Bio
Eight years young and recently refreshed – Pop is the daily dose of news and entertainment for the surf, skate and snow obsessed.
Founded and run by Rick Baker and Dave Keating, Pop started as a quarterly free press magazine with a little website on the side. In 2014 we’re all digital with a team of dedicated contributors and a new look.
Site design by Rick Baker and developed by Drew Baker at Funkhaus.
Dave Keating
A professional athlete trapped in the body of a man who gets out of breath typing. I have been reading about, writing on, and watching boardsports for two decades, between being a digital producer for a Melbourne ad agency and a new Dad. After nine years working on this site, many people ask me why I do it. It’s a valid question… and one that I can’t yet answer.
Rick Baker
There’s a saying in the snow/skate/surf world. Those that can’t do, take photos. Those that can’t take photos, make a magazine. At least I think that’s a saying. Regardless, I was better on a computer keyboard than I was on an actual snowboard, so I started Pop. That began an incredible creative endeavor to bring surf/skate/snow entertainment to the kids.
Contact
General
hithere@popmag.com.au
Advertising
For all enquiries, please contact Dave Keating on dave@popmag.com.au.
Advertising Policy
Thinking about advertising? Good for you – a very wise decision. Call your banker and tell him to staff up. But before we press ahead, we wanted to fill you in on a couple of details – we’re selective with who can advertise on our site.
Each potential advertiser is vetted by our editorial team, who in turn are putting their names up to endorse your brand/products, so we have a few rules:
1. If you’re shilling energy drinks, a wacky tee shirt company with a deliberately misspelled name or recruiting for the army, we can save you some time and let you know that we’re not the site for you. We probably wouldn’t recommend your products to our friends, so we’re not going to recommend them to our readers.
2. If you live for volumes of page impressions, whether they come from banners hidden at the bottom of a page or auto refresh as someone clicks through an image gallery, we’re not the site for you. Everything on our new site has been built with our readers in mind – we deliver your message effectively and consistently without diminishing our reader’s experience through that kind of stuff.
3. If you’re hoping that by taking a sponsorship package, we’ll write up a piece about how great that launch party for your new beanie colour way was, we’re not the site for you. We don’t do advertising/contra content swaps. However, if you’re content is actually good and you send it through, we may give it a run.
PR Policy
Hi PR people! This is just a totally friendly warning that sending us articles when you have clearly not bothered to read or understand our site, may not end up how you had hoped. We are a surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding site only – we don’t cover wakeboards, scooters, rollerblades or boogie boards. And we’re unlikely to take seriously any wacky variations on boardsports – like the Aqua Skipper. If you send us irrelevant or off topic releases and we find them funny/disturbing, we will write about them the way they deserve. Please file all complaints in the Shoutbox and await reader response.
Contributors
Writers, we want you! We need you to have basic literacy skills and a pretty damn good knowledge when it comes to surf, skate and snow. How much does the gig pay? Not much… By which I mean nothing. But you get a byline and an audience plus we’re pretty laid back as far as editors go.
If you’re keen, drop us an email at hithere@popmag.com.au with the following questions answered:
1. What videogame was Tony Hawk playing in the intro to his part in the Vision video Psycho Skate (don’t feel bad if you can’t get this one… It isn’t what you think it is anyway).
2. What was your favourite surf/skate/snow video part of all time? (We are going to judge you like crazy based on the answer to this one).
3. Name one rider from the original Whiskey film. (Bonus points if you can name the Australian smashing bottles over his head).
4. What’s your local mountain/park/break?
5. Shaun White took gold at the Sochi Olympics – what was his first trick in his second run?
If you’re questions are somewhere near right, or you entertained us, we’ll be in touch.