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Let's start from the start.
Take a look at the rack of magazines, any given month. What a sad collective image that is. The standard of cover photos has dropped significantly in recent years. Editors: If your cover photo doesn't make a non-snowboarder who's just passing by the magazine rack, stop and pick up your magazine and say, “Holy fucking shit, that shit is fucking fucked!” then you're doing something wrong. Your cover should be an explosion of visual stimulation, an optical orgasm. Men should want to be it, women should want to be with it, small children should shriek in the horror of its' presence! In short, it should be beautiful, stunning art. And it doesn't always have to be the best rider shot by the sickest photographer either. If some unknown gets a photo of his buddy and it's fuckin' sweet, print that shit! Do not give me some drab, dark, muted catastrophe depicting some douchebag with no style standing still on a flat bar waiting to be dropkicked in the testes. I will wipe my ass with that crap and set it on fire. Your cover, like it or not, is the impression by which your publication will be judged by all those (and there are a lot of them) who don't actually pick it up and thumb through some of it until the rude store clerk kicks me out of the store. If your cover doesn't sell, you might as well leave the rest of the magazine blank. Which, by the example you've been printing lately, is what you might as well have done anyway.
If you are actually convinced to pick up a magazine and pry the cover open, you'll no doubt be flipping through 9 or 10 pages of advertisements. Besides the back cover, the first few pages of magazine are the most valuable, monetarily-speaking. So, because magazines are broke and need to pay for photos and printing and distribution and fat, balding laptop-jockies to sit around typing this crap up, they need to sell advertising. This is fine, use up the first few pages to pay the bills, doesn't really bother me. What DOES bother me are the advertisements themselves. God damnit, what a waste of perfectly good real estate! Have you ever wondered what some pro snowboard sitting on a horse in the desert is supposed to do with what bindings I should buy? Or some drunken longhair with some girls in bikinis supposedly rides some certain board, so should I? Or if it actually contains some snowboard-related content, why the fuck would I buy the same goggles if the guy in the photo isn't even wearing them?!? That's the best example, goggles are the easiest thing to advertise, all you need to do is get some decent shot of a guy ripping through some trees on a snowy, socked-in day, with his goggs glowing and awesome. Then you can say, “These look sick, even in pea soup, and you can still see well enough to shred your face apart.” That makes me want those goggles. One of the best ads I ever saw was a guy I can't name wearing a jacket from a brand I probably can't say, standing in a vicious blizzard, smiling. That's all you need. Quit hiring a bunch of idiots to dress in lab coats and pour green slime on each other while trying not to get boners. You suck at your job.
Next is usually a table of contents, which is useless because most magazines don't even have page numbers anyway, and it's not like you're going to flip straight to “how to wear your beanie really cool” on page 48 right away. Then sometimes there's a masthead (always beside an all-too-distracting photo) which is extremely important. It lists everyone who is involved in creating the magazine you're holding. Study up! You never know when there will be a quiz.
What's next? Actual content! Columns and articles and stories and interviews and photos. What order should we attack these in? Actually, that one sounds just fine.
Columns. Opinions. Probably not worth reading. Especially this one.
Articles. Let me tell you a secret: Nobody cares about how delicious your ultra-vegan raw diet is and how you're tired all the time. No, it doesn't make me want to snowboard.
Stories. This is when someone actually goes on a pretty sweet trip to some awesome little hardly-thought-about country and tries to put together a snowboard trip. Sometimes, if you read a lot of them, you come across one that is actually interesting a worth reading all the way though. Not often though.
Interviews. My favourite. If you picked a random person off the street, who has nothing to do with snowboarding at all, and made them read 100 of the latest rider interviews, they would tell you that snowboarders are a bunch of low-life, dirtbag, grease-ball stains who try really hard to seem like they don't try hard at all. And you couldn't blame him (or her, but don't try picking random girls off the street, trust me). All interviews are the same, “Ooh, I live on a couch and I have to work so hard all summer long doing manual labour because I have no education, just to support by weed and beer habits and so I can do nothing but snowboard all winter!” Aww, well let me be the first to welcome you to what the rest of us call “real life”. I rarely read an interview in which anyone ever has anything interesting to say. Try harder.
Photos. Remember all that shit I said about the cover shot? Same goes, only not quite as harsh. These should be pictures that were just not quite good enough to be on the cover, but close. Again, I don't need to see all the best riders' b-shots just so you can print their name in the corner. Each photo should stand out on its own and make me want to pull them out and pin them to my wall. And cut out this sequence bullshit! If I wanted to see the whole trick, I'd watch the video! There's no sense in using up an entire page with 40 tiny pictures you can barely make out anyway, just so I can see that some asshole 180'd off that rail. A photograph should be one magnificent instant worth catching and saving and showing to your friends, and it should be caught well.
That's usually the end of the magazine, except of course the back cover which is usually just an ad for shoes or an energy drink or something stupid and unrelated like that. One thing snowboard magazines are missing, is a “carnage” section. One photo with a short story to go with it, of something going absolutely batshit sideways. THAT I would flip straight to, every time.
