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You, uh, so you mentioned like the friend coming over and seeing it on the coffee table. Like that's what you expect the magazine to be featured. You can kind of want to position it as like a collector's item, something that someone, they
How Mountain Gazette thrives as a collector's print magazine by focusing on passionate readers over ads.
Key Takeaways
- Print magazines can thrive by treating issues as collectible, premium products.
- A subscriber-first model supports sustainable, quality journalism and photography.
- Nostalgia and legacy brands have value beyond digital metrics and algorithms.
- Outdoor and niche communities remain loyal to tangible, well-crafted media.
- The digital fatigue trend fuels renewed interest in print media experiences.
Summary
- Mike Roi bought the dormant Mountain Gazette magazine brand in 2020 for $5,000.
- The magazine was revived as a premium print publication targeting passionate outdoor readers.
- Mountain Gazette publishes two oversized print issues annually with tens of thousands of subscribers.
- The magazine is positioned as a collector’s item, not disposable media.
- Roi rejected traditional ad-driven models to focus on subscriber-first revenue.
- This approach allowed investment in high-quality writers and photographers.
- Print’s resurgence is linked to a backlash against digital overload and fleeting clicks.
- Roi’s background includes extensive experience in outdoor media and community building.
- The video includes insights into the magazine’s history, business model, and future plans.
- The show is part of The Business of Content series about media entrepreneurship.
Chapters
- 00:00Positioning Mountain Gazette as a Collector's Item
- 03:13Mike Roi’s Early Life and Skiing Background
- 06:37Post-College Career and Early Media Experience
- 09:40Community Building and Powder Magazine Role
- 13:04Print Magazine Revival and Business Model
- 22:29Subscriber-First Approach and Content Investment
- 30:13Print Media’s Resurgence and Digital Fatigue
- 36:58Future Plans and Audience Engagement
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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wouldn't just throw in their magazine rack, that it would be somewhere like prominently positioned in the home or something or an office or something like that.
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Yes. And I'll tell you the thing that I find to be the best. So just 'cause we're here, I'm hopping on my phone. I just went to eBay and I just typed in Mountain Gazette and I want to show you
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the first thing there is Mountain Gazette 202 from 2024. It's $50 right there on eBay. Here's 1970s Mountain Gazette 49 issues, $750.
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Hello, I'm Simon Owens and this is The Business of Content, the show about how publishers create, distribute, and monetize their digital content. When Mike Roi purchased Mountain Gazette in early 2020, he wasn't acquiring a thriving media business. For $5,000 and
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the cost of a couple beers, he bought a dormant outdoor magazine brand whose main assets consisted of a URL, a trademark, decades of archives, and boxes of old issues sitting in storage.
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But Roi believed the magazine's legacy, which included contributions from writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Edward Abbey, still carried meaning. At a time when many publishers were chasing algorithms and scale, he wanted to prove there was still a market for a
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beautifully designed print publication built around passionate readers rather than fleeting clicks. Five years later, Mountain Gazette has grown into a profitable independent magazine with tens of thousands of subscribers who pay for two oversized print issues a year.
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In our interview, Roi explained why he rejected the traditional ad-driven media model, how a subscriber-first approach allowed him to invest more into writers and photographers, and why he believes print's resurgence is tied to a broader backlash against an increasingly digital
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world. If you want to listen to an audio version of this show, subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're watching this on YouTube, gently tap on that subscribe button so you can watch more
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interviews with the world's most successful media entrepreneurs. Okay, let's jump into the interview. Hey Mike, thanks for joining us.
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Thanks for having me, Simon. So, super excited to talk to you. You are the owner and editor of a public, a magazine, a premium magazine that you bought, uh, and revived called, uh, The Mountain Gazette. And I, I want to jump
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into and talk about all of that. But first, I just want to hear a little bit about your background. Like obviously The Mountain Gazette is, is, is a kind of outdoorsy magazine and I was looking at your LinkedIn and not only do you have a
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long background in media, but it seems like you worked for several like outdoor media brands prior to that. So let's start there. Tell me a little bit about that.
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Sure. So I grew up in upstate New York and I started writing for my local newspaper a little bit about skiing as an intern, mostly about outdoor adventure. Um, I was blogging on a website called newchoolers.com.
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And to be honest with you, Simon, this is the only thing I'm good at. This is the only thing I know how to do. If this didn't work out, I have no idea what I would be doing right now.
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Were you an avid skier growing up?
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Yeah. Yeah. So, my dad got my sister and I on snow and we were about 5 years old and it was night skiing. It was at this small spot called West Mountain in
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upstate New York. I could get out of school around like 2:30, 3:00. My parents could drop me off and I would ski until 9 or sometimes 10 p.m., like pretty much every day when I could and it was really good rain or shine. And I
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think just being there all the time, it just became a part of sort of who I was and who I became and who I am now.
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And you said you wrote for a blog. Was it like just some independent blog that you ran or that someone else owned?
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Uh, it was called newchoolers.com and so it's still around today and it was really cool. It was like, um, um, it was kind of like pre-social media, before social media, pre-YouTube, before YouTube. This is back in like 2002.
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And they had a website you could upload videos to and people could comment on them. Uh, internet was a little friendlier of a place back then. So that was really fun. And I was just using the tools that
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were in front of me, Simon. Like, uh, Facebook was this brand new thing, uh, in 2006 when I got to college. 2005 I think really was when it was. And I, um, I just started using it to find pro athletes or
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filmmakers, photographers and ask them politely like, may I interview you for my blog? And I got a following and I just never thought to monetize it. I was stoked when someone would send me a pair of goggles or a free jacket. I always
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felt pretty good when I was in college. And then slowly but surely I started getting some paychecks for it and I'm 40 now. This is, yeah, really all I've ever done.
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So this wasn't new schoolers like you actually had your own like personal blog?
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Uh, I did have that but mostly I just wanted to write. I was an English literature and writing major in college and every day I was going to school and
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learning some sort of new technique, new style of writing, news, new literary interpretation, uh, literary criticism and I just wanted to see if I could translate that into skiing and outdoor culture.
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Yeah. And did you read like a lot of skiing media back then?
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Um, kind of. I did and I didn't. Like so, uh, when I was a kid, I did. My mom and dad had this great policy where the
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only thing I could ever ask for in a grocery store was a magazine. So I would go by and I wasn't looking for, you know, home and gardening or People magazine. So I was getting Freeze or Powder or Ski Magazine and, uh, Outside
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occasionally and was just kind of digging in and I, I found pretty quickly that, uh, not only did I really enjoy the writing in there, but I also became critical of the writing in there, too. If I felt like it
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was slipping or something wasn't up to the standards. And I think maybe from like a young age, like 9 or 10, I was already starting my editing career of just being like, you know, they can do better than that.
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And what happened after you graduated college?
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Gosh, man. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had an opportunity to write a senior thesis or make a documentary and I actually made my senior year documentary about how I was
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going to find a job in the ski industry. And, uh, my advisers all thought it was pretty funny. It was like a good job application. Um, I ended up getting picked up by a website called skitheeast.net community. Back then it was
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community-based website and a little bit of a clothing company. Now it's mostly a clothing brand and a bar in Burlington, Vermont. And we were trying to push boundaries of just like what we could do to rally a community together. It taught
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me a lot about community building. And, um, I ran their website from an editorial standpoint. I helped put up new merchandise on the website which really helped me with what I'm doing with Mountain Gazette now. And, um, I was
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in Burlington for two and a half years and then I got the call to go be an editor at Powder Magazine. So I packed up my dog and my skis and I moved across, well actually it's kind of funny. I was
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intended to bring my dog out and then about a month before my apartment told me I could not have a dog there.
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So I had to leave my dog behind. And where did you move to work for Powder?
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San Clemente, California. Orange County, California. The heart of ski culture. Um, and so at the community, you said it was a community website before that you were at. What does that mean? Like it was like an online message board for
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skiers?
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Yeah, a little bit. And mostly like just there was some weather, there was some games. It was really about, um, it was regional, you know, the Northeast. Um, Northeast has an incredible ski culture b
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Mhm. And what And I don't I'm not familiar with the magazine. Is it like kind of like an outside uh like kind of like outside where it was just about skiing enthusiasts to professionals like kind of like a glossy
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magazine like what what kind of magazine is it kind of? So, Powder was founded in 1972 by Jake and Dave Mo. Um, for a very long time, for several decades, about 40 years or so, it was known as the Bible
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of skiing. It was sort of where you went to write about soulful soulful ski articles there. And then slowly but surely, it just kind of fell victim to social media and clickbait and listicles and all that. But when I was
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there, it felt it felt pretty core. It felt pretty authentic. And for me it was like a comedian getting to Saturday Night Live. I think for a long time if you're a writer and you wanted to write about skiing in particular, you wanted
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to work at Powder Magazine. Um and and so that was a really big thing. I was only 23 when I was hired there. So that was a big uh it was a big thing for me.
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And this was sometime in the 2010s. Yeah. Yep. And so was it kind of like a jack-of alltrades type of position where you were like writing features or and editing and putting the book together and different stuff like that?
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Yeah, it was definitely an intro for me to making magazines. Um, I'd always loved magazines, but it's where I kind of got my feet wet. Um, I was hired to to be an East Coast voice uh for the
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magazine being that it was West Coast centric. It was founded in Sun Valley and had always been in California for since its founding really. Um, and then, uh, yeah, I did a lot of website stuff.
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I, uh, you know, started their Instagram account, started their Twitter account, um, started their Facebook account, started kind of down the path of like just communicating with our audience, which Powder had never really done before outside of like some like movie
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tour stops during the Powder to the People tour. And I think what I really wanted to do was make this place that felt so exclusive feel really inclusive.
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And um I think I succeeded in that in a lot of ways. And um yeah, I was there for 3 years and then decided to leave and move to North Lake Tahoe where I live now.
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And you said that it like entered like a clickbay era and obviously like the we'll get into talking about this, but Mountain Gazette is the opposite of that in every shape and form. Was that something that happened during your
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tenure or is that something that you noticed like after you left? I think it happened after uh but like the seeds were planted there. I mean I started that Instagram account. I mean just as much as fault you know the original sin
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was started by me securing that Instagram account. But you know I think I think the big thing about publishing is that we've all sort of most publishers have forgotten why people like them in the first place. It's it's
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nice. We take we've always taken for granted in the United States how nice it is to have a trusted news source and those news sources have never been huge financial grabs or cash cows or anything like that. I mean there way you can make
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a good living in media but I don't think you should expect to make a great living like uh like you can in maybe tech or in this is AI or oil and gas or any of the other you should expect you should expect a
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massive exit basically. No, I mean I don't I also I also don't think that media and journalism in particular, journalists that I know, photographers I know, cartoonists I know, they um looking for an exit sounds terrible. Like this is a calling. Um and
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for a very long time and and I still believe this that journalism is like medicine is like law. It's something that needs to be practiced. It's something that needs to be perfected and advanced. And and in all of those
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professions, honesty is is the best thing for you to have. If you have a lawyer, you sure as [ __ ] want them to be telling you the truth. Same with a doctor. Same with a journalist. And so,
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I think what I learned about clickbait was like the incentive model was wrong. You know, for me with Mountain Gazette, the way we set it up is I I don't have enough space or enough time or enough issues to lie to our readers, you know,
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because if we lie to them in one issue, they're gone. they're gone forever. And so we put a lot of emphasis on being truthful on finding and telling people what we know and more importantly what we don't know, you know. And so I just I
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find that clickbaity stuff was like was really incentivized by social media just frankly not having very good content.
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You have to remember that at one point. So I mean I I don't know how old are you Simon?
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42. 42. So we're about the same age. Like you you remember this. Social media was just not very good content.
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And so what did these guys have to do? They partnered with media outlets so that you could read New York Times stories on Facebook.
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Yeah. I mean, the media created the monster of Facebook because they all put the like buttons all over their their their huge websites and and directed people to, you know, follow them on Facebook. A lot of them like shut down their own
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comment section and said, "Just go to social media. You can comment on our stories there." where I don't think the average person realizes like how much like the media for all it complains today about how Facebook gutted the the
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business models that they like they actually shipped a lot of their audiences over to Facebook and told them go over there because they thought Facebook was like a partner that was going to be sending that traffic back to
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them. We let the wolf into the hen house and then got upset when it just [ __ ] ate all the chickens. Like literally, we're like what the hell? And I mean, I can remember being at Powder in a
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Performance review and someone telling me how great a story was cuz how many likes it got on Facebook.
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And then I mean I would I think about that now and had I had the hindsight that I have now then I would have been like, well, how many people actually came over and read the story? Like maybe
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they just like the headline and the photo we used, you know, like our maybe our SEO was like just outstanding on it.
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And I just I don't know. And I remember like kind of it was about it was kind of like Wizard of Oz style getting the curtain pulled back, you know, on a you know another publication and and finding
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out that their most popular most read story of the last decade was not hard-hitting journalism about going up Everest. It was not about like an avalanche death or like environmental story or climate change or anything like or an athlete profile. The two most read
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stories were the top six sports bras for the summer of like 2003 and the top 10 ways to get your kid into summer camp.
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And I was like, what are we doing? We have trained our audience to only like this is all servicey journalism.
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No one we have trained our audience to not give a [ __ ] about what's actually happening in the world. And that felt pretty bad to me.
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So you left Powder. I know at some point you started kind of your own kind of production company that created content.
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I don't know if it was up on behalf of like outdoors companies. So, like what what was that?
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I just like needed to leave skiing behind for a little bit. I mean, I was still skiing a lot, but from a professional standpoint, I think the big question I had was I'd only told stories about skiers and skiing and mountains
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and snow, and I wanted to see if I could tell other types of stories. And so, my first I I we created Verb Cabin in a cabin in Verbier, Switzerland. and I was over there um on a ski documentary trip
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and the filmmaker and I were like, "Yeah, Verb Cabin, cool. We're here. Let's just do this." We combined our resumes. We pitched a job. And then a month later, we were in Haiti for 14 days with an artist from Brooklyn doing
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something that was way outside of our comfort zones, but we nailed it. We did really well with it. It had a res the film had a residency alongside the artist's artwork in the Brooklyn Museum for a while. Um,
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and would you how would you describe what it is though? Like is it like a marketing agency, a content agency, a creative?
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We were a short we made I mean I wouldn't call myself we made short short form documentaries and my pitch was always a hard one. I was like, "If you give us the money to make this, we will go find out the truth
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about your business." And so, it really didn't work for a lot of people. They were like, "Wait, I don't understand." But we would make what we would call these hero assets where I would ask questions to customers, to athletes that represented
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the brand, to people making the stuff for the brand. And what you'd end up finding was that there were people working at these big companies, say like Grundins's, this fishing company, where that was their entire identity. And I
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mean that in a good way. Like I mean like they had a lot of pride in going to the office every day of wearing their company colors, of showing up to the company Christmas party and like hugging their friends and that they knew each
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other. And I found that that um was it marketing material? For sure it was. And it was used that way. But what I liked was it was infalluable.
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Like it had no you couldn't poke holes in it because it was true. And when we could when I could convince a company that they should do that, it worked. It worked almost every time. Like it was only when the company interfered. Was
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like, well, we want to present this way. That was when it was like, well, dude, that's not who you are. And you know, honestly, it was a way for me to pay the bills. I was still freelance writing a
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little bit for Vice Sports at the time. and and I took an editorship at the ski journal for a little while to get back into magazines and and when I was back at the ski journal I when I back in
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magazines at the ski journal that really set me off on the like this is what I'm supposed to be doing like I didn't I hate making stuff for the internet man it sucks I just think it's so it's like
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throwing a penny into a volcano it's just like what are we even are we making a wish here like what is the point of this Like it's so gross and you're just like algorithm catching all the time and
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it just doesn't sound fun to me. So Ski Journal was another print magazine that you went to work for.
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Yep. Yep. Four four issues a year independently owned by a nice family up in uh Washington State.
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Yeah. And that's what we're going to get into talking about is this like we I think you were maybe featured in a New York Times article I read like a year ago or something like that about this kind of and I write about this in my own
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newsletter, you know, the media newsletter about this kind of print revival, but it's no longer treating print as mass media. It's treating it as this kind of bespoke collector's item type of thing. And that's what Ski Journal was. It was like a quarterly
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like beautiful magazine, familyowned of some sort. Yeah. Yeah. Coffee tips. So, like, you know, there's a lot of origins of like how this all started, and I think anyone who claims that they started it, it's probably wrong. Um, I will gladly say I
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did not start the Great Print Revival. Um, I mean, you could argue that there was a time where when you walked into an American's house, if they didn't have Life magazine on their coffee table, they probably weren't well informed. You
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know, like the New Yorker on your coffee table says something about you. Um, and I think with the ski journal, what I learned was that you didn't need a lot of readers. You just need passionate ones who were willing to just fork over
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their money every year. And that there was a ton of freedom, like way more freedom than I ever had at Powder, where you could just kind of write and photograph and illustrate what you wanted. And what I found was really cool
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about that was that most editors um that are younger than me don't know how to do that. Actually, many editors that are older than me don't know how to do that either because we've always been beholden to advertising revenue. And so
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this subscriber model is it's really smart. It makes a lot of sense. Um it's sustainable.
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You know, there's no quick algorithm changes that totally f over your business model. So yeah, it really works for me.
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Were you continuing to run run the production company while you were doing that? I was. Yeah, the uh ski journal paid for exactly at the cost of my son's child care. So it was a great it was a great
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gig. It was like, oh, perfect. There's a leaky hole in the dam and I can put four magazines in there and hope it'll stop the dam from leaking. So it worked out quite well for us. Yeah. So, you
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eventually buy the Mountain Gazette, and I I definitely want to hear the story of how you did that. Could you just give us a quick primer on the history of this magazine?
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Yeah, so it's celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Uh, it was founded in 1966 by an editor named Mike Moore in Colorado. It was called um the Skers Gazette. Um, at one point it was called Skiers Gazette Weekly. Um, shows
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how frequent it was coming out. And it was sort of alternative skiing. You know, 60s counterculture was rampant in the United States. You know, you have Vietnam War going on. There's a lot of protests. Earth Day is getting started.
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You know, like there's just a lot going on. And mountain culture was really starting to blossom. In 72, they changed the name to Mountain Gazette so they could cover broader topics. And I think that's just a nature of ski magazines in
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general is like skiers are so much more than going up and going down. There's so much that happens in the middle and off the hill and everywhere, you know, we're artists, we're musicians, like and so Mountain Gazette made a lot of sense in
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' 72. It ran till 1979. It had contributors like Dick Dworth, George Sibi, Edward Abby, Hunter S. Thompson were writing for it. Um, it uh died in 79 just due to lack of advertising. I think it was really tough because it was
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very regional. Um, and I just don't think the outdoor advertisers knew what to do with it at a certain point. You know, I mean, Patagonia was basically launched in here with Pacific Iron Works through uh through Ivon Shinard. Doug Tommpkins
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launched the Northace ads in the Gazette in the 70s. Um, REI, Jansport, Reichley, all these like legendary outdoor brands were all ad partners and I think at a certain point it just rides course. Um, there was a revival effort in '84. Uh, I was
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born in '85. Mountain Gazette was not reborn in '85. It just never really happened. And then finally in 1999, George Stranahan uh got some money together and helped bring it back with John Fehee and they brought it back from
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2000 to 2012. Um, and what did it look like then? It was okay. So, it was a free monthly that they were sending out.
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Free monthly. And you got to remember like that era, like that was the era of us all being so excited about craft beer and like finally starting to write about like weed in magazines and like concerts and you know digital music was
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everywhere and people were really getting it just there was a really cool time in outdoor and they did a good job covering that. It died in 2012 after being bought and sold a bunch of times and then I uh bought it in January of
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2020. And it was like in the morning at a bar or something. I was I I saw the video. We were talking about it.
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Yeah. Yeah. So, there's more to there's always more to it, but you know, the internet only allows you so much space.
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So, um I was in Alaska working on a short documentary with Grundins. Um the owner of Grundins, the founder of Grrenins USA, uh Mike Jackson. What is Matt? So, if you've ever watched Deadliest Catch, they're wearing orange bibs, bright orange bibs, like the color
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of like a lacy hard drive orange bib. Um, that's Grundins. They make protective gear for commercial fishing.
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And commercial fishing is [ __ ] rad because it's the only form of fishing that's not pretentious. Like, they are just they are badasses out there catching America salmon and king crab and just very cool, very down to earth
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bluecollar people. And I loved loved working for that brand because I never met anyone who was a bullshitter. They were all just honest to God, looking in the eye, nice people, strong handshakes, like really good folks, work really hard
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for their money. And so I was up there and what I always liked about Mike is that Grundins had grown to this like multi-million dollar business. He and Matt still visited every shop. They still called shops. They still knew
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their customers. They knew their customers spouses names. if their kids had graduated high school, like they just like they gave a [ __ ] about their business. And so coming off Ski Journal and coming off of, you know, just like
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working with Grundons, I realized that like that was the way I wanted to run a magazine one day. And a friend called me when I was in Alaska and said, you know, look, I've talked to the owner of
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Mountain Gazette. It's for sale. It's in a storage unit. It's just a bunch of old magazines. Like the website's still good. They still own it. There's no debt on it. It's just it's owned. So, do you want to call him? So, I bought $38 an
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hour internet up in Alaska and logged on and did a little FaceTime audio with the owner, Blake. We chatted for a little bit. He wanted much more than what I paid for it. And I was like, can we keep
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talking? And we just talked. I told him exactly what I wanted to do. And to be fair to myself on this, what I want to do with Mountain Gazette is exactly what I'm doing with Mountain Gazette right now. I wanted it to be large format
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twice a year, huge photos, huge art, limited advertising, subscriberbased. That was it. Maybe a little merch and that was that. And so he just like kind of fell in love with the idea and and we met at a bar in Denver, his choice. I
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wrote out a check from the Verb Cabin checking account. I set some money aside and it was for $5,000. I have no problem telling people that. Blake's fine with me telling that. I put it in the I asked
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the hotel clerk, desk clerk, if I she had an envelope, so she gave me like a Best Western envelope. I stuffed the check in. We went, we sat down. The waitress came over and said, "Can I get you guys anything?" And he said, "Well,
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just a minute. Where you have some business? Let's see if we're going to sit and enjoy ourselves if we're going to leave." And so I I said, "Blake, this is all I have. The only way I can do
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this is without investors, and this can't be a private equity play or anything like that. It has to be pure." and he opened up the envelope. He looked at the amount and he shrugged his shoulders and he goes, "If the check uh
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if the check clears, it's yours and you're buying me a beer." And so he ordered two Kors banquet beers. And so for five grand and the cost of a Denver banquet, two banquet beers. We wrote up a bill of sale on a notebook. It's like
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actually right over there. It's framed. We went across the street to the outdoor retailer show. Dan Abrams, the owner of Flyo, which is an outerear company, who also officiated my wife and I's wedding, signed it as a witness. And then I did
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my first interview with the guy that's now our senior editor or managing editor, uh, Doug Schnitzpawn. And we were like, okay, it's January of 2020. What can go wrong? Let's start a magazine. And, uh, and to be clear, you were not buying any
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operations. You were just buying the right to basic basically just the right to call your magazine the Mountain Gazette right?
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Oh, and like a bunch of old cocktail napkins, a bunch of extra small and triple XXL t-shirts that they hadn't gotten rid of the URL, the trademark to Mountain Gazette. Uh, our entire our entire archive, which was massive. I
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mean, I got a hard drive that just had the archives of mountain gazette.com on it. So, every storm, everything that had ever been written on there, about 40 or 50 boxes of dusty old magazines. Um, I bought the business.
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It's what's known as an asset transfer. So, everything that Blake's LLC owned was transferred over to BB Cabin. Yeah.
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But other than just the coolness factor of owning the web archives and the old dusty magazines, is that does that play a factor into the the I guess the question I'm getting at is like why not just start a brand new magazine? Like
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what was the was the brand so strong that you like it was worth it to to spend that $5,000 on that or was there something in those archives or in those dusty old magazines that somehow gave it some extra value? just want to try to
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understand like what was the actual value of the thing that you were buying. Totally, Simon. I get this question a lot. Um, we in the outdoor industry preach a lot of like recycle culture. Recycle. Recycle. Don't buy new
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gear. Don't buy new gear. The funniest thing is if people don't buy new gear, there's no outdoor industry. It's gone.
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You know, there's some recreation industry that's a little different. Um, my thing that has always bugged me is that I wanted to write for Powder because Keith Carlson wrote for Powder because um, Chris O'Connell had shot for Powder because my heroes were in there.
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These people that like meant a lot to me and changed my life were there. And I don't know that I would have wanted to write for a magazine that wasn't called Powder because it was Powder. I you know
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it's I'm a Mets fan as you can tell by my hat but it's sort of like people playing for you know I don't know if anyone wants to play for the Mets right now we're pretty bad but it's like
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playing for the Red Sox or the Yankees like you want to play there cuz Ted Williams was there cuz Mickey Man was there you know like you want to be a part of a history and a legacy and a
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culture and for me I thought today's writers deserve to be with Hunter S. Thompson and Edward Abby and John Fehee and Gayen Row and Royal Robbins and like I just I was like, you know, we have our version of Royal Robbins, you know, it's
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Jeremy Jones like we we're doing and I by we I don't mean Mountain Gazette. I mean people are contributing versus to the universe every day in really profound cool ways in outdoor culture. And to think that we don't belong in that pantheon is wrong.
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And I also felt like it wasn't right for today's writers to not measure themselves up against those previous giants of our of our genre. Um, outdoor literature is the one that people love when there's a breakthrough, when there's a Cheryl Strade, when there's
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John Crackour. What's crazy is outdoor literature is some of the oldest literature ever. People have been outside much longer than they've been inside. And for me, Mountain Gazette just had this legacy and this history that I felt deserved to be preserved.
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And so much so that like our big announcement this fall is that the entirety of our archive has been donated to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno and it'll be preserved there forever. It's an endowed museum. It's through the
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state. It's through it's a privately held museum, but they've got a lot of grants, a lot of funding. And Mountain Gut's never going back to a storage unit ever again. like it's something that future generations will be able to look
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to and learn from. And I just I felt like I don't know, dude. I'm not a car guy, but it's like resurrecting an old car, you know? Like it could sit in a field like a piece of [ __ ] or you could like
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actually bring it to a garage and work on it. And I knew I knew how to work on it. I don't know how to do anything with a gas powered vehicle, man. Not a thing.
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But I know how to fix this particular old magazine. And that was just I just wanted to do it.
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So, uh, so you only had $5,000 to buy this thing. Like what did it take? And it didn't have an like it had a it had a URL and stuff like that maybe, but like it there wasn't some kind of like
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already existing distribution. You had to basically bu rebuild everything from scratch. So, how did you do that on like a shoestring budget? You said you hired someone. So, like what was what did it take to actually get the the magazine up
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and running? Well, so I bought it at the end of January. We all know what happens two months later in 2020. Like COVID hits. Uh my wife worked in the travel industry. I was making documentary films that required travel. We had a young
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son. Um we got a bunch of magazines delivered to our house and we started reading them.
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We just started checking and like hundreds of them. And first thing I needed to know was what I what I had bought, you know, like what what was I grasping. And then um I started talking to friends, you
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know, Jason Levventhal from Lineskis, now JKS, hit me up with this email that was called like the ninja's guide to Shopify 101. It was basically his way of like running a business on Shopify. Soup to nuts. Like here's here's how you use
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Shopify. I talked to Luke Jacobson from Moment Skis and Dan Abrams from Pho about like how they had started their business, what kind of money they had taken on. I knew I didn't want to take on money. Um, what we did have was we
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had these really cool archival covers and people wanted to know what I was going to do with it. And so I put these covers online and started selling them as prints and said, "Look, like just if you buy I wanted I don't want you to
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give me money. like that's not if you see a print you like purchase it and know that I'll use that money to continue this journey and I was sending out emails through Claio just letting people know like hey this is what's
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going on and then I hired I found him through moments skis uh Merritt Lent to build mountain gazette.com to rebuild it rebuild our subscription platform um and when I say build it like I wasn't like go build this like we were doing what
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we're doing right now like being on like a video call through co figuring it out, working it out. And then on July 1st, 2020, we relaunched mountain.com and we got three subscribers that first day. And I was like, "Cool, I'm making a
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magazine." I knew I knew I had to to sell like 250 or so um copies in order to break even. And so I was emailing people. I was doing interviews. The Colorado Sun did a great, you know, Jason Blevens did a
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great piece on us about me bringing it back. I was like literally driving back across the country from New York. You know, I wanted to see my parents and so we drove back across the country to see my parents in a van. And I was coming
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back and like ran into Blevins and he did this story and we got to 250 after like maybe a month, month and a half and I was like cool like I'm not in debt and I thought that was really cool that I
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could make a thousand magazines and not be any debt and that's paying people too. I didn't ask anyone to do anything for me for free. That was like a big thing. No free interns, no unpaid interns, no like media is built on
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premium [ __ ] all the time. I was like, "No, we're going to value people's work and we're going to do this." And then that first issue came out and the reviews were insane and people started doing this thing that they still do,
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which is they started unboxing the magazine and being like, I mean, my friend Jamie Voss, who's a brilliant writer, and he sent out this tweet that was like, "Surfers Journal, you know, Ski Journal and Mountain Gazette, like these are the premium magazines of our
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time." And I was like, dude, we had put out one issue to be compared to those other two felt really special. And um we started getting ad partners, ad interests. I think the biggest thing was people were like, "Okay, you did one.
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Can you do two?" Uh we sold out in December of that year of our second of our first issue. And I was like, "Oh man, we've sold we we made a,000 copies and we're done now." You know what I
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mean? Like we get to make the next one. How much were How much were you charging for that first issue?
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Uh we were charging um $60 plus $9.99 ships or $70 for for that one issue.
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Uh for two issues. For two issues. I knew I was going to make a second. I knew I could do it.
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And was that as like a recurring subscription or you just paid $70 that would get that would give you two issues.
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Okay. So they were signing up for $70 a year. $70 a year and we will give you two issues.
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Yeah. So, and that kind of paints a picture for people listening that like this isn't a, you know, one of those like Time magazines where you're basically signing up for like a dollar per issue. Like the what's going into
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the price is the cost of the entire magazine, not just the the paper and the delivery. like this is a premium almost like a booklike product where yeah maybe there are some advertising and we could talk about that in a second but uh like
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the subscriptions are the main thing that's actually funding the entire magazine. It's the whole thing and what that does as a reader is it puts you in control which I like.
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We're beholden to our readers. We don't pander to them. We tell them that all the time. We're not going to give you like chicken soup for the outdoor soul.
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We're going to challenge you. You know, we will do something on gun control and something on hunting in the next, you know, like we are there to buck preconceived notions of what it means to be outdoor.
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And so, and uh and it's not like there are like pay, it's not like you're putting these articles online behind a payw wall or anything like if you want to read if you want to read the Mountain Gazette, you have to subscribe to the
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the print version. There's no online version. There's no online version. Yeah. And the on the website is basically kind of like, you know, cool branding. Uh but it's basically a storefront like where you where you can you could subscribe to the magazine or
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and we'll talk about the other stuff like the merch and stuff like that, but it it it purely it serves as like an e-commerce website more than like what we typical think of like a a media website.
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Oh yeah. It is not a CMS in any way, shape, or form, dude. It is a Shopify store. And my thought was I always disliked when I would pay for a subscription to something and then the article would be free on the internet
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two weeks later. I was like, why did I pay for this? I can just wait. You know, like it's a terrible business model. I still think the business model I tell people all the time is tell me a product
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that's available that costs you money to make and give it away for free and show me how you make money. And everyone's like well YouTube YouTube ish I think in you know YouTubing and and podcasting and online blogging and writing and all
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that stuff like there's a lot of diminishing returns. I I think for the amount of work that you you know you put into this Simon like I mean I I hope you're making great money. I think it's re I think it's very hard though to turn
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to turn a profit on the internet. Um so was it mostly just you writing the articles to begin with or did you always have like a freelancer budget from the very beginning?
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It was not going to be my personal journal. So I always made a freelancer budget. They're built into the cost of it. So, our budget was proportionate to how many subscribers we had. And, you know, we have spent more per issue um
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for 13 issues now running um than the last one. And then we just keep upping that. Like I I mean, we were able to send a contributor to Europe for 6 weeks last summer and hire a photographer to
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join him for a few of those trips. And it ended up being a 31,000word piece that currently you can only read in the Mountain Gazette. So, I think what's cool is we get to tell people like you we this is what we did with your money,
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you know? It's something I took from some friends in nonprofit of the best nonprofits are the ones that show you like you donated $100 and this is where your money goes, you know, and I think that's it. We're being we're really
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transparent about this is where your money goes. Your money goes to paying Steve Martin and Harry Bliss to make cartoons for us.
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And is it remain just twice a year? That's how that's how often you publish.
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Yeah. Yeah. And we the the first issue wasund uh 122 pages. I think we were at 160 for a while and now we're up to 192 pages. We want to stay there.
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192 pages twice a year. So you get to that first thousand subscribers by the second issue. Um so as you're continuing to grow, what was that allowing you to do? like as as the subscriber base joined, were you able to like start
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printing on bigger pieces of paper, get higher quality write or get hire more marquee writers? Like how did the business evolve once it like really started taking off?
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So I was always telling writers, photographers, and artists, this is what I can pay you. I was always transparent up front. This is what we can pay you and we'll pay you early if you know we're not going to make you wait 6
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months. So, we um at 3,000 subscribers, I didn't have to make movies anymore. That was pretty cool. At um 5,000 or 4,000 subscribers or so, I hired my friend Austin to be um our marketing manager. He was just part-time. He was
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freelancing. He had a bunch of jobs. He's now our general manager full-time. Um, I hired Connor Sedmac in a sales role with like crazy commission. It was like eat what you can kill and like we're in this together. Um,
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sales ros. Mhm. So, we only have 12 like about 12 ad spots per issue. They're all in the front and the back. We believe in like having 170 pages or so of uninterrupted editorial.
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So, and our and everyone the other thing, man, is everyone knows the the game, you know, like Mountain Gazette readers know they're not going to open up their magazine and see a Northface ad in the middle of a feature. Like, we're
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not going to do that, you know? We're going to keep everything pure, everything uninterrupted. There's no sponsored content. We don't do like sponsored Instagram posts. We don't do sponsored email, you know, stuff like that. Like, that's it. We figured out
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from some PR companies early on that they would give us free trips and we said, "Can we give them to our readers?" So, we started growing our email list by giving away sweet trips that they wanted to give to us. You know, we're like,
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"Oh, no. We don't, you know, we don't want to go to Costa Rica to go surfing.
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Like, it sounds fun, but can we give that to like a reader through an email contest?" And so, um, we grew it one truly, we still are growing it one reader at a time, and it's it's worked out really well. It's like you you you
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mentioned a newsletter like have you do you create any kind of online content? Like what are you what are you doing to to communicate with readers or audience like in between those two issues?
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We have a Sunday email that we send out that's written by Hannah Trouy. She's been with us for a few years. Um and that's sort of like just like here's what we heard this week. Uh here's like some news from the Mountain Gazette
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world of like things contributors are doing things books we like, movies or podcasts we've appeared on. We'll probably share this podcast in there. Um, and then uh we email them to see if they moved, you know, to update
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their credit cards if they've expired and and just sort of preview what's in the next issue. And that's it. And then on social, we kind of just we're on Instagram, we do paid media because it it's a good acquisition strategy. Um, we
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kind of just make fun of social media every time we hit a milestone. Like we hit 150,000 followers and we're like, "This number means absolutely nothing to us." And I don't know, we're just like, there's just not much that's telling me
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that I need to play in that yard right now. Yeah. When you say you do paid acquisition, what what what exactly are you acquiring? Like are you trying to get people to sign up for the newsletter with your
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subscriptions? No, you're actually just like straight up just come buy a subscription basically. We did a vid so a couple years ago, you know, I'd done this short form doc and I told you I was convincing brands to just
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be honest and tell their story. And I was like, well, I should follow my own advice. And so I wrote a script and it starts with, "Hi, I'm Mike Roie and this is what I did. I bought you saw the
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video and like we ran that. That thing's been viewed probably 30 million times and it is something that I've been recognized on the streets of New York uh for I have been invited on bunch of podcasts for I've appeared on some
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panels like it kind of changed everything for us and we grew from about 4,000 or so subscribers to where we are today which is like 33,000 subscribers give or take and it happened in about two years.
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Yeah. And that was how much of that was paid acquisition versus uh versus just organic word of mouth, do you think?
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I mean, it's hard to say. It's hard to say. Um, that's the funny thing about Facebook and Meta. They attribute everything to them and we're like, "Oh, come on, guys." I mean, I we find a lot of people the people that I meet tell me
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kind of the same story over and over again, which is that um they were at a friend's house, they walked in, they saw Mountain Gazette, this huge outdoor magazine, they usually say something to the effect of, "What the [ __ ] is this?"
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is usually like honestly almost everyone says those exact words, "What the f is this?" And then they are like, "Yeah, and I just like signed up and I've been a subscriber for two years and I love it." And our what I
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really like is our readers are all super normal people. I've yet to have a weird interaction with any of them in real life. They don't fan out. They don't get weird. They're just like, "Hey, man." And they usually want to just talk about
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what they read, which it's 2026, dude. Like that's what people are not doing or were being told everywhere. People don't do that anymore. I It happens at the playground here in Tahoe. It happens in bars in New York. It happens everywhere.
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Um, our writers say that they hear more about their Mountain Gazette pieces that are print only, mind you, like than anything they publish online. And I think what it is, it's just a it's a microcosm. I mean, vinyl record sales
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are up like crazy, and live events are up, sporting events are up, concerts are up, you know, like people want to go to these things.
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And I think it's just we're I think it's a symptom of of postcoid and also like just Jesus Christ, who wants to be on their phone anymore? It's so brutal.
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Like it doesn't make you feel good. The first few years of an iPhone were nice cuz it could optimize your life a little bit so you could spend more time in the real world. Now you are like just like
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you're forced to be like magnetized nose to phone and just I don't know. I think I think we can be one of the antidotes to this problem of just people spending too much time on the internet.
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You uh so you mentioned like the the friend coming over and seeing it on the coffee table. Like that's what that's what you expect the magazine to be featured. like it's it's considered you can kind of want to position as like a
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collector's item, something that someone they wouldn't just throw in their magazine rack that it would be somewhere like prominently positioned in the home or something or an office or something like that.
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Yes. And I'll tell you the thing that I find to be the best. So, just cuz we're here, I'm hopping on my phone. I just went to eBay and I just typed in Mountain Gazette and I want to show you
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the first thing there is Mountain Gazette 202 from 2024. It's $50 right there on eBay. Um there's a $44 uh truck someone selling our $25 trucker at for 44 bucks. Here's um 1970s Mountain Gazette 49 issues. $750.
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You know, I'm just showing you this. What I found was that uh people like cool stuff. They like stuff that's made intentionally.
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We don't control the aftermarket of this whatsoever. My mother-in-law sold her complete set of the Mountain Gazettes that I've made for about three grand last summer and donated all to a charity that her sister had had loved when she
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was alive. And so, yeah, we want it to be something special. I mean, $45, $50, $50, $50, uh, $21. Like, yeah. I mean, $129.
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Like, these are all prices of of printonly magazines. And, you know, my wife had knee surgery and is doing physical therapy right now, Simon. And she came home today and she goes, "So, my PT's husband needs Mountain Gazette
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202 and 203. He missed his subscription laps and he really needs them." And I'm like, we have two copies for our family.
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I'm not trying to sit on a bunch. So, it's just it's meant to be special cuz it is special, you know. What have you had to learn about print logistics and all that kind of stuff since uh like I
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know you were doing a little bit of that at the previous jobs and stuff like that, but have you especially like I've talked to some print um publishers talking about you know inflation and how you know they've seen like a a a really
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sharp rise in their costs and stuff like just in the last few years. What has that been like for you? uh we used Supreme Canada and when the current president uh pulled off his like [ __ ] illegal tariff thing and that's
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not political like the Supreme Court said it was legal. Um and it was [ __ ] Um we had we had a company in Canada that tried to inflate prices which is funny because um there are no tariffs on printed goods due to like a
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treaty that Richard Nixon signed. So, I'm learning about treaties that Richard Nixon signed with Canada and Mexico. Uh, ironically, it was signed because they didn't want any of the nations to fall under tyranny. They thought the free flow of information was very important
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to the alliance of North America. Um, I have learned that if you're going to make something on paper, it really just shouldn't be a throwaway. I think there's a real argument that some things could just be an email. None of our none
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of our stuff can be emails. That's just not what we make. We make long form deeply investigated fact check journalism. Um deeply felt lived experienced essays and poetry and art and like um I've kind of learned so far
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that pretty much everything on the internet is hyperbolic. Like the tariffs were bad, but I was just like, "Okay, we'll just go to a US printer, you know? Like we're at Wsworth in Missouri and if they have their way
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and we have our way, we're never switching. We really like working with them." And like I'm a New York born Californian. Like I shouldn't have anything in common with the folks in Missouri, but I actually have a ton in
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common with them. And I I guess man, like maybe this isn't what you expected from that question, but we have subscribers in all 50 states and there are outdoor people and people who love going outside everywhere and in cities and everything.
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And the thing that I've learned the most from making a print magazine is people just want to be seen and they want to be respected and they want their uh choices of what they buy to be respected. If we sent them a piece of
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crap, they'd be really pissed. But we really respect them. We have a policy and people don't take advantage of it.
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If you send us a picture of your magazine and like the post office messed it up or your dog ate it, it's only a dog. We won't accept cat related accidents. we'll replace it for free.
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And we do. We do. And that's like, you know, if we were owned by private equity or something, they'd be like, "That's a margin hit. You can't do that." And I'm like, "Dude, these people work hard.
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People work hard for to make money. Full stop." And if it shows up not the way they expect it to, I think that's what we get from our wife, my wife that's our vice president is like uh you know is
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that idea of hospitality and just trying to take care of people and and also being honest with people. I have an out of office up right now that says like I might not answer emails this summer because I'm working on a book project
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and like I'm just I'm not trying to be funny or an [ __ ] I'm just being honest with people and I think it's better just to be honest and I don't know that's what I've learned the most
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man is just like people want you to be honest and they want you to deliver what you say you're going to deliver.
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Is there any way that you like official way that you interact with your audience to revent or anything like that?
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Not really but we're working on it. Um, so I just I was so before we started recording, I told you I was just in your neck of the woods in DC and I gave a speech to the Library of Congress. About
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75 people showed up and it was incredible. Like I had such a great time meeting our readers. Like I said, I mean there are people that we like the same things, you know? Maybe they're not as obsessed with skiing as I am. they're
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into like running or fishing or something else. But like inherently we all go outside for the same reasons which is to you know it's rec recreate to recreate yourself. That's why you go out is to feel a new and
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we are now finally we're going to explore maybe bringing Mountain Gazette on the road in the future. I can't say we don't we don't have it's not like a tease like we don't like we haven't even hired this
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person yet you know but we're just thinking down the line that we just kind of want to get the community together.
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We've done a couple things. We did a concert here in Tahoe and it was amazing with people that drove up from Los Angeles which is like driving from you know Myrtle Beach to Boston. It's kind of a long drive and it was cool. like we
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we've had a really good experience and we're trying to figure out how to get people more together where we can.
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Do you think it would be getting them together for like an outdoorsy experience or some kind of like conference or like what do you think it will be or just random bespoke things?
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I think it's random bespoke things. you know, our art director's got a couple shows this summer. So, we thought about maybe just sending he's a acoustic guitar singer songwriter, you know, on the side of being our art director. And I was like, we should just
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like totally troll John and just like he's expecting like six people to show up to his show, but we just email our whole list and we're like, hey, we're going to be here on this date and try to
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get like a few hundred people in a bar. Um, I just I don't know, man. I just um I don't like charging for outdoor activities. I think it's already expensive enough and I think conferences are money grabs. Like I've met good
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people at print conferences, but I've also been like, "Wow, I had to do a lot of waiting through [ __ ] to find the three people that I wanted to meet here, you know? Like I do think we'd kind of
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have to allow random encounters to happen. Um, we've had some good ones, you know, like our sales guy I mentioned like, you know, he got married last summer and he sweet now wife but fiance at the time did not know their afficient used a copy
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of Mountain Gazette 200 as like her book when she was reading, you know, and we've had dads that have brought Mountain Gazette into the room after their first child is born and they're reading their baby, the jaded local
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column. And uh I'm getting chills talking about this cuz that was not my intention, Simon.
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When I started this, I wanted to, like I said, just give writers and creators a space that they deserved. But what's been very cool is our audience has elevated our magazine to something. I mean, there's some people that are wild
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and cut up the magazine and make original art with it. You know, there's coffee shops that have four subscriptions that three go out into the shop and one's kind of the shop copy for people that are on break. And I don't
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know, like it's just it's cool that it feels like it's it's living its own magazines are living their own lives.
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The issues are living their own lives outside of anything we could ever track, you know? And we just show this stuff to our ad partners when we go to them and they're like, "Well, what are your metrics?" I'm like, I don't know what's
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a baby being read a Hans Ledwig story in the first moments of its life worth to you. You know what I mean? Like I we can't put a price on that. And so, you know, we just try to keep it keep it
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honest and keep it real. And and I think our readers do the same thing. And they tell us, man, I'm telling you right now with this war going on and everything, like we've had a lot of people that have
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canled this year and told us like, "Hey, I I love this magazine. I just can't afford it." And we have a thing set up when they cancel that we email you six months after not to ask you to come.
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There's no like come back to Mountain Gazette for half off. We're like we go just like hey how are you doing, you know, and we've had some really good interactions from that. Like we just give a [ __ ] in a real way.
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Yeah. I noticed that you have like you sell prints on the website and you have like a merch store and stuff like that with like various designs on like shirts and tote bags and stuff like that. How big a part of that is is that like a big
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part of your business? How do you when how do you think about that as like as being something that you that you do?
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Obviously the New Yorker tote bag has become kind of its own fashion item. So that can be a big part of some people's uh media businesses. What what is that for you?
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It's pro the tote bag is probably our worst selling item. I think our readers have enough, excuse me, have enough of them. Um, we do a lot of hats, we do a lot of sweatshirts, we do a lot of
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t-shirts. Um, I kind of feel like where we are as a magazine is we're kind of like a band that unfortunately your friend knows about and you don't know about and so naturally they want to just like wear
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the t-shirt and just wait for someone at a bar to be like, "What's that?" And then you get to be like, "H, you've never heard of Nirvana? Let me tell you about Nirvana." You know what I mean?
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Like I will, you know, our our readers do that. Um, we have a lot of people in the print industry, which is really, really cool in the publishing industry that buy our print. We, you know, we trademarked print ain't dead. We call it our
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grammatical nightmare slogan. Um, and we get like, you know, I'm working on a book with Penguin Random House right now, and for their break room, like we got them, I think 20 mugs that say print ain't dead, which is kind of a funny
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thing to have in a Midtown Manhattan, you biggest publisher in the world. Um, and yeah, I don't know. It's just something we have fun with. You know, sometimes we'll do like charitable things for Protect Our Winners or we'll
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do GoFundMes for small organizations. We helped out with flood relief in North Carolina. Um, we kind of let our readers just sort of like tell us where to go with that stuff and our artists make funny stuff like the dead dirt bag made
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a thing that's an apple core and it says still core after all these years and I'm like that's so corny. If you call yourself core, you're like not core.
Speaker A
So So when you look ahead like 2 to 3 years from now, what do you want to be doing that you're not currently doing? Like what what are your ambitions for the magazine? Um, honestly man uh, I want to keep doing what we're
Speaker A
doing right now. Yeah. You don't strike me as the guys like, I want to launch three new three new magazines in other verticals that are adjacent to outdoor to mountain, you know, mountaineering or something like that.
Speaker A
No, we made a book. We made an anthology book that I'm like our team is really proud of and I'm really proud of. You know, it's the first um first printed thing we made that is in stock all the time. Like we just like
Speaker A
we made 10,000, but like we might sell out of 10,000 copies in the first year.
Speaker A
We've sold almost almost 7,000 I think now. Um I mean maybe a little less like I think it's actually less. It's like 60 6,200 copies. I haven't checked the Shopify today, but um I love making books and I that's not like I I am not
Speaker A
trying to call the magazine a book. The magazine is a magazine. It is what it is. It's and I'm very proud of it and we want to keep that format. Um in two or three years I'd like to find new voices.
Speaker A
Um, I'd like to give opportunities to other voices that feel like they I mean, one of the reasons why Harry Bliss and Steve Martin make a cartoon for us every issue the last couple years is we don't tell them what to do, which I think is
Speaker A
really fun. Um, I'm I want to make sure our staff is happy, our readers are happy. You know, I just wrote my intro to the fall issue and that's kind of what it's about is I turned 40 and I started running, which I
Speaker A
hate. I hate running. I've never been a runner, but what I like about it is it allows me to kind of adjust my moral compass and figure out if we're headed in the right direction or not. And right
Speaker A
now, it feels like we are. I feel like we have something that's um pretty rare in this world. And I don't want to ruin or betray anyone's trust or sell 10% so I can buy a boat. Like, the
Speaker A
lake's too cold in Tahoe. I don't really want to get a boat. Like, I don't know.
Speaker A
I I just want to keep doing my kids are young. They're seeing me do this. I don't think they totally know what I do.
Speaker A
Some of their parents are in crypto, so I think it's like you their friends parents are in crypto. So, I don't think they I'm sort of just like the weird parent at pickup. And I kind of want to
Speaker A
keep you doing that, man. Keep making magazines, keep talking to folks like you that care about the media and trying to spread this message that doesn't have to be um if something is [ __ ] up, it doesn't
Speaker A
have to be that way. Like I I was very upset with how magazines were for a long time and I know this is an entrepreneurial story like oh so I changed it. I wasn't trying to change the world. I just kind of wanted to
Speaker A
prove that you could do it this way. And what's cool is a lot of magazines have popped up after us and now there's this pretty robust independent magazine ecosystem.
Speaker A
And so I guess what I would say for the industry is in two or three years, I would love to see some more magazines that have our amount of subscribers and that you have these freelancers who are freelancing for just a couple
Speaker A
independent magazines a year and they're earning a living and they're paying a mortgage and they're raising a family with it. That would be that would be the most 1990s throwback thing we could do as a print magazine is to actually
Speaker A
support people in that kind of way. I mean, we're only twice a year. There's only so much we can pay people to make stuff for us, you know, but we don't want someone to write a 90,000word piece for us. But I feel like maybe one of our
Speaker A
writers is just got that idea. So, but yeah. Okay, Mike, those are all the questions I have for you. Where can people find you online?
Speaker A
Uh, we at mountainazette.com/subscribe. That's kind of all you need to know. And then just wait a little while and you'll get a massive package. Your roommate or your wife or your husband will say, "What the hell is this?" And be
Speaker A
surprised when you open it. Your kids will like it, too. That's awesome. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me.
Topics:Mountain Gazetteprint magazinemedia businesssubscriber modeloutdoor magazinecollector's itemMike Roiprint revivalmedia entrepreneurshipbusiness of content
