Covid will be remembered as the outdoor industry’s greatest disrupter. The pandemic wrought massive changes on the trends, businesses, and culture of our climbing and outdoor communities. Most of those changes had been looming for the preceding 10 years; covid just catalyzed them. The writing was on the walls.

The pandemic revealed how utterly obsolete the Outdoor Retailer trade show had become, for example, which is something everyone already knew but nevertheless continued to indulge in order to have a free beer on some company’s dime and see all those friendly faces. “The Show” had long become a vestigial totem to an era of retail commerce that would never be coming back, yet people still felt obligated to go. Not any more.

Now, as the trade show heads back to Salt Lake with its tail between its legs, just about every climbing company appears to have had it with this exorbitant waste of money and time. OR? More like No R! But it’s not because the trade show serves no discernible purpose in an era of e-commerce and Zoom, mind you. These righteous and good companies are not returning to OR, they say, because of their virtuous commitments! They want you to know that they’re making a difference with their OR boycott. They especially want you to know that they are really good businesses, where only good people spend their good dollars to do so much good in this bad, bad world.

Covid also put the brakes on climbing gyms, which, after more than a decade of growth, wasn’t the worst thing. Prior to covid, the new gyms were popping up like shrooms on cow patties after a May rain—and by “cow patties” I mean gentrifying urban centers near at least one new Whole Foods. Brand new gyms claiming to have the city’s biggest, tallest walls merely blinked before another, newer gym assumed that superlative mantle from them. That’s less likely to happen now, in part because they’re all owned by the same company and called the same thing.

Covid accelerated the move to remote work, too, allowing young people to move to places where their whole salary wasn’t going to renting shoeboxes from boomers. It spurred a lot more van lifing, and all the attendant misery that hashtag brings once the superficial veneer of backlit sex shots gives way to the malaise of boring reality. And with all the gyms closed, it also made our crags way more crowded—resulting in more chipping, more egregious bolting errors, way more crowds, and now more regulations. As I asked last year, what did you think was going to happen?

And finally, covid disrupted outdoor media and journalism. In fact, it’s safe to say that covid accomplished what dozens of Internet forum lurkers have been saying they hoped would happen for years: Climbing and Rock and Ice magazines, formerly the two biggest climbing titles in the U.S., are now no longer in print.

Upon hearing that Climbing Magazine would stop printing magazines after its storied 52-year run, the first question I had, of course, is what will “tradguy511” wipe his ass with?

The second question was what, exactly, have we as a community lost with these titles’ disappearance?

As some may know, I started my writing career professionally at Rock and Ice, where I was lucky enough to work for nine years as an editor, learning so much from the best in the business. Jeff Jackson, Duane Raleigh, Alison Osius, and Matt Samet gave me the creative freedom to develop my own style and voice, and I’ll never not be humble and grateful for that. I loved every one of the nearly 100-some issues I worked on, too. But by the time I left in 2013, media was clearly changing. Then, I was bullish on the idea that print offered something special, something that couldn’t be offered in an online journal such as Evening Sends. (It’s not a blog, people, I swear, it’s not a blog!)

Does anyone really need that tactile feel of holding paper in their hands in order to be entertained or inspired or provoked into thinking about something differently? Until recently, my opinion was no–but now that I know I won’t be receiving a climbing magazine in the mail, I feel sad about that, too.

But the internet killed print’s utility as a vehicle for distributing information, whether that be climbing news, training Information, or crag beta. News, even climbing news, moves so fast that by the time something gets written, edited, designed, printed in China, and shipped to mailboxes in the United States, not only has the latest, greatest route on the cover been downgraded, it has also already been repeated by four rando comp kids you’ve never heard of, kids who were let out of USA Climbing’s training cage in Salt Lake as a treat for good behavior.

So if not news or timely info, what was left for magazines to offer?

When I think about why I first fell in love with magazines as a teenager, I think of the funny, snarky, subversive, and edgy content I was devouring. There was so much humor, wit, and artistic sensibilities poured into every page, from objectively well-written longform features to hilarious little captions a la Vice’s legendary “Dos and Don’ts.” To be an avid magazine reader in ‘90s was to read things that couldn’t and wouldn’t be said on television.

Since then—and especially over the past five years, when so much of our journalism, culture, and art have become empty vessels only for expressing the “right” virtues, morals, and political beliefs—many magazines and their corresponding online footprints have lost their appetite for edginess.

Much of what gets written these days is safe and sanitized. Perhaps it’s because it’s all written by the same group of Columbia University journalism grads—upper-class kids whose parents can afford to float their lifestyles while they spend months doing unpaid internships in New York City, where they churn out clickbait and hope that one day they will land themselves a $40,000 a year staff gig at an impressive-sounding legacy magazine, which is actually only one or two advertisers away from financial ruin.

Then publishers made the fatal decision to embrace sponsored content as a way of trying to save themselves, crossing the ultimate line. Whatever honesty and integrity was left in the pursuit of creative writing drained from pages—and along with it, the trust that readers have that the thing they’re reading isn’t full of shit.

This has been the story of outdoor media as well. When the pandemic hit, climbing magazines essentially lost all of their advertising dollars overnight. Pocket Media, which already owned Climbing, went on an acquisition spree. It bought Rock and Ice and Outside magazine, along with a bunch of other titles. Pocket renamed itself Outside Media, and began pitching itself to investors as having a “Netflix-style portfolio” of content. The problem is, most people who read Backpacker don’t really give a damn about rock climbing or yoga. In an era when people were cutting their cords and moving away from bundled cable-TV packages toward a la carte television and media offerings, Outside Media banked on the idea that there were enough people out there who might be on the fence about subscribing to Climbing magazine, but if they could also get access to all of the paywalled stories on Outside mag’s website, perhaps that would sweeten the deal just enough to convince them to pay a premium price.

Given the recent round of layoffs, it’s safe to say this plan isn’t working. This sucks for all of the great people who recently lots their jobs—or who still work there and have to live under the fear that they could be next. I feel horrible for them. Unfortunately, I don’t see things getting better. Outside Media is currently trying to entice new investors and subscribers with some nebulous bullshit called the “Outerverse,” which is an “NFT initiative designed to promote sustainability and get people outside.” I’m sorry but getting people outside through some gimmicky web3 thing is clearly an oxymoron. And NFTs? No Fucking Thanks!

There are myriad reasons that the journalism business model is floundering, but from my point of view, strictly as a writer and reader, I can’t help but think that one of them is the timid approach to creating content. Everywhere I look, I see depressingly few editorial risks being taken in service of pandering to the same, insufferable opinions and spins. I see more sponsored content. I see rehashed “news reports” that are little more than scrapping content from Instagram captions, which have already received 10x the views that their official write up gets.

Publishers and editors are not just living in fear of losing advertisers; they can’t afford to lose a single reader now. Because of that, they seem unwilling to publish voices that say anything interesting, witty, edgy, or subversive. Why bother pissing off anyone? After all, editors aren’t being paid enough to endure a week of cancel-mob wrath coming into their inboxes. Just give readers the latest training clickbait, and rest assured that no one bother writing angry letters demanding their subscription be canceled.

Problem is, a whole bunch of people won’t bother renewing. They’ll just do it quietly.

So, I’m not sure I can honestly say that I’m all that upset about the end of print. To me, magazines have been dead for a long time.

However, I will say this: Print made me, and many other people, better writers, better thinkers, better photographers, and more creative people. Unlike with online sites and social media, print has real space (and cost) constraints that demand each word and every photo be justified. The bar for quality is higher. Your ideas must merit the space they take to reveal them, which is such a foreign concept in the era of social media.

There is a kind of respect and passion for the craft of storytelling that print demands but that ad-driven clickbait websites and social media doesn’t. It’s the difference between waiting to buy a hardwood coffee table that gets built by expert hands to immediately having the one you assemble yourself from Ikea. You’ll never fall in love the latter.

I hope people continue to care enough about writing and telling stories and thinking deeply about this climbing experience we share in the absence left by print’s demise. I’m optimistic they will. Dangerous writing, interesting ideas, and really good stories about climbing will never go out of business.