By John Fry
Editor-in-chief, SKI
What do you do when you’re editing a nationally ski distributed magazine, and your readers tell you they want more information about smaller areas to ski in their region? Useful information about a resort near Hartford, Connecticut, may hold little interest for a Californian. A skier looking for hills outside Seattle doesn’t want to read about hills near Grand Rapids, Michigan. As a result, the 600 or more smaller ski areas in North America have tended to get short shrift in the national magazines. Yet attitude surveys conducted by the Editors of SKI Magazine indicated that our 400,000 subscribers and single copy readers do want more information about such areas that are easily accessible for a weekend or a day.
In early 1973, when Times Mirror Magazines Inc. acquired Ski, the editors won corporate approval for a new program called, “Where to Ski in Your Region.” It divides North America into three geographic areas: the East (including Laurentians and Ontario), the Midwest, and everything west of the Missouri and Mississippi (Rockies, Sierras and the Cascades). A separate staff, with an annual budget of $40,000, was established under Travel Editor Abby Rand and three regional editors—Janet Nelson (East), Don Dooley (Midwest) and Barbara Wicks (West)—each working with a network of stringers.
The editorial concept for the “Where to Ski in Your Region” program is fairly simple. In assigning stories to the regional editors and stringers, we direct them to answer in 400 words the prototypical reader question: “I’m thinking of going to ski at Mt. XYZ, can you tell me what it’s like?” We dubbed the answers “capsule reports.” Twelve such reports appear in each issue, from November through March, accompanied in each case by a portrait of the mountain showing the ski trails, and a road map showing the best way to get there.
In order to draw maximum attention to this new reader service, we settled upon an eight-page section (with no advertising), positioned immediately in front of the editorial well. We heightened reader interest by starting the section with a one-page, topical theme: for instance, special Thanksgiving weekend deals in November, Christmas-New Year’s activities in December. In the face of gas shortages and Sunday filling station shut-downs, the March issue reported on scores of special bus services, car pools and other ways to get to ski areas in each of the three regions of the country. The “Where to Ski in Your Region” section ends with a “Handy Facts” page: guides to night skiing, telephone numbers for lodge reservations, nurseries, cross-country skiing and rental shops, and more.
Although each regional section appears as eight pages, the actual editorial work for any issue entails production of 24 pages. The 1974-75 publishing cycle, for instance, will result in 120 editorial pages containing about 170 detailed capsule reports on small and medium-sized areas.
The facts and details contained in SKI Magazine’s “Where to Ski in Your Region” sections are voluminous. Last winter, for instance, we reported (including repeated mentions) 1,319 area names, 590 lodges and lodging reservation services, 419 phone numbers of places to stay, 131 baby sitting facilities, 250 night skiing facilities, and 271 regular and chartered bus services to ski areas.
By Doug Pfeiffer
Editorial Director, SKIING
The answer to “What can the smaller ski area expect from Skiing Magazine?” is, in the broadest of terms, almost exactly the same thing as the big ski area can expect: 1) an evocation of the beauty, thrills and fun of skiing; and 2) a celebration of the body and the spirit through the physical delights of making turns on snow, and a certain soaring release from the grind of the daily rat race.
We at SKIING have never considered too many differences to exist between the large or small ski area, considering them all as places to ski with varying degrees of excitement for skiers of different abilities. If there is an exception to this generality it is because we have to think of ski areas in terms of reader interest. In that context there is more interest among our readers nationwide for the big “destination resorts” that pull skiers from all sides of the continent than, for example, a smaller ski area that attracts its customers from a distance covered in a couple hours driving time. Consequently, we tell our readers about the big resorts in what we call the “national” section of the magazine. We tell our readers about the smaller areas — and a great many of them, too — in our “regional” editions. Further, we frequently editorialize on the merits of the small area for the get-away-from-the-crowds experience.
Skiing is a special interest publication, meaning that it’s appeal is primarily for those with an interest in our sport already developed. We try to heighten that interest to increase the enthusiasm for, and understanding of, our sport. Very extensive and, I might add, very expensive studies of our readership have shown that most of our material must address itself to the interests of the market place. We’ve learned that we have basically only three stories to tell: 1) How to ski better; 2) Where to ski better; and 3) What to ski better with.
There is one area where SAM readers could help us do a better job. That’s in keeping us informed with up-to-date human interest anecdotal material about what’s going on at the smaller ski area level. We find that publications such as Phil Camp’s Ski Area News Service and Bill Keil’s Northwest Ski News do a good job in this regard, but after all, we know there are several hundred smaller ski areas in North America not covered by those public relations services. Might we not also hear from them?
And might we not also get some up-to-date good black and white photographs showing the excitement and charm of those play-spas? Every year we send our requests for this type of information to every North American ski area worthy of the name. Every year we get less than a 50 per cent return and many of those arrive too late to be of any editorial value to us. What is too often forgotten, especially by the small ski area, is that information to be published in our December issue must be in our hands by the first of September — we work that far ahead.
To paraphrase President Kennedy’s classic remark — Ask not what SKIING can do for you. Ask what you can do for skiing — the sport, that is. That’s the way we look at things, so smaller ski areas, give us the word in time, and we’ll help spread it.
