6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 1 of 18 Meet the Writer Behind the New Skateboard History Book ‘The Next Wave’ ILLUMINATED PAPER speaks to next-generation skateboard writer Daniel Fedkenheuer about chronicling skateboard history from 1999 until 2020 and the realities of working as a skateboard journalist in today’s digital- !rst media landscape. By Dirk Vogel - May 29, 2020 The early 2000s were a golden age of journalism in skateboard history. In the United States, the freshly rebooted Skateboarder Magazine explored the subtleties of skate culture with some of the day’s finest skateboard writers on staff. The Skateboard Mag elevated the look and quality of print magazines, while the holy trinity of Slap, Thrasher, and TransWorld Skateboarding maintained their unique voices at newsstands worldwide. Magazine publishing was even still lucrative enough to sustain outliers like the lifestyle driven TransWorld vehicle Stance. 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 2 of 18 Over in Europe, Kingpin Magazine set out to provide a platform for a unified European skate scene and published four language editions (English, French, Spanish, and German) on a monthly basis at the height of its print run. Every country across Western Europe was home to at least four regular print magazines, and the amount of words written about skateboarding – and the number of writers getting paid to pen them – was at an all-time high. Fast-forward to 2020 and look how times have changed. Printed skateboarding magazines have mostly gone the way of the dodo. The majority of skate mags from 20 years ago have either gone fully digital or ceased to exist. The latter also applies to full-time jobs for skateboard writers and other chroniclers of skateboard history. In a digitally disrupted skateboard media landscape, the death of print publishing has left a gaping hole in the economics of skateboard journalism; a hole only very few writers manage to fill these days in what has become a constant hustle of side gigs and one-off article commissions for brands or skate retailers. 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 3 of 18 All the shred that’s fit to print: Issues of Thrasher Magazine from the early aughts provided source information for The Next Wave. On that note, how does a new generation of skateboard writers even get a start under these circumstances? Enter Daniel Fedkenheuer. At age 24, the New Jersey transplant has established solid roots in the California skateboarding scene. He has successfully applied his writing talent to Concrete Wave magazine as one of the few titles that still published a print edition until recently, as well as digital outlets such as Everything Skateboarding and the Stoked Rideshop website. To pay the bills, Daniel landed a full-time job at one of the skate industry’s most storied brand conglomerates, Dwindle Distribution in El Segundo. Over the last two-and-a-half years, Daniel also chronicled skateboard history from 1999 until 2020 in a new book titled The Next Wave, published in partnership with the Skateboarding Hall of Fame and Museum (SHoF) in Simi Valley, California (also read our Illpaper interview with SHoF mastermind Todd Huber). Available now, the full-color softcover book paints a vivid picture 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 4 of 18 of the past two decades through interviews with skateboard industry representatives such as Don Brown, Mark Waters, Soy Panday, and George Powell as well as pro skateboarders including Paul ‘P-Rod’ Rodriguez, Vanessa Torres, Leo Baker, and Greg Lutzka. In our ILLUMINATED PAPER interview, Daniel Fedkenheuer explains the genesis of his skateboard history book The Next Wave and details leaving his East Coast life behind to pursue the skateboarding life in sunny California. Grab a nice cup of tea or coffee for this one. Hands down: Skateboard writer Daniel Fedkenheuer levitates his shred stick on the Globe mini ramp in El Segundo. Portrait photo by Chris Bywater. Please introduce yourself and how you got involved in skateboarding. My name is Daniel Fedkenheuer and I am 24 years old. I first got involved in skateboarding about a decade ago, after my hometown in New Jersey built our local park. I took a few years learning how to tre flip and learning 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 5 of 18 which office buildings in town had no security guards. Was skateboarding also the reason for leaving New Jersey? By the time I fell in love with the lifestyle that the skate industry projected, I realized that the scene in northern, suburban New Jersey was nearly nonexistent. As I got older and prepared to move out of my hometown, I started networking online and taking steps to pursue a career related to skateboarding more seriously. As soon as I graduated college, I followed the dream of moving out to California and have been working in the industry ever since. “Writing became my vehicle for going to events, visiting different companies and connecting me to the world of other skateboarders that my hometown lacked.” How did you decide to become a writer and, by extension, how did you start writing about skateboarding? In the process of trying to put my name out there, I linked up with Michael Brooke, former editor of Concrete Wave Magazine. Though I lacked any prior experience, he embraced the fact that I was eager to get involved. That’s awesome. I got started by connecting to a skateboard distributor in Germany who was starting his own magazine in the early 1990s. They sat me down and said, ‘This is an Apple Macintosh computer’ and we took it from there. What was your first task at Concrete Wave? 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 6 of 18 I started by redesigning their website and naturally, we needed content to fill it. To do so, Michael guided me through different writing assignments and connected me with dozens of people from his network in New York City and beyond. Writing became my vehicle for going to events, visiting different companies and connecting me to the world of other skateboarders that my hometown lacked. MOVING TO CALI IN SEARCH OF SKATEBOARD HISTORY High society: Selection of Baker Skateboards decks from the early 2000s. You secured a full-time position in the skateboard industry to facilitate your move to California. What are your responsibilities at Dwindle? My full-time gig at Dwindle is working as an Inside Sales Representative. After some recent changes, I currently oversee sales for all of our core skate shops in the United States, Canada, and South America. I work with 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 7 of 18 a solid group of outside reps to process orders for skate shops and make sure that they are stocked with the right mix of product that moves for them. Does your ‘day job’ connect to your writing work about skateboard history? In truth, my full-time work is pretty separate from the writing I do on the side. I would love to make it more connected though. I’ve formed relationships with a bunch of shop owners, skaters and artists through this job. My plan is to start collaborating with these people and feature them in future publications. Speaking of publications, what kind of media and magazines do you write for? In the past, I’ve written predominantly on the internet. Specifically, I’ve contributed to a couple of publications and ran blogs for a shop and a small bearing company for a period of time. As of late, I’ve been trying to make some new connections and align with smaller, independent publishers. I recently started working with Stoke Much, a magazine based here in LA. By nature, their aim is to highlight the creative culture of skateboarding and the guy behind it, Zach Moldof, encourages long form content. After writing something as literal as a history book, it’s been a refreshing change of pace to experiment with some more conceptual writing for their upcoming issues. SKATEBOARD HISTORY WRITING IN 2020 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 8 of 18 Shred patrol: A SoCal police officer finessing a 360 kickflip on flat as seen in ‘The Next Wave’. Photo – Andrew Durso. Overall it feels like the amount of writing about skateboarding has dramatically declined, with all the print magazines gone and everything pivoted to video. What are your thoughts? In the printed form, it certainly feels as though traditional editorial has fallen by the wayside. It’s sometimes disheartening to think that the only consistent literature we get as a community are the monthly Thrashers and the occasional Free Skate Mag issues that make their way over from Europe. Do you think that digital media can fill the gap and document skateboard history? Obviously, there are some solid sites out there that have demanded space for editorial on the web as well. Chrome Ball has been holding it down for years and Quarter Snacks always keeps up with things. But isn’t it gnarly to think that these are all one-man 6/27/20, 3:15 PM Page 9 of 18 operations, or very small teams on bootstrap budgets, who provide this kind of core commentary, especially compared to having full editorial staffs and travel budgets at skate mags in the early 2000s? It would be nice to see more support from the industry on projects like those though. I would much rather see brands putting their money towards creating meaningful, sponsored content rather than dumping their marketing budgets into 30-second pre-roll ads on Thrasher.