In a Digital Age, High-End Outdoors Magazines Are Thriving in Print

In an ordinary industrial building off a busy Orange County street, a Seussian contraption, nearly 100 feet long, clattered to life. The room filled with the hum and squeaks of belts and machinery. There was the smell of hot glue.

Like passengers on a dark amusement ride, bundles of colorful magazine pages, printed a week earlier, began a wild, circuitous journey, through tunnels and up ramps, that lasted a few minutes. The bundles were somehow cut and collated. The long edge of each new 130-page sheaf was dipped into a pool of melting glue, then dropped into a U-shaped cover. After drying during a series of slow corkscrews, the new magazine’s edges were chopped smooth by guillotines and emerged through an opening. Unimpressed men stacked them into boxes.

Nearby, Stephen Casimiro held one of the 7,200 copies in his hand.

Casimiro, a former editor of Powder and National Geographic Adventure, is the founder and publisher of Adventure Journal, an unapologetically analog magazine at the heart of an old-school trend.

He sifted through the pages. He smiled.

“People will have this in their hands, on their coffee table,” Casimiro said. “That was the idea. We’re all exhausted from our screens. We want something to savor.”

There are sprouts of life, even profitability, on the landscape of print media and magazines, cratered by the pixilated bombardment of the digital age. High-end niche periodicals are popping up, but the trend might be most evident in a burst of small-batch, independent outdoors magazines like Adventure Journal, Mountain Gazette, Summit Journal and Ori. They are crowding into quiet spaces of narrow lanes — climbing, surfing, skiing, running and the like — where quality is key, advertising is minimal and subscribers are faithful. Most do not put their content online; this is journalism meant to be thumbed through, not swiped past.

The magazines are sometimes oversized and increasingly matte finished, filled with edge-to-edge photographs and literary heaves. They can cost $25 or more per issue. They are meant as much for the coffee table as the shoulder bag — designed to be collectible, not disposable.