When most people think of skateboarding magazines, their thoughts immediately turn to Thrasher magazine, with it’s gritty edges and hardcore presentation. They envision articles about grunge skateboarders with tattoos and body piercing spinning their stunts on public streets.However, the more professional and discriminating skateboarders actually turn to another publication for their monthly fix on the latest buzz in the skateboarding community. This magazine is Transworld.Aside from skateboarding, Transworld’s other publications run quite an impressive gauntlet of offerings of other extreme sports, including snowboarding, surfing, BMX, and even OffRoad vehicles. All of them follow the same pattern of excellence that Transworld Skateboarding has set.Transworld skateboarding offers a very professional approach to it’s articles, presenting facts in an easy manner and giving out tips which are quite simple to understand and absorb. Other skateboarding publications seem to focus primarily on mindless bling bling and the use of light shows and radical senses of humor to get relatively minor points across. Transworld, on the other hand, maintains a systematic and factual approach to it’s articles that appeals to more mature and professional skateboarders.
It features interviews with the pros, but splits it’s focus equally between questions about the backgrounds of the pros, their lifestyle, and tips or advice they have to offer aspiring professional skateboarders. Instead of turning these interviews into simple jamming sessions for the entertainment of the interviewee’s fanboys, the staff of Transworld actually tries to get as much useful information as possible from the pros to help other skaters.Transworld also covers every major skateboarding competition and event with an article, not letting any of the big ones slip though their fingers. Their writers give descriptive, blow by blow accounts of each of these events, and give greater focus on highlights of the events, like crucial turning points in competitions that gave the edge to the winners, or especially impressive stunts pulled off by people during a demo.They also do feature articles on the latest cutting edge of skateboarding tech, with buyer’s guides showing the hottest new equipment as well as special feature articles that cover radical new tech entries into the field of skateboarding. The information for most of these tech articles are usually taken straight from the manufacturers themselves.
It isn’t all seriousness and numbers, of course. Most of these articles, while written with an emphasis on fact, still retain enough wisecracks and kidding around to keep the readers entertained. Still, given that the staff of transworld tends to cater to a more mature audience of skateboarders, the type of humor generally displayed tends towards the dry and witty, as opposed to the more common and brain dead slapstick approach.Transworld Skateboarding’s primary goal is to further the expansion and support of the world skateboarding community by keeping the heart of the sport alive in it’s participants, as well as being enticing and understandable enough that it can also attract those who don’t know anything about it into the sport. All of it’s otherpublications follow the same theme.By and large Transworld’s magazines have been contributing admirably to the growth and development of every sport that they feature, not only by giving the readers better information, but by actually setting an example for a higher standard of maturity and professionalism while maintaining a good degree of fun factor.
