Last week, GrindMedia made headlines by becoming far and away the largest action sports publisher in the world through the acquisition of Transworld Media. This is an interesting development for the surf world in particular considering Surfing Magazine, Transworld Surf, and Surfer Magazine will now be housed under the same umbrella company, SourceInterlink Media. In order to get a better understanding of what this means for the future of these titles, I spoke with Norb Garrett, Senior Vice President and Group Publisher for GrindMedia.
How are you doing Norb? This is Zach Weisberg.
Zach Weisberg! What’s up buddy?
Lots. Tons of stuff. It sounds like a lots going on in your world, too. How’s everything going with you?
Great. It’s been crazy.
I just wanted to call to hear a little bit more about acquiring TransWorld. That’s a pretty major announcement for the world of action sports publishing.
Yes. Definitely, I think it is. For the world of action sports media, it’s, in my opinion, the best thing that could have happened for us to be honest with you.
How long have you been considering the acquisition? I’m sure people are curious to know how long that had been in the works.
Well, nothing formal up until recently. Obviously, when you sit around and strategize what to do, how to succeed in today’s ever-evolving media landscape, you’re constantly looking for ways to strengthen your business and make your business more important to consumers and advertisers. Honestly, the thought around this is that both of us are really good, strong action sports media companies and we spend a lot of time battling each other, when, in fact, if we were together we could be a lot more effective in helping build these sports – and ultimately improving our chances of being a significant media player. In this kind of new landscape, the opportunity came, and we jumped on it.
How do you see the surf titles – Surfing, SURFER, TransWorld SURF – working together? Where does that synergy exist?
So really the short answers to the question is we’ll operate multiple brands. As long as there is an industry with demand from the consumers within it, we are all over it. We are going to begin evaluations immediately, you know. How viable is it to operate three magazines in the same industry? We’d love to operate them for the next twenty years if the industry will support it, and the consumers will support it, and it makes good business sense. So for now, we have three brands, and there is business tied to all three. We’re going to see where that takes us, and we are rolling up our sleeves over the next several weeks to really analyze this particular opportunity.
Obviously these are all strong brands, especially in the print category. How does this acquisition play into your digital strategy moving forward?
It’s critical. As we are currently in print, everyday there is an increased opportunity to reach more people digitally. It’s an interesting thing now because I think over the last couple years we’ve actually seen an increased resiliency in print as a platform for pretty much all of our vertical properties. So print, as a category or distribution platform, isn’t going to go away anytime soon. So the truth is that there is opportunity for us to grow, expand, and reach more consumers. Digital, video and mobile are the categories we can focus on growing aggressively. We have strong, well-developed digital platforms to operate, and the SURFER and Surfing brands are very strong at involving social media as well. These are areas of great importance for us; we know that’s where the growth is. But make no mistake, we’re not going to run away from a platform that people are demanding, and there’s a large percentage of people that still want to consume through print.
So physically everything is staying in the same place? Between Carlsbad and San Clemente?
Exactly. The Carlsbad office remains intact. There is some service stuff that’s not related to the day-to-day editorial operations, or sales operations but function as central services. There will be some consolidation of those resources once we get our arms around it. We will be getting our arms around that in the coming weeks, but I don’t think there will be anything significant in that regard. Status quo as far as where the buildings are and brands and stuff like that.
Was there any type of trade involved? I’m just curious as to what you can reveal about the transaction dollar-wise and the terms of the transaction, as it seems like Bonnier acquired Source Interlink’s Moto titles on the same day.
So the terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed and certainly aren’t anything I can discuss. But what I can tell you is there were two separate deals. One based around our acquisition from Bonnier and another based around outdoor sports. Then the separate deal was to sell Bonnier the motorcycle group. Two separate deals. It impacted us in that some writers who used to be in our group aren’t anymore, and obviously we brought in TransWorld Moto as part of our acquisition. Basically swapping out Moto titles with different positions in the marketplace.
So for the foreseeable future TranWorld, Surfing and SURFER will all be running under the Source Interlink banner?
Yes. We would love to make them all work, and we will see if that is doable. Right now there is no reason for me to think anything otherwise. But they’ve done a very good job over the years establishing a brand that’s in a very competitive environment. So we want to give it every opportunity to expand. For the consumer nothing has changed. Really my view of it is, my responsibility is to say, is there enough of a demand for there to be these three brands – if not more? We don’t answer that yet cause we’ve just transacted the deal.
