Here’s the premise: there’s a magazine stuffed with interesting articles, all about you, and it’s illustrated with beautiful photography—again, all about you —and someone else is paying for it. That’s the basic idea behind vanity magazines published by ski resorts. Sounds pretty good, but it’s a lot harder to pull off effectively than you might think.


What Makes a Great Vanity Mag?
In our view, great vanity mags understand and respect their audience, and they deliver content that speaks to it. You can’t be too nuts-and-bolts, and you can’t oversell. In fact, you have to realize that the message isn’t all about you. If what you really want is a big, fat brochure loaded with details of every product or service you sell, we have a suggestion: create a big, fat brochure instead of a magazine.

Next lesson: there’s a big difference between writing effective press releases or brochure copy and creating resonant magazine pieces. Most PR people and copywriters can’t do it, and if you don’t have people who can, you really need journalists.

To that end, we recommend that you assign (at minimum) the major features to skilled freelancers. Make it clear to them that you’ll be editing for space and flow, but not for content. And stick to your word. For editorial authenticity, the writers’ voices must come through. You may cringe when an article mentions how jeezely cold it got on the mountain that day, or how bawdy things got in the base lodge bar, or mentions a competitor in passing. But that’s what make the mag authentic; readers will smell a rat if the content is uniformly glowing.

Photography and design are even more important than the words. Just as with the copy, there’s a big difference between designing a brochure and designing a magazine. A great magazine defines a set of visual “rules” for readers, and then the art director has fun “breaking” the rules to surprise and entertain. The rules can pertain to color palette, grid structure of the pages, use of typefaces and uses of type and image.

In addition to maintaining the mag’s overall artistic integrity, each story must be designed for maximum appeal. Even ad placements must be carefully selected so that they complement, rather than compete, with the magazine’s content.

Photos must be extraordinary. Less-than-perfect photography makes your resort look—well, less than perfect. While owning up to a few foibles and potential flaws in the edit is a good thing, photography serves a different purpose: to stop people from flipping the page. Most folks only start reading once something catches their eye. What catches their eye is visual. We don’t care how cute the kid is: if she was photographed on a cloudy day, don’t use the picture.

Most resorts don’t have the people and skill-sets in-house to do all this themselves, so it’s usually better to outsource the job to a custom magazine publisher. You can set the editorial direction and tone, and maintain final say. Pick your publisher carefully, and listen to them—if you’ve hired the right outfit, they’ll produce a better mag and help you avoid the common traps of vanity publishing.


The Current Crop
We took a look at five different resort mags. Here’s our take:


Title: Mountain Life
Resort: Crystal Mountain, Michigan
Published: twice (Summer, Winter)
Circulation: 170,000 per issue

We were disappointed by Mountain Life, mostly because Crystal does so many things so well (see page 31). At 32 pages, Mountain Life is more an oversized brochure than a magazine; the overall look and feel is more consistent with Sunday newspaper inserts than with lifestyle magazines. There’s no recognizable grid or consistency in type treatment, color, font or layout.

Visually, almost every page and article looks like an ad, and the copy in roughly half the articles is pure advertorial. This last would arguably be OK, except for the fact that they’re so obvious; a surfeit of adjectives and adverbs in copy invariably sets readers’ BS sensors a-jangling. Speaking of ads, most of the paid ads are quarter-pagers or smaller, creating a choppy feel to the layout. Photos range from OK to dreary. Note to would-be publishers: stiff your writers if you must, but don’t skimp on the pix.

Mountain Life tries to do the right thing, with some articles that have nothing directly to do with the mountain. But better editing would help. Consider this passage from an article on a local maple syrup producer, which opens with a description of the syrup maker talking with a customer, and then proceeds:

“The bottles are shaped like log cabins, the statue of liberty, lighthouses, and maple leaves. As they chat, another customer strolls up.”

The mental image of bottles chatting among themselves kinda creeps us out.


Title: Stratton
Resort: Stratton Mountain, Vermont
Published: quarterly
Circulation: 25,000 per issue

Stratton magazine is arguably the longest-running continuously published resort-based magazine in the industry (under one title or another, it’s been around since 1964), and it’s undeniably one of the best.

The magazine is owned by the Stratton Corporation, but it’s edited and published under contract by Romano Publishing, which also publishes titles for regional theater and tourism destinations. Unlike many resort lifestyle mags, Stratton is actually profitable in its own right; it’s a fat book boasting a roughly 50-50 ad/edit ratio with lots of beautiful full-pagers selling upscale stuff.

The resort maintains a largely hands-off approach to the magazine. “Everyone realized early on that if we wanted to build a reader base we had to broaden the editorial scope,” says publisher Lee Romano, himself a veteran of Stratton’s marketing department. “So we created a regional lifestyle publication. The value to the resort is that it speaks to the region and what goes on around here.”

Stratton takes its tagline, “Celebrating Southern Vermont,” seriously. There’s an extensive (and surprisingly interesting) calendar section containing detailed info on events from close to the Massachusetts border north to Killington. In addition to requisite ski and golf articles the feature well can include such offbeat topics as frogs, farriers and auctioneers. The writing and editing are rock-solid, and the photography is uniformly terrific.

The layout grid is nice. Starting editorial on spreads that “crossover,” as Stratton does, gives a lot of nice entry points for a reader to stop flipping and start reading. We also liked the simplicity of the covers, which demonstrate an appreciation for its upscale audience.


Title: Peaks
Resort: Vail Resorts
Published: annually (September)
Circulation: 260,000 per issue

Peaks is in its sixth year of publication, but under new management. In 2005, Vail hired Active Interest Media, led by former Mountain Sports Media honchos Efrem Zimbalist III and Andy Clurman, to produce Peaks. Former SKI editor Andy Bigford manages the publishing and editorial duties. In fact, the masthead reads like a list of SKI and Skiing refugees.

With that pedigree you’d expect Peaks to be slick and professional, and it is. The colors and type in the headers are nice. The grid is organized with a lot of visual “surprises” that make looking at the spreads fun. The photography, for the most part, is very good. The writing is crisp and the edit clean.

Even so, we found Peaks to be. . .well, sterile. Granted, it’s Vail’s prerogative to try and sell the reader on a vacation at one of their resorts, and they’ve got a lot to sell. But the copy is uniformly glowing, and there’s precious little in Peaks that speaks to anything that happens anywhere but on the resorts’ properties. Any skier knows that some of the best ski vacation stuff happens off campus.

The mag has a 45-55 ad/edit ratio. Not surprisingly, the advertisers include Vail’s resorts, ski equipment companies and real estate operations. Bigford hints that there may be some significant improvements for the next issue of Peaks.


Title: Okemo
Resort: Okemo Mountain Resort
Published: twice (Summer, Winter)
Circulation: 50,000 winter, 35,000 summer

Okemo is another mag that’s slated for an upgrade next year. We’re glad to hear it. It has its strong points, but it’s currently something of a brochure on steroids.

That’s not to say that it lacks content or detail. Or ads, for that matter. In fact, the ad/edit ratio is so high it’s hard to find any “entry points” to start reading.

The front-of-book content is primarily one-pagers on various products and services available at the resort. It’s okay, but after a while it seems like overkill; lots of this stuff is better suited to the Web. And you’re halfway through before anything resembling a feature—the mag has but one—shows up.

The feature itself? Well, it’s all about Okemo, of course. We’ll call that forgivable, in that Okemo is paying the freight and the feature is all about the resort’s history on the eve of its 50th anniversary. But the feature is long. Very long. New-Yorker-article long and, frankly, we found ourselves tuning out about a third of the way through it.

OK, that’s the downside. Here’s the up: layout and design are legible, fun and consistent in look and feel. The grid is traditional and comfortable. Most of the photography is solid, and the images are well produced and well printed.

Here’s hoping that Okemo takes a hint from the mag down the road (Stratton) and becomes a bit more of a mag and a bit less of a sales pitch.


Title: Crested Butte
Resort: Crested Butte
Published: twice (Summer, Winter)
Circulation: 15,000

Crested Butte is our other fave of the mags we examined. There’s a nice open feel to the cover. The photography is fabulous. It’s printed on heavy stock. There are lots of ads, mostly for upscale stuff, and there’s never any confusion between what’s ad and what’s edit.

Unlike Stratton and its eponymous magazine, Crested Butte the ski area has no ownership stake in Crested Butte the magazine. Nor does it maintain any level of editorial control. But like Stratton, Crested Butte has been around for a while (since the early 1970s) and the publishers have clearly drawn the same conclusion: although the ski area may be the biggest draw to the area, it’s not the only one. Given the common ownership of Crested Butte and Okemo, perhaps a little bit of Crested Butte will rub off on Okemo.

The well-written features in the winter ’06 issue include several about the ski area and its denizens, but also cover local artists, wildlife, snowmobiling and backcountry skiing. There’s also a beautiful photo essay.

If we have any criticisms of Crested Butte, it’s that the mag is rather dense with content—the open feeling of the cover isn’t always carried through on the inside—and that several of the articles mine roughly the same conceptual ground. We also noted that many of the articles start on the right-hand page, which makes them a little harder to find. But Crested Butte clearly shows that in the right hands, everyone and everything is a story.


The authors come by their resort-magazine expertise the hard way: they were mainly responsible for the cheeky, youth-oriented and ill-fated Sno magazine, produced briefly by American Skiing Company in the 1990s.

Skip King is now the president of Reputation Strategies, a Portland, Maine-based public relations and strategic marketing communications firm. He’s also a regular contributor to SAM and SKI magazines.

CJ Johnson is president of Axon Design and Marketing in Portland, Maine. In addition to magazine art direction, she creates collateral, websites, and other design elements for a wide range of businesses.