December 23, 2009 | Posted in 
Devastated. That’s the only word I can conceive to describe the way I felt when I learned that Northeast Boating magazine will cease publication on December 31.
My first article for this award-winning regional ran in January 2005, when the magazine was still known as Offshore. The piece was called “Subtle Splendor,” and it included a 2,000-word narrative plus a 1,000-word info box about cruising in Long Beach Island, New Jersey.
The story and its rich, accompanying photography ran across eight pages within the 136-page issue. My last article for Northeast Boating appears in this month’s issue. It’s called “Sweet Spot” and talks about cruising in Beach Haven, New Jersey, with the same word and page counts—only packaged within a magazine that has 56 pages total.
Northeast Boating was never my best-paying gig as a freelancer, but it was always one of my favorites. Former Editor Betsy Frawley Haggerty, followed by current Editor Tom Richardson, always fought to preserve the space that writers needed to develop narratives, bring characters to life, incorporate dialogue, and, in general, do more than just spout boat test statistics at readers.
They encouraged me to write creatively, to write completely, and to write well. This magazine actually let writers be writers—and it won a heck of a lot of awards over the years for sticking to its editorial guns.
It’s hard to know whether to fully blame the title’s demise on the continuing recession. Obviously, when the total page count is a mere 56, ad revenue is all but gone. There is no doubt that advertisers stopped being able to (or perhaps wanting to?) support a regional magazine filled with long-form journalism.
Still, I can’t help but wonder whether and how much the rise of the Web as a primary information resource contributed to this magazine’s end. Long-form journalism just doesn’t seem to be the main attraction anymore for readers. Those of us who write for websites know that 300 or 400 words tends to be the maximum that readers will tolerate (or perhaps enjoy?) on any given day. The way I would re-search and write for Northeast Boating would be considered insane by my online editors today.
My fingers, when not typing out staccato sentences full of search engine-friendly phrases these days, are crossed for Richardson and his colleagues, who are attempting to find financing that will keep NortheastBoating. net in operation. I hope they can find a way to marry the style of journalism that made the magazine so great and its writers so fulfilled with the style of reading that is fast becoming the norm. Godspeed. To us all.
–Kim kavin, BWI President
