Skate of the art - magazine publishing and technology - The Electronic Magazine

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 1993 by Paul McDougall

From blacktop to desktop, Thrasher's gang of sidewalk surfers is riding technology's fourth wave to even bigger profits.

Thrasher's concrete pillbox of a headquarters sits in a San Francisco industrial park, across from a scrap-metal shop and downwind from a sausage factory. On the walls inside are Black Sabbath posters, an artificial leg and police ordinances against "public skateboarding." Editors can variously be found sprawled over couches or skating through the halls.

The apparent anarchy notwithstanding, the 125,000-circulation monthly continues to gross big money--more than $3 million last year--in a niche that the publishing empires of New York and Los Angeles won't touch: disaffected urban teens who don't do much but eat, sleep and fly around on skateboards.

The reasons for Thrasher's success are many, but ultimately it gets down to attitude: The magazine's crew of twenty- and thirty-something staffers, most of whom are themselves rabid skateboarders, like to push limits--whether on the streets or behind a Macintosh.

A prescient decision

In the mid-eighties, with circulation rising steadily, Thrasher execs responded to growing production demands with a decision to buy Macintoshes. Back then, most publishing professionals sniffed at Apple's friendly little computers. But the move proved prescient. Says managing editor Brad Dosland: "We came to a turning point and had to decide between a proprietary typesetting system that wouldn't handle images, wouldn't handle page composition, or a Mac system that would, at least eventually, be able to do all that and more. At the time, all the pros said you had to go with the proprietary system, but if you had even the slightest understanding of how the Mac works, you could see where things were headed."

Today, Thrasher's basic software is XPress, the popular page-assembly program from Denver-based Quark. Working in XPress, staffers create pages by pouring in text and images from programs like Delmar, California-based Paragon Concepts' little-known word processor Nisus, and better-known Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. That's pretty standard stuff these days, but Thrasher is also using XPress to generate four-color separations and create traps--functions that many publishers still cede to the pre-press house. Dosland says that the time and effort spent learning those techniques have helped Thrasher cut its pre-press bills by about 75 percent over the past two years. Also helping is an Agfa image-setter used to generate black-and-white film. "Why pay someone to do that for you?" asks Brian Brannon, Thrasher's music editor who doubles as the in-house typesetting expert. More recently, Thrasher added a Leaf 35mm scanner, an $8,500 piece of desktop equipment that has sent a $12,000 stat camera to the scrapheap and eliminated the film and chemicals that went with it.

Finally, staffers are now using an off-the-shelf video system to freeze images and send them to Macintoshes. "It lets us get all the important parts of a trick into the magazine without having to shoot 60 rolls of film and hope we get lucky," says editor Jake Phelps.

Dosland estimates that, altogether, Thrasher's production system "cost less than $50,000, and it is saving us that much every month. The decision to go with desktop is probably what has allowed this company to survive."

In the beginning

The high-tech setup belies a humbler beginning, when much of the book was produced from a sparse Potrero Hill apartment owned by one of Thrasher's original investors. "We were poor, we were up all night developing photos, doing everything wrong for many, many years," says co-publisher Kevin Thatcher, an ex-pro skateboarder who has been with Thrasher since it launched (for less than $40,000) in 1979. "Everything we made, we put back in," he says. "We bought stat cameras, typesetters and then Macs."

That investment in desktop equipment used to produce Thrasher is also paying off in helping parent company High Speed Productions expand its product line. Using Illustrator and Photoshop, for instance, staffers like production manager Kat O'Loughlin design logos for T-shirts, ball caps and other ancillary goods that last year accounted for about 20 percent of the company's gross revenues. "It lets us go after a bigger pie in the sky," says co-publisher Ed Riggins. Indeed, the synergies don't stop at software--the designs are ported to the imagesetter, where positive film is output for silk-screening.

And the video equipment is used to produce a video version of Thrasher. More than 12,000 readers paid $14.95 for the most recent tape, which featured some of the Bay Area's more notorious skaters, one of whom eats live crabs on-camera.

Staff artists also put the Macs to work creating display spots for advertisers, including small skateboard dealers who can't afford conventional design or ad agency services. "We help them to the point of losing money," Thatcher concedes, "because some of the kids that came to us a year ago, or five years ago, are now among the biggest in the industry, and they remember who helped them and who told them to go fuck themselves."