About Skiing Magazine

Skiing Magazine

Skiing Magazine was an American magazine devoted to skiing, published in print from 1948 until the winter of 2017/2018. Founded by Merrill Hastings as Rocky Mountain Skiing, it became one of the two largest-circulation magazines for skiers in the United States, alongside its longtime rival SKI. Based for its final years in Boulder, Colorado, it was known for a focus on committed, everyday skiers, instruction, equipment testing and new places to ski, and for a voice that, in the words of its own former editor, gave skiers a voice of their own.

The print magazine ended after nearly seventy years when its owner, Active Interest Media, incorporated its assets into its sister publication SKI in the winter of 2017/2018. The brand continued online at skiingmag.com, and the decision was presented as a shift toward digital, video and television storytelling rather than the disappearance of the title altogether.

Founding as Rocky Mountain Skiing

Merrill Hastings launched Rocky Mountain Skiing in 1948 as a news-oriented magazine. American skiing was then a young, rapidly expanding sport: veterans of the 10th Mountain Division had returned from Europe and were pioneering ski areas in the West, and hundreds of local hills were reviving in the Northeast. A publication that began as something close to a regional newsletter for purists, interested in getting out on snow in wool pants and leather boots, soon developed into a national title.

The name changed as the ambition grew. In 1950 it became the National Skiing Newspaper, in 1954 National Skiing, and in 1956 simply Skiing. Circulation rose to almost fifty thousand in its first ten years. From the start it competed aggressively with SKI magazine, run by Bill Eldred, and historians of ski publishing note that in the early years its reviews were not entirely objective, favouring resorts and equipment makers who advertised in its pages — a common weakness of the young ski press that its later equipment testing would try, imperfectly, to correct.

Editorial Identity: The Everyday Skier

What separated the two big ski titles was positioning. Where the rival focused on ski racing and established resorts, Skiing focused on everyday skiers. Its early pages were heavy with instruction, because the sport was young and its readers were learning, with gear coverage and reports on new places to ski at a time when new areas were opening constantly.

That positioning made Skiing the natural mouthpiece for the first distinctively American movement in the sport, the hot-dog, or freestyle, era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as opposed to European-influenced racing. Former editor Marc Peruzzi, writing its obituary in Outside in February 2017, argued that for most of its long history the magazine offered a unique and at times vital take on the sport, and that its ultimate problem was paradoxical: its success in speaking for skiers helped build an audience that the business could no longer separate profitably from its sister title's.

The Ziff Davis Years in New York

In 1964 the Ziff Davis company of New York bought Skiing and Skiing Trade News from Hastings and moved operations to New York. Owner Bill Ziff recruited experienced staff from SKI. The first editor under the new ownership, Luray, wanted a slick magazine, but Ziff decided it should be a more serious title aimed at dedicated skiers, and replaced him with Doug Pfeiffer, a ski school director from California.

Pfeiffer was editor-in-chief of Skiing and its sister publications Skiing Trade News, Skiing Area News and Skiing International Yearbook from 1965 to 1976. Under Ziff, in 1965, the magazine began issuing test reports on skis. Pfeiffer himself later examined that testing critically: to avoid upsetting advertisers none of the reports were negative, and because of the timing of new model releases, the skis tested, and the conditions they were tested in, did not typically match what readers would actually buy and ski on. Pfeiffer was followed as editor by John Jerome and then Al Greenberg.

Ownership Carousel: CBS, Times Mirror and Time

The magazine's later history is a tour of American media consolidation. In 1985 Ziff Davis sold Skiing and other magazines to the broadcaster CBS. In 1987 CBS sold the magazines to Peter Diamandis, and later that year Skiing was bought for twenty-five million dollars by the Times Mirror Company, which also owned the rival SKI — placing the two great competitors under one roof for the first time, a pairing that would last, through successive owners, for the rest of the magazine's life.

Times Mirror was purchased by the Tribune Company of Chicago in 2000. In 2001 Skiing, SKI and other magazines were sold to Time4 Media, a subsidiary of Time Inc. By then the traditional ski magazines faced fierce competition from ski websites. In 2006 another sale was announced, to the Bonnier Group, the Swedish publisher that took over the titles in 2007.

Active Interest Media and Boulder

In 2013 Skiing was purchased by Active Interest Media, a publisher of about fifty magazines based in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder was a fitting final home for a magazine born as Rocky Mountain Skiing, and by its last years the distinction between the two sister titles was described in industry coverage in audience terms: Skiing was the winter-adventure magazine, focused on younger skiers who live for the sport, while SKI was more family-friendly, aimed at the ageing baby boomers who had grown the industry and wanted more comfort in a ski vacation.

The magazine's final editor-in-chief, Kimberly Beekman, was noted at the closure as the title's first female editor-in-chief, and Active Interest Media said it was keeping the Skiing staff as the brands merged.

The Final Print Issue

In February 2017 Active Interest Media announced that Skiing would shutter its print publication and fold its adventure-focused content into a revamped SKI magazine. The final print edition, the winter 2017/2018 issue, had already been published when the trade coverage appeared. President and chief executive Andy Clurman described the plan as marrying the two brands into a single, snowy voice, a bigger-tent approach.

The company stressed that the brand was not ending: skiingmag.com would remain, with a renewed focus on digital video, television and online storytelling carrying the Skiing name, and its content folded into the combined operation. Peruzzi's Outside assessment was less corporate and is the more quoted verdict: that Skiing was the magazine the sport deserved, that it had a voice, and, more important, that it gave a voice to skiers.

What the Magazine Covered

Across its name changes and owners, the recurring content was instruction for a learning sport, equipment coverage and testing, resort and terrain reporting, and news of a fast-growing industry through its trade sister publications. The early emphasis on new places to ski documented the post-war multiplication of American ski areas; the later emphasis on adventure and younger skiers documented a sport whose centre of gravity had moved from racing gates and established resorts toward terrain, travel and personal experience. That editorial arc mirrors the history of American skiing itself between 1948 and 2017, which is why the Skiing Heritage Journal's history of the ski magazines treats the title as a primary source for the sport's development.

Legacy

Skiing Magazine's legacy is double. Institutionally, it was one of the two largest-circulation ski magazines for most of its life, surviving six ownership regimes and the transition from a regional post-war newsletter market to national glossy publishing. Editorially, it is remembered for choosing the ordinary committed skier over the racer and the luxury traveller, a choice made under Ziff Davis in 1964 and still visible in the way its closure was reported in 2017.

Its end also illustrates a wider pattern in enthusiast publishing: two rival titles, consolidated under common owners for three decades, were eventually judged one title too many, and the younger, louder brand was folded into the older one while its name continued online. The print magazine that Hastings founded in the Rockies in 1948 thus finished, seventy years on, back in Colorado, as a digital brand inside the rival it had competed with for most of the twentieth century.