As a young twenty-something, Ive slowly lost interest in keeping up with park skiing and who can spin faster, but my love for the soulful side of skiing has only grown – By the sounds of Grant’s reply, they’re trying to capture the essence of what makes us want to get up early and get out there. I love that.

As for the web vs print debate, again, as a fairly young guy, I only have one or 2 magazine subscriptions. With the explosive growth of blogging, and its slow but steady march towards becoming more grown up in both credibility and professionalism, the old arguments against it will soon have lost their oomph. As many people have said, the ideas that will keep the print industry alive in are really well written articles and fantastic photography on high quality paper. It sounds like they want to focus on this. I’m definitely interested.

I can see that this article is nearly a year old. I’ll have to look into it and see how things turned out.

The only way to survive in the print industry is to A, have a niche, and B do it very well. Powder does very well as does Backcountry and Couloir. However all of these mags are still struggling. The key is to successfully integrate web content (I.E. news, snow reports, gear reviews etc) on an interactive and compelling web site, and leave the hard copy for compelling well written substance and content rich articles combined with ultra high quality imagery.

The Ski Journal, isn’t going to be another version of the existing mags. Instead our goal is to create a journal of skiing and to capture the soul of the sport. To us, skiing shouldn’t be classified into separate divisions, but Big Mountain skiing, Backcountry skiing, Racing, Jibbing and ski mountaineering are all valid aspects of the sport and are all an essential part.

Just as the journal will reflect the diversity of the sport, the editorial staff we have chosen reflects diversity in the industry. We purposely assembled a crew of industry veterans and new face, and selectively chose individuals with different opinions, views and experiences to maintain and editorial lineup that will be as diverse as possible, yet chronicle the soul of the sport. Sure Mark’s experience at Freeze will come into play, so too will Galbraith’s experience as a former editor of Snowboarder and current editor of Frequency. Kris will bring his experience editing Aspect Journal and his experience working with new faces.

Oh, and to answer your question about switching to the photo editor side of things, I don’t think it is that big of a deal. I will still be shooting, and I will still be stoked to look at awesome images. To me, good photography is good photography, no matter who shot it, so expect to see a lot of images from both well known industry veterans, as well as new names.

I appreciate your writing style but that style might be too subtle for some readers. But, hey, just like in the restaurant biz, the lowest common denominator can be a killer!