A Few Words About Adventure Journal’s New Direction

Dear friends,

After 14 years (holy smokes!) of Adventure Journal as an online magazine updated multiple times a day, often from my mobile office (above), changes are coming. AJ started in 2008 as my personal blog and has grown to reach hundreds of thousands of readers each month, serving as a community for outdoor adventure, with news, essays, gear, polls—you name it. It’s been terrifically fun.

But Adventure Journal’s printed quarterly is the pinnacle of our efforts. It is home to our best writing, the best photography, the most interesting ideas, and most compelling stories. It is where our heart and soul are most deeply invested, what we’re proudest of, and where we prefer to spend the majority of our time. It’s also where we’d like to focus your attention. The majority of our readers visit our site but don’t subscribe to print, so they aren’t getting the best of us; if this is you, you’re missing out on the full AJ experience.

The most obvious change is that our website has a new look, with a design that mirrors what’s in print and a modern, best-practices e-commerce platform. This reflects a transition we’ve been making for a while, from ad-supported digital content to a reader-supported premium print experience. We will continue to bring you our most popular column, Historical Badass, every week, but our digital energy will be focused on our new biweekly newsletter with outdoor essays, gear reviews, and nuggets from the adventure world. We have also begun expanding our video offerings on YouTube.

I could give you a dozen reasons why we’re making these moves, but the most important is that we are above all striving to make a world-class print publication—one whose narratives can be enjoyed by any curious mind, whose details ring true with those who’ve been atop the highest mountains and in the wildest lands, whose stories will be fresh and interesting for years to come. We hope you will subscribe to Adventure Journal, because we promise, if you like what we’ve been doing online, you will love AJ in print.

Stephen Casimiro
Editor and Founder