13693561:Park_Ranger said:
Good to hear. What can we do to help?
Also, would you mind updating the community on what you're working on and what you incision NS to be in the future? That might help defeat the notion that all you guys do is booze and buy like 30 kids pizza at NS gatherings.
There's loads still in the works, but if you're looking from the outside you can probably start to see some of the pieces coming together.
We've been running hard on the open philosophy for a few years now. One of the main theories behind that was that Ski Media had become a very closed club of a few people with roughly the same opinions being recycled over and over. We wanted to cast out a massive net to do our best to find some of the best undiscovered talent that was out there, and assist both them and everyone else with a platform to publish on.
Thoughout the years of us doing that, we've discovered some incredible talent. Evan Heath, Jamie Walter, Sam Turner, Cy Whitling, Adam Spensley, Matt Sklar, Matt Kretzchmar, Gavin Rudy, Erica Aarons and Erika Dhalby... countless others who have come through the system and proven to be the next generation of ski media.
The next step in this process is to provide curated editorial feeds on top of our community system which gives the best of these people a proper outlet, and to provide them with either jobs or solid freelance contracts which will allow for more predictable flows of Quality Media. I thought this would happen a little faster than it did, which is my bad - but you can see it happening.
So next year you're going to see a huge amount of highly produced professional level content on top of our open system. We'll always keep the open system open, because we want to always allow that next generation to have a shot at working their way up. However, you guys will have feeds which are heavily curated, so you can get back to trusting everything will be top notch quality. I had really hoped that the voting systems would do this so we all decided together... but I've realized that we've picked the people together who fit our vision of skiing, and they need to be the final curators of what goes out into the world.
In terms of events... look at what has happened over the last two years. We've grown Tell-A-Friend Tour to 22 stops between the UK and US, which brings professional skiers to resorts never before imagining them coming for the ski day of your life. We've taken over the Dew Tour, which will be happening in full force in December 2016 - and this year though it wasn't highly publicized yet - we had a group of about 8 skiers attending Snowboarder Magazine Superpark... which is the same company as us.
Remember as well - Transworld snowboarding and Snowboarder are the exact same company. So I'm constantly meeting with those crews, sharing ideas and looking for inspiration of what is next for Newschoolers.
The last two years have been highly transitional for media in absolutely every industry. Social Media has exploded into the space, and dramatically changed how everyone interacts. This affected us extremely well in some areas and hurt us in others. All of that ends up that its time to really get the final pieces of this puzzle together.
Other media are great at what they do, but Newschoolers is and always has been dedicated with extreme passion to the core skier. We have gone about that by empowering everyone to speak their words, and now that we have an insanely good team in place, we're going to focus that message in so that every skier who decides they want to add some style to their day and play on the mountain will look to Newschoolers for inspiration.
What can you do to help? Keep throwing feedback at us, read articles, share them, buy some merch, uninstall ad block, add content to the site, start a conversation - keep the momentum going and just watch out for the content drop that is going to hit in the fall.
Should be a fun ride for us all to be on together.
