Joel Patterson on Surfer's 50th, the Web, and what's next

Tell me more about this change and what else you’ll be doing to spice up the magazine as far as writers, sections, online and your role.

Travis Ferré (Surfing’s Editor) and I are going to be taking on a lot more leadership of our respective brands, and while we have a lot of mutual respect, we have different interests in the world of surf, so yeah, I think SURFING and SURFER will start differentiating themselves organically.

There’s no master plan, but there is certainly room in the surf media space to be different.

As far as detail about “what’s next,” we’re going to be featuring a year-long instruction column written by Kelly Slater with new tips each month. He’ll be on our masthead as “coach” or “instructor” or something. He’s already written a few pieces, and they’re good and very detail-oriented.

We’re doing some design tweaks to our covers in hopes of some better newsstand performance.

We’re always on the search for great writers, but in the past year we’ve had a really eclectic, intelligent bunch writing for us, including Christian Beamish, Sean Doherty, Kimball Taylor, Alex Wilson, Brad Melekian, Belinda Baggs, Derek Rielly, and others along with our staff.

Plus we’ve got a couple new guys and gals coming up with pieces in our 2010 volume.

Online, we’ve recently redesigned our Web site, and the never-ending challenge is to populate it with great content. Our numbers online are second only to Surfline and growing every month, so we feel good about what we’re doing there.

We’re embarking on a ground-up rebuild of FantasySurfer.com for the 2010 World Tour, and it’s going to make the players’ experience exponentially better. We’re up to 20,000+ players this year, and we think we can double that with a couple initiatives we’re going to launch in 2010.

Lots on the boil.