USA (23 Mar 2004) -- Rodale Inc, the family-owned publisher of lifestyle magazines and books has dumped its troubled 'Scuba Diving' magazine. F&W Publications of Cincinnati, which publishes more than 55 magazines and has over 3,000 book titles in print, bought the magazine for an undisclosed sum. Rodale Inc was founded in 1942 when health fanatic J. I. Rodale launched Organic Farming and Gardening magazine. After J. I. Rodale died in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show minutes after joking that he expected to live forever, his son Bob took over and added fitness and lifestyle magazines to the growing list of Rodale publications. Scuba Diving was launched in 1992 two years after Bob Rodale died in a car accident in Moscow. The US-based magazine grew steadily as the North American economy and scuba diving boomed during the 1990s, but recently got caught up in company infighting and managerial mistakes that threatened to drown Rodale in red ink. The magazine has also been plagued by equipment manufacturer lawsuits citing biased reviews, accusations that it sells subscriber email lists to spammers, and fights with international environmental groups that oppose its campaigns promoting harassment of marine wildlife. The sale of Scuba Diving is part of an ongoing realignment of the company and cost cutting that started when Rodale hired new CEO Steve Murphy from the Walt Disney Company and sacked 150 employees including senior executives and editors. Although Scuba Diving benefited from the recent failure of its major competitor Skin Diver, it faces an uncertain future as more and more dive consumers turn away from ad-driven magazines for more reliable web-based information. "Between Scuba Diving's car advertisements and phony scuba equipment reviews, there really isn't anything worth paying for unless you happen to be in the shark feeding business," said Percy Harrington, editor of In-Depth Magazine, the web's leading ad-free scuba consumer advocate. "A few years back, ad-driven print media controlled the dive-related information flow meaning you got the world according to DEMA, PADI and relatively few high-volume operators," Harrington explained. "In the electronic age, we can easily access less distorted and more reliable data on the web, which has become our primary source of information about scuba diving, dive travel opportunities, dive safety, and scuba equipment." "For business management it's a no-brainer," Harrington added. "Why waste company resources on a little box ad in a regional scuba magazine with limited circulation and duration when you can reach so many more divers for so much less via leading scuba portal sites such as Cyber Diver and CDNN?" | 
