Celeb Shot: Mike Rogge
The Queensbury native is leading the revival of print-based adventure journalism with his larger-than-life magazine, 'Mountain Gazette.' PLUS: Airbnb drama and Hattie's heads south.
Forty-five minutes before I was supposed to call Mike Rogge for this very story, he emailed me. “Something came up at 9 my time,” he said. “I have time now to conduct the interview. Would that work?”
The thing that came up? Well, it was a powder day.
I didn’t have anything going on (unfortunately, there hasn’t been much powder to chase in the northeast this winter), so Mike and I chatted while he was driving to Homewood, which he describes as a little-known mom-and-pop ski hill on the west shore of Lake Tahoe. Mike now considers Alpine Meadows his home mountain, but long before that, the Queensbury’s native’s stomping ground was West Mountain. “It’s where I grew up skiing 25 years in a row,” he says. “I didn’t miss a single year. My first kiss was on the Frolic Chair.”
While Queensbury was where Mike developed his love for skiing (and possibly women), it’s also where he developed a love for writing about skiing—a lifelong endeavor that led him to, in 2020, purchase a defunct adventure magazine called Mountain Gazette in a Denver bar at 8am. If you’re now questioning Mike’s sanity, you’re not alone. A subscriber-only, biannual magazine, available exclusively in print, that costs readers a whopping $80 a year? In a world in which even print media titan Sports Illustrated is teetering on the edge of survival, no less? They say print is dead. Mike Rogge says bullsh**.
In spite of the high price point, Mountain Gazette has been profitable since its third month in business. How is Mike doing it? That answer and more, here:
I read in one of your Mountain Gazette newsletters that you’re from upstate New York. Tell me about your Warren County roots.
My grandfather owned the Imperial Motel in Queensbury. My father and his siblings run Lamplighter Acres, the mobile home community in Moreau, and my dad runs Route 9 Mini Storage as well. That was a sponsor of all my Little League baseball teams. I went to Queensbury elementary, middle and high school. Pretty much every member of my large extended family went to either Queensbury, Glens Falls, South Glens Falls or Fort Edward. Practically a third of the town might be related to me in some way. My parents live on Lake George now, and we come back every year for six weeks.
Where did your career begin?
I started writing about skiing when I was 17 years old in my room in Queensbury. I interned at the Glens Falls Chronicle when I was in college. When I was 23 I was hired to work for POWDER magazine. That’s what made me leave the east coast. I went to southern California, worked for POWDER for three years, then freelanced for ESPN, the X Games, VICE Sports, the San Francsico Chronicle…I started producing and directing films on my own. I wrote a book about Haitian art, which is the most random thing in the world but it was still pretty fun. In 2020 I bought the Mountain Gazette. And when I say “bought,” I bought it like it was a dirt bike on Craigslist.
OK, back up. What’s the history of Mountain Gazette?
The Gazette was born in 1966 in Colorado. It was called Skiers’ Gazette. They switched it to Mountain Gazette in 1972. It was known as The Village Voice of outdoor culture, meaning it was kind of an alternative approach—the EQX, if you will, of mountain newspapers at that time. It was around until 1979 when it shut down due to poor business practices; running a regional title is really difficult. And then in 2000 a guy named John Fayhee and some partners bought the magazine and restored it to its glory editorially right before the internet destroyed everything. It slowly trickled to a death in 2012 maybe. And then it lived in a storage unit in Boulder, CO, which coincidentally is actually what I ended up buying—all the debt they had incurred in not paying storage bills for a couple of years. My dad owns Route 9 Mini Storage, so I was very familiar with the details of that part of the business.
How did you come to be interested in the magazine?
I was in Alaska filming a documentary about some of the people that worked on the show Deadliest Catch. I was out on, like, the furthest island on the Aleutian Chain. A friend of mine who had actually worked for the previous iteration of the Gazette called me. He knew that I was really interested in trying to revive an old title. I feel like so much work and effort goes into building up magazine or newspaper titles that it’s really silly to launch a new one when there are so many dead ones around. The Gazette always spoke to me, so when I was in Alaska, I paid—no joke—$38 to get the internet for an hour and called the guy. We agreed to meet at an outdoor retailer trade show in Denver. He was like, “Let’s just meet at the bar across the street and then we could walk into the show together.”
So what happened?
I had this idea that I would write him a check for what I could afford. We were pretty far apart on price, but I knew that no one else wanted to buy a dead magazine. We sat down and the waitress said, “Are you ready to order? What are you having?” And he said, “Well, let’s just see how this conversation goes and that’ll determine what we order.” I said, “Well, this is what I can afford. I don’t want to take on any investors. I think I have to do this and own it 100 percent myself.” And he looked at the check, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yep, but you’ve gotta buy me a Coors Banquet Beer.” And I said, “Only if it goes in the bill of sale.” So we wrote the bill of sale on the back of a scrap piece of paper that the waitress gave us. We went across the street after our beer and my buddy, Dan, who owns Flylow Gear, signed it as the witness. And that was it.
What was your vision for reviving the magazine?
I have a fundamental knowledge of what it takes for someone like Jimmy Chin to get a park permit and go into Yosemite to shoot these insane photos of Alex Honnold just for them to show up three inches by three inches on your Instagram feed. That doesn’t represent Yosemite and it doesn’t represent Jimmy’s vision. So I was like, we’re going to go large format. Huge. Two feet wide and a foot-and-a-half tall. Just massive paper, massive real estate. And we’re not going to clutter it or over-design. We’re just going to have full-bleed photos and long stories. It’s such a big piece of merchandise that it just sits on your coffee table, which is where we wanted it. My vision was to get the best writers, the best photographers, the best artists and to just be shepherds of that content and display it in its purest form. Every single issue of the Gazette is different because it represents the contributors of that issue and their vision.
How did that vision take shape?
We were like, OK, let’s reverse engineer this. I’m a freelancer—how much would I want to write the best Mountain Gazette story ever? We started pricing that out per issue, twice a year, and that’s where we landed on the higher price point. We were just like, look, you get what you pay for. If you want to buy something for $6 at the grocery store, fine. That’s the quality you’re going to get. If you want to buy something for $80 a year that comes twice a year and has almost a million words in every issue, you can do that. So we tell everyone that this magazine isn’t for everyone. Not everyone wants to pay that much for media, and that’s OK. But the people that get it really get it. And that’s who we’re after.
Clearly, you’re finding those people. Tell me about your marketing strategy.
I think if you put your content on social media networks, you’re basically just increasing the value of social media networks, not your own brand. I’m one of the few publishers that says this openly: I love Facebook and Instagram…as an advertising platform. I hate them for sharing. If I want to share something with my friends, I’ll text it to them. So we use Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. We made a video and, god, it sounds so revolutionary, but we were just like, let’s be honest and tell people who we are.
The video got me—I’m now a subscriber.
Some guy commented and was like, “This guy’s voice is terrible.” I commented back, and was like, “Yeah, sorry, I had a cold that day but we needed to get the ad out and I’m really sorry that my voice sucks.” And you could tell instantly that he was like, oh, sh**, this is a real person. That’s the thing: We’re real people. There’s no corporate entity. Consumers can see that. We’re out in the community. People are like, how the hell are you doing this? We’re an anomaly in media right now. We have been profitable for three-and-a-half years. We’ve paid back four business loans. We’re growing a media business at a time when Chicken Little’s out there saying the sky is falling for all media companies. And we’re just like, yeah, not us.
—Natalie
Quote of the Week
“27,000 people go daily to the race track. There are 3,300 hotel rooms. There’s no place for these people to stay.”
—public hearing about Airbnb legislation
That Was Fast
Just as people across town were getting excited to make a little extra money by renting out their homes on Airbnb during the two Belmont Stakes being run in Saratoga, the City Council rained on their parade. Tuesday’s public hearing on the new legislation proposal was packed—more than 100 people crammed themselves in—and it got just as heated as you might have guessed. Why the uproar? The city wants to charge a hefty $1,000 application fee for a two-year permit to short-term rent your house, and only owner-occupied properties would qualify for the permit. To ease the pain, if the legislation goes into effect, it would happen this summer—after the first Belmont Stakes in Saratoga—with a grace period to allow one more restriction-free track season.
Mullet Mania
Stillwater’s Scott Salvadore has not only been on the TODAY show for winning its mullet championship—twice!—he’s now been honored on Jeopardy. Wednesday’s game included the above clue, which contestant Jesse buzzed in for. “What is a mullet?” he asked, with a somewhat wry smile. Scott’s wife, Ashley, posted a video to Instagram of Scott and friends watching for the first time—now just waiting for Jeopardy to add it to its “You’re a Clue” highlight button on its own page. How exciting!
Finger Lickin’
Saratoga’s famous fried chicken is officially heading south. Hattie’s Albany is now accepting reservations on OpenTable—for those of you who plan in advance. The long-awaited chicken outpost opens March 14. The restaurant will be open for dinner six days a week (closed on Sunday) and weekend brunch, and will have some new dishes. We bet they’ll keep the treasured fried chicken the same though.
Fun for the Fam
A new monthly meet-up for LGBTQIA+ parents and their kids launches this Thursday (leap year day!) at Saratoga Arts. POP (Parents of Pride) Nights promise arts, crafts, mixing and mingling, and will happen the last Thursday of every month from 6:00-8:00pm at the Saratoga Arts building located at 320 Broadway in Saratoga Springs. Kids’ art activities provided by Saratoga Arts, light snacks/refreshments provided by Saratoga Pride, and bubbles/mocktails provided by Bocage Champagne Bar.
All good things come from #Queensbury ;) Great article 🤘