Sidetracked Magazine is an online and printed journal featuring a limited collection of personal stories of adventure travel, journeys and expeditions. The concept is simple: to capture the emotion and experience of adventures and expeditions throughout the world… and to inspire. We get sidetracked with John Summerton, its founder, producer and creative director.
You launched the adventure travel magazine in 2011. What has the journey been like to date?
It’s been an adventure in its own right. In 2011, I started Sidetracked as a distraction from my usual day to day work and it was run online only. It wasn’t until 2014, when I started seeing a few beautiful indie magazines starting to crop up (my favourite being The Ride Journal) that I decided that Sidetracked could work really well in print form. We printed 1500 copies of our first issue and sold out pretty quickly. It was such an exciting time and The Guardian even picked us as one of the top ten indie travel mags. Soon after, the reality of running a publishing business hit, along with juggling very tight budgets. I come from a design background so was pretty confident with that side of things. However the commissioning, production, and distribution side of the business has been a massive learning process but a surprisingly enjoyable challenge. We’re now four years down the line and have a really popular website and have just released our 12th issue. Our team is still very tiny – there are three of us working part time at our respective kitchen tables basically along with a large number of freelancers. One day we’ll have a Sidetracked HQ in a log cabin in the woods somewhere.
What resources do you find invaluable to liaise with writers and photographers all over the world?
Social media has been incredibly useful recently to follow and stalk (ha) certain writers and photographers that we’d like to see in the magazine. Instagram is fantastic for this. Luckily Sidetracked has a good name now in the adventure travel world so we do get an awful lot of people sending proposals to us. A huge amount of time is spent on research and commissioning and often we’ll use Skype, message apps and of course email to work things out.
Do you have a jealousy coping mechanisms for reading and commissioning stories from so many fantastic far-flung corners of the globe?
I’m incredibly jealous of many of the stories that we hear about. I’m absolutely not jealous at all of some of the ones that involve a large amount of suffering. In some ways it’s nice to live vicariously through the stories but I constantly feel like I want to travel to these places. There is no getting over that. But then the whole point of Sidetracked was to get people off the sofa and out taking a look at the world so if it has this effect on me then hopefully it’ll do the same for many of our readers.
Can you explain the commissioning process? I assume people have already decided to undertake these adventures before pitching the story and photography to you?
Yes, 90% of the stories that we feature are from people that have undertaken their own independent trip or expedition – self funded and supported. We’ll then discuss options for a story angle and our editors work with them to produce the article for us. A Sidetracked feature needs to be a real ‘tale of adventure’, the type of story that you tell whilst sitting around a campfire. We also feature some incredible photography and I consider both the story and photos to be of equal importance and we can’t have one without the other. The last 10% is through working with brands and brand athletes to follow their journeys and showcase what some people at the top of their game are up to.
Sidetracked grew from a digital beginning. What criteria have you considered in differentiating between online and print and converting readers from one platform to the other?
I like to think that Sidetracked is a multi channel adventure story-telling platform. Yes, we did start as digital only, but now the printed version is our flagship. We’re using the digital and print to compliment each other. For example, if we run a long form article in the magazine from a particular expedition then we might publish the film, additional photography or a supporting interview on the website and run a photo series on social media too. It’s a great way to expand on the story and give some of these incredible endeavours the exposure they deserve.
What other magazines travel or otherwise serve as a source of current inspiration?
As I mentioned earlier, The Ride Journal was the one magazine that started me on my path to create Sidetracked in print. I do love Like The Wind Magazine, Another Escape and the US based Gear Patrol is superb too. There are so many incredible independent publications around now and there’s nothing better for design inspiration than poring over any of these.
When was your last trip and what is your dream one?
My last trip was a short but fun one to Spain to follow the River Ter from its confluence with the Mediterranean sea up to its source in the Pyrenees for a story and film for Sidetracked (sidetracked.com/upstream). It was a really interesting journey, meeting the locals and learning about the delicate ecosystems that surround the river. My dream trip would involve a bicycle of some kind, perhaps a paddle board or packraft and a fair bit of hiking thrown in for good measure. Patagonia, Mongolia and Northern Norway are pretty high on my list right now.
Volume 12 is out now, £10.
