Pit & Quarry
Pit & Quarry is a monthly trade magazine based in Cleveland, Ohio, that covers the aggregates industry in the United States. Launched in 1916, it serves producers of crushed stone, sand and gravel, along with the dealers, manufacturers and other professionals who supply and support those operations. Published by North Coast Media, LLC, it describes itself as a leading equipment and technology media source for the crushed stone and sand-and-gravel industries. Its official website is pitandquarry.com, and its print magazine is supported by digital editions, a website, email newsletters and social media coverage.
Aggregates are among the least visible but most essential materials in modern life. Crushed stone, sand and gravel go into roads, bridges, buildings, concrete and asphalt, yet the quarries and plants that produce them operate largely out of public view. For more than a century, Pit & Quarry has documented that world from the inside, reporting on production, equipment, regulation and business practice for the people who run pits, quarries and sand-and-gravel plants every day.
Founding in 1916 and Harry W. Baumgartner
Pit & Quarry was first published in 1916 in Chicago. It was founded by Harry W. Baumgartner and is reported to be the first magazine created specifically for producers of nonmetallic minerals, principally crushed stone and sand-and-gravel operations. That founding date matters because it places the magazine at a formative moment for American infrastructure. In 1916 the United States had not yet entered the First World War, automobiles were still a relatively new presence, and good roads were scarce in much of the country. Demand for road-building material was about to transform the small, often family-run operations of the era.
Production levels at the time were roughly one-tenth of what they would later become, and most operations were small. The magazine grew alongside the industry it covered, chronicling mechanisation, consolidation, highway building and changing environmental expectations. When Pit & Quarry marked its centenary in 2016 with a special June supplement, it used its own archive as a record of a hundred years of change in North American aggregates production.
The Handbook Tradition Before the Magazine
The Pit & Quarry name reaches back even further than 1916. The first Pit & Quarry Handbook was published in 1907, nine years before the magazine launched, as a textbook-style reference guide for the industry. Updated editions followed over the decades and found their way to experienced managers, new hires, students and university mining-engineering programmes alike. From 1998 to 2000 the handbook tradition was digitised as Pit & Quarry University, and the modern Pit & Quarry University Handbook continues that role, offering an overview of the aggregate mining process and of the business of running a crushed stone quarry or a sand-and-gravel operation. Few trade magazines can point to an educational reference lineage that predates the magazine itself.
Publisher: North Coast Media in Cleveland
Today Pit & Quarry is a publication of North Coast Media, LLC, headquartered at 1621 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. North Coast Media, founded on 1 May 2012, presents itself as the largest business-to-business publishing company headquartered in Cleveland. Its other titles include Landscape Management and Portable Plants, the latter a quarterly sister publication to Pit & Quarry covering portable crushing, screening and related equipment. The Cleveland base is more than an address: the magazine stresses that its editorial team covers the industry from the field, travelling thousands of miles each year to visit quarries and sand-and-gravel plants and to attend trade shows and conferences.
Editorial Leadership and Staff
The magazine is led by Editor-in-Chief Kevin Yanik, who joined Pit & Quarry in 2012 and also serves as editorial advisor to Portable Plants. A Cleveland native and graduate of John Carroll University, Yanik has spent more than 15 years in business-to-business publishing. Managing Editor Jack Kopanski, a graduate of Kent State University who joined North Coast Media in August 2021 after three years in newspapers, is also editor-in-chief of Portable Plants. The team is supported by digital media specialists and by contributing authors, guest writers and industry partners, reflecting a model in which staff reporting is supplemented by first-hand expertise from inside operating companies and equipment suppliers.
What the Magazine Covers
Editorially, Pit & Quarry concentrates on the practical and commercial questions facing aggregate producers. Coverage includes crushing and screening, conveying, washing, drilling and blasting, loading and hauling, plant maintenance, safety, workforce issues, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory and permitting developments, and the markets for construction aggregates. Equipment and technology sit at the centre of the offer, because producers make large, long-lived capital decisions and need independent reporting on how machines and plants perform in real conditions. Business coverage matters just as much: pricing, demand tied to highway funding and construction activity, and the strategies of both national producers and independent family-owned operations all feature regularly.
A Century of Industry Change in Its Pages
The magazine's archive traces the industry's arc. Early issues in 1916 and 1918 used hand-drawn art and cartoons; the first cover, in October 1916, was a text-heavy advertisement. In the first half of the twentieth century the magazine covered both aggregates and the ready-mix concrete industry. After the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 launched the Interstate era, the January 1957 issue devoted a section to highway funding, a subject that has never left its pages since. Covers gained colour in the later twentieth century, trade-show reporting expanded, and highway funding, safety and technology became recurring themes. That continuity helps explain the magazine's self-description as a voice of the aggregates industry since 1916.
The Roundtable and the Hall of Fame
Pit & Quarry is also a convenor. Since 1996 it has hosted the event that developed into the Pit & Quarry Roundtable & Conference, originally called the Equipment & Technology Suppliers Roundtable. Producers were incorporated in its early years, and the gathering now brings producers, manufacturers and association leaders together in a different American city each year to exchange ideas about the industry's direction. The brand also maintains the Pit & Quarry Hall of Fame, honouring individuals who shaped aggregates production. Together with its awards history, including the Producer of the Year and Success Story recognition given to companies such as Graniterock in 2000, these programmes position the magazine as an institution within its sector, not only a reporter on it.
From Print Monthly to Digital-First News
Publishing has changed profoundly since 1916, and Pit & Quarry has described its own evolution openly. The monthly print magazine remains a flagship, but readers now typically encounter news first online. The website carries news, features and product coverage, supported by digital editions of the magazine, a weekly e-newsletter known as the Pit & Quarry Weekly Report, and monthly and special-coverage newsletters. Storytelling now extends to video, slideshows and social platforms alongside written reporting. For advertisers and list partners, the audience is defined by seniority: owners, chief executives, partners, directors and managers involved in purchasing and specification decisions, segmented by factors such as annual production tonnage and planned equipment purchases.
Audience and Industry Position
The magazine's readership is deliberately narrow and senior. Aggregate production is a concentrated business, and Pit & Quarry addresses the decision-makers who run plants and companies rather than a general construction audience. Marketing descriptions put its multichannel audience at around thirty thousand contacts, and its weekly newsletter file at several thousand senior subscribers. That specialisation is its strength: a producer reading Pit & Quarry finds coverage written exclusively about crushed stone, sand and gravel, rather than a small aggregates section inside a broader mining or construction title. Its main long-term counterpart in the sector, Rock Products, covers much of the same ground, and the friendly longevity of both titles underlines how durable the aggregates market for specialist media has been.
Why Pit & Quarry Matters
Every road resurfacing, bridge replacement and housing development depends on a nearby supply of aggregates, because the material is heavy, low in unit value and expensive to haul far. That local economics makes the industry fragmented, regional and intensely practical, and it needs a trade press that understands plant-level detail as well as national policy. Pit & Quarry has performed that role since 1916, through world wars, the Interstate building boom, environmental regulation, automation and the digital transformation of publishing itself. Based in Cleveland, published by North Coast Media and led today by Kevin Yanik, it remains a monthly print magazine, a daily digital news source and a gathering point for the American crushed stone and sand-and-gravel industries.
