Alpinist SOLD … To The Man on the Phone
Posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009
Height of Land, Backcountry Magazine publishers, bought Alpinist magazine vie phone auction for $71,000 yesterday.
The sale comes after the 9,000-circulation archival quality journal closed its doors in October.
As soon as Alpinist closed, my roommate, a former employee, took over managing the company’s assets. And by managing assets, I mean going through piles of files, moving furniture from office to storage to UPS and making stacks of Alpinist’s book collection in the living room.
I wish he would get a cut of the $71K or at least get thrown into the package for all the work he’s done and all the work he could do. But, the $71K only buys the publishers The Magazine, The Web Site (currently out of service) and the Annual Alpinist Film Festival.
While that seems like a lot of money to me (I could buy 23 Nikon D700s and a $50 Alpinist Issue 0 with $71K), one source pointed out that the price tag even for a “not yet profitable” publication is scary. This, the source said, just indicates what some publishes don’t want to admit about print journalism.
So, what will happen to the mag now? Will my roommate become the new production editor, will the glossy pages get recycled into a high-brow Forbes-type mountain town rag? Will it fold into backcountry like Couloir did?
TetonAT thinks this means we’ll have the Surfer’s Journal equivalent of a two-niche magazine: backcountry skiing and alpinism. And I agree, that would be so totally sick and gnar.
