Founded in 1960, Surfer magazine furloughed staff on Friday and ceased further print and online content offerings after printing its final edition, according to The Los Angeles Times.
“We were told that we were being technically furloughed, but it was pretty clear there was no intention to bring the jobs back at any point, that essentially our duties had ended,” Todd Prodanovich, Surfer’s editor in chief since 2015, told The New York Times. “No one thought that we were doing great, as far as business was going, especially since COVID hit. We had a lot of advertisers pulling back or pulling out completely.”
American Media, the owner of The National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids, acquired Surfer’s previous publisher 18 months ago.
Surfer was one of the first niche sports magazines of any kind to be successful, similar to Hotrod and Field & Stream, and paved the way for magazines like Surfer’s Journal in the U.S. and Surfing World in Australia.
“I have watched many great publications go out of business over the past few years, but this one hit me really hard,” Steve Hawk, who edited the magazine for eight years in the 1990s, told the LA Times. “It was so much more than just a magazine for a lot of surfers of a certain generation. It was a cultural touchstone and groundbreaking in a lot of ways.”
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