Recently, the FiNS Team had a rare and happy opportunity. Normally scattered across the globe, we gathered for a few days in Bangkok, Thailand for a recent dive show. Having most of the team in a single location for the first occasion in recent memory gave us time to have some fun, and also to chat about the direction of FiNS.

As you may recall, FiNS initially started as a small publication in Singapore, and over the past seven years, we’ve grown into a much bigger effort, with offices in three countries and contributors, subscribers and friends around the world.

In addition, we’ve always been at the forefront of change…experimenting with and implementing new forms of communication to stay in touch with the dive community and to keep you informed.

Our website is the most popular of any dive publication in the Asia-Pacific region. Our discussion forum was the first successful English-language forum in the region. We launched our blog two years ago to keep you abreast of breaking news, and to date, we’re still the only major dive publication in Asia to use this effective media form to reach divers everywhere.

In addition, we’ve re-designed our print magazine twice, provided free PDF versions of our magazine, established the FiNS Magazine podcast on iTunes, created innovative and humourous magazine column concepts instead of copying what everyone else does, and organised the most successful Divers’ Night parties the region has ever seen.

Not bad for a bunch of divers donating their spare time, right?

That’s right. Many of you may not be aware of this, but everyone involved with FiNS works other full-time jobs. We don’t get paid or subsidised by large parent companies for our FiNS-related endeavours. In fact, we invest a lot of personal time with little to no financial reward. We create FiNS because we love the oceans and we believe in what we do.

During our group eat-and-chat sessions in Bangkok about where to take FiNS, we discussed a wide range of topics, but found our thoughts returning often to four major themes:

Our Expectations: First is our own expectations. FiNS Magazine has become incredibly popular. We get dozens of emails each day asking about subscriptions, shop orders, article ideas and contributions, general feedback, and much more.

On the one hand, we’re really happy to receive acknowledgment for our efforts. But at the same time, we’re increasingly finding ourselves unable to respond in a timely manner…which bums us out. Try as we might, we simply can’t keep up with the escalating flood of communication sent our way each day, since we all work full-time jobs to pay bills.

State of Print Media: Next, we’ve watched the health of most forms of print media decline all over the world. The highly respected and successful LIFE magazine, for instance, discontinued its print edition recently, opting to go online only. Underlying decisions like this are statistics that demonstrate a precipitous decline in newspaper and periodical subscriptions in almost every market and area of interest.

Accompanying this is a drop in advertising revenue, which is the backbone of every print publication. Newspapers in the United States, for instance, saw a 9.4% plunge in revenues last year, the worst decline in 50 years (Source: Newspaper Association of America).

In this climate, many periodicals have been forced to cut costs and streamline dramatically to survive. Newsweek, for instance, recently let 20% of their staff go (Source: Wall Street Journal, p.B1, 4 April 2008).

In contrast, both viewership and revenue for online media have been growing. As one example, internet ad revenue for major newspapers in the US has jumped from an estimated US$2 billion to US$3.2 billion between 2005 and 2007 (Source: Newspaper Association of America).

Consistent with these figures, we ourselves have seen magazine subscriptions increase, but we’ve seen website viewership, PDF downloads, and iTunes podcast accesses literally explode.

There’s a lot more data underscoring this worldwide trend, but you get the point. The writing is on the wall, so to speak.

Integrity: One thing that’s always been a concern to us is being able to maintain editorial integrity. You see, here’s the inside scoop on the dive industry.

Print magazines rely primarily on advertisers (not subscribers) to pay the bills. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that many advertisers only want (and expect) good things to be said about them. In cases where positive views are warranted, there’s no problem. In situations where there’s a need for constructive criticism or worse…most dive magazines have their hands (and tongues) tied.

During our seven years, we have chosen to speak out with constructive feedback on certain occasions, and we consequently suffered the wrath of advertisers and other parties in the dive industry (though ordinary divers rallied around us).

In addition, people have at times asked us to remove or censor opinions they didn’t like which were posted by divers on our forum, which we of course did not.

Standing on principle as we’ve done often means losing money and taking sh*t, but we believe that the lure of extra cash to pay the bills isn’t worth compromising our integrity.

Still, given the exceedingly high cost of producing and distributing a print magazine, we occasionally find ourselves biting our tongues when we really want to address controversial topics…and not being happy about it. Ideally, we’d like to have complete freedom to express opinions…good or otherwise…that are in the best interest of divers.

In other words, we believe FiNS should be created by divers, for divers, without any strings attached and without any vested interest dictating the agenda.

The Environment: Finally, there’s the environment. No matter how we dress it up, printing thousands of copies of FiNS Magazine and sending them all over the world every two months is not environmentally friendly, especially when there are now alternative forms of media available that are both easily accessible and rapidly gaining in popularity.

Magazine production, storage and transport consumes trees, generates pollution and contributes to carbon emissions.

We’re not overzealous eco-warriors, and we’re not by any means advocating a ban against the use of paper, but we do believe in optimising our own environmental impact, and we believe in practicing what we preach.

We are, after all, the first and only dive magazine in the Asia-Pacific region willing and able to state openly that we don’t consume shark fin. When it comes to environmental issues, it’s easy to talk the talk, but not necessarily to walk the walk.

Summary: After careful reflection upon these and other related issues, we decided that it’s time once again for FiNS to evolve…in order to look to the future and embrace the rapid and exciting changes in the world, rather than to cling to the past…and also to bolster our editorial independence while minimising our environmental impact.

To this end, we have developed and set in motion plans to unveil FiNS version 4.0, the details of which we will make public in the coming months.

The one aspect of our plans that we can announce now is that we will cease printing FiNS Magazine in paper form with immediate effect. Clearly, this was a difficult decision for us, as we are proud of our print edition’s success and popularity, and we certainly enjoy the positive feedback we receive.

However, in the final analysis, we do not feel that the satisfaction we would derive from continuing our print magazine would outweigh our environmental concerns or the diminishing effectiveness of print media.

Don’t panic though! This does not mean that FiNS Magazine will disappear. Quite the contrary.

FiNS v4.0 will be packed with informative content, our trademark sense of humour, and lots of brand new features…plus FiNS will continue to be run by divers for divers, providing you with straight-up, well-informed and unbiased information.

Ironically, our plans will probably end up resulting in more work and additional lost sleep for us, but then again, innovation never comes easy.

Until we implement the changes we have in mind, our website will stay up, and if you are one of our valued subscribers, contributors or advertisers, we will be in touch soon regarding how this decision affects you. This undertaking will require communicating with thousands of people all over the world, so please bear with us.

Thank you for your support, and stay tuned for the next FiNS Evolution.

Download the PDF version of this announcement here

The FiNS Team