Stop the Open Marriages in Surfing Journalism!
Written by John David, Wednesday January 28 2009
I have nothing against open marriages. Beautiful creatures should be shared, but not intellectual property in this sense, not surfing journalism......
I have some beefs with the surfing industry in general as y'all are beginning to see the pattern in my wrting....but this is actually a compliment.
If you google surf, the main 3 news sources of surfing pop up 1st. Surfline, Surfer, TW Surf, then further down is Surfing (work on your SEO guys). Previously, like 6 months to a year ago, they would all be covering the same stories. If you pulled up the headlines on all of these sites, 90% of the time all of the headlines would be exactly the same, same photos etc. Once again goes back to my belief that there is incessant laziness in surfing and they would just piggyback on each otthers stories.
Well today I check, and there is a great variety of stories on these sites. They still do plenty of non-exclusives, but all in all there is alot of progress and diversity. There is coverage on some new and different ideas.....
I used to think (total hunch) that Surfline landed most of the stories first, just because they rely solely on online to crank out their news feed, and then the other picked 'em up or got the e-blast from the journalist second, or whatever, really bad journalism practices....
But there are so many stories that DON'T get covered, there is a huge blackhole. There are kids ripping and swells hitting and sick days in my hometown all the time that don't get covered but are worthy of coverage, people would want to read it....guaranteed.
So I still think there is room for a few more surf news media companies in the world to fill niches, like the non-pro niche, the local niche, etc. But I'm glad the big-dogs have started diversifying their focuses.
AND, the moral of the story is I will do better to dig up weird and random shit that you all haven't already heard about. That's for real.
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