nick McGregor, albeit one who doesnt have the sophistication nor wisdom to comprehend the intricacies of my sense of humor. ENJOY !!! I liked the premise behind the piece. And it’s probably the best out of all the things you’ve submitted to us in the past. But it felt indirect. You lost me right off the bat with “There once existed a time,” which is about as passive as a phrase can get. Change it to “Remember a time without... ?” and you’re speaking directly to a reader rather than waxing poetic and talking right past him/her. Also, many outlets love to snarkily denigrate their readers: the “‘just-got-cable’ minions of Dare County,” “Every schmuck from Long Island Joey to Miami Luis,” etc. It’s just not the way ESM’s owners and publishers (or my mom, God bless her soul) trained me/raised me. Maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe that makes me weak. But every email I’ve ever gotten from you has denigrated somebody: me because I’m from Florida, our last editor Allison because she was a woman, Mez because he ran away from some guy named Nicky Scarfano 30 years ago, Micah Sklut because he banned you from his website,Southerners, ghetto dwellers, smartphone photographers, surf forecasting websites, ADD kids, boring pro surfers, etc. etc. So much negative energy, even if it’s just deployed in the name of humor, which I think it is, is downright exhausting. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t bother me in the least — I have a 3-year-old who tears me down to utter nothingness each and every day and two jobs that keep me stuck to computers and social media for 18 hours straight, which successfully sucks every ounce of humanity from my body before bed each night. But when such a denigrating tone dominates nearly everything you submit — and you keep making me struggle through the strangulated phrase “You know what it is that I be sayin’” over and over and over again — it gets even more exhausting. Believe it or not, young people read our magazine. Many of them weren’t even alive when the Internet wasn’t the dominant force in everyones lives. My first reaction to your piece was, “None of those readers would understand this,” which probably means none of them would read it. We like to publish things that appeal to as many East Coast as possible: young ones, old ones, bitter ones, happy ones, ones who ride shortboards and longboards and bodyboards and wooden planks, ones who pine for the elusive good ol’ days, ones who yearn for some indeterminate and probably unattainable future, ones who just want to look at pretty pictures, ones who want to read well-crafted words… A love letter to the Weather Channel is nice, as we’ve certainly paid our fair share of tribute to John Hope in the glorious past (even had an award named after him for many years). So the part of me that grew up on The Weather Channel and thumbs up/down signs from passing surfers on the highway and wind forecasts printed nearly illegibly in the backs of newspaper and muffled telephone surf reports thinks if you tightened the hell out of all the passivities and vagaries in your piece, it could even be workable. But the part of me that runs a magazine attempting to cater to as many different slices of the East Coast surfing demographic as possible thinks that printing something so obviously addressed to one narrow slice of that demographic while denigrating all the rest of it doesn’t make sense. I certainly appreciate your love for the printed word, and I admire your desire to dive deeper into surf writing — Lord knows we need more straight-shooters and bullshit-callers and people with slight screws loose (dont take that the wrong way) to keep boring hacks like me honest. And since it seems ESM has obviously failed you with our repetitive pro surfer interviews and inability to deviate or take any risks, I feel a bit honored that you still want something published in our magazine. Oddly enough, I liked your piece on Surfd more than anything you’ve sent me so far (maybe because it didn’t denigrate anyone or use stiff, hokey slang?) Then again, maybe I’m just a bad editor doing poor work and driving a once-gloried East Coast institution into the ground. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here, it’s that you will never come close to making everyone happy. In which case I encourage you to start your own publication. Everybody’s doing it these days, and I assure you it’s quite easy (oops, didn’t mean to let that bit of sarcasm intrude). You’ve got the singular voice to do it (no sarcasm there). Or you could keep pitching ideas my way (and the way of other editors — The Surfer’s Journal might dig some of this stuff), and I will keep letting you know how I feel. Chances are we might hit the mark at some point. I will tell you this: I only write emails this long about once every six-week editorial cycle, and it’s usually the night before I have to spend three straight days proofing every word, photo, credit, caption, and ad in a 104-page magazine three times over. I’m not sure whether to thank you for providing me with such an outlet to vent or apologize to you for having to endure it. Either way, I hope you don’t hate me and ESM even more and continue finding ever-snarkier ways to denigrate us. But if you do, that’s fine too — you do it with more panache than anyone else. Nick Nick McGregor Editor, Eastern Surf Magazine & EasternSurf 904.315.1054 nick@easternsurf EasternSurf
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 00:47:31 +0000
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