WANDERING FREELANCE JOURNALIST: 8/2000 to Now.
Salary: Zero to 50 cents a word.

I worked in an office at SURFER Magazine for 10 years and in 2000 I couldn’t take it anymore and left to hit the road-to Alaska, Montana, The Yukon and Fiji. My dream has always been to be able to work from the road, and there have been periods over the last four years where I lived that dream. With a good laptop computer and a sneaky hand at finding Wi Fi signals, it is possible to work from anywhere.

Over the last four years I have drive to Alaska twice, by way of Idaho, Montana, BC and The Yukon. I spent a month in Fiji and also in Hawaii, on Oahu, doing a story on the Bishop Museum. I recently drove the California coast to write the Surf Guide for Chronicle Books and SURFER Magazine.

I try to stay busy and sometimes succeed. I have produced articles for The Surfer’s Journal, SURFER Magazine, The Big Sky Journal, The LA Times Outdoor Section and any one else who will have me.

After all that wandering I am now in Malibu, doing freelance work for a variety of magazines and pitching TV shows and movies, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Chris Carter-who went from working at Surfing Magazine to writing The X Files.

VISIONARY FOR SWELL.COM: 8/1999 TO 10/2000
Salary: $50,000 year for too short a time.

My name is Ben Marcus and I am a dot com victim.

In October of 2000 I was the first person to be hired by Swell.com. Nicholas Nathanson and Jeff Berg came from the east coast with millions of dollars in venture capital wanting to establish a website to retail surfing/snowboarding/skateboarding equipment online.

They wanted my help with the editorial side. I was intrigued by what was possible editorially on the net, so I worked with them as much as I could. I wrote the first edit plan and signed on for $50,000 a year as a "Visionary."
I wrote their first big feature called A Farewell to Arms which used the web the way I thought it should be used: words, videos, photos, space, sounds.

I also developed the format for their surf maps: http://www.surfline.com/travel/surfmaps/us/sanfrancisco_monterey/index.cfm and I'm told that the North Central California map I wrote is twice as popular as any other.

Swell.com hired 160 people to do who knows what. They went through about $24 million in two years and ended up laying everyone off. By that time I was gone and driving around Alaska.

They since have split off into swell.com for retail and www.surfline.com for surf forecasting.
Swell.com won a Webby Award its first year, but I’d rather have the promised salary and the stock options.

SURFER MAGAZINE: 1/1989 TO 8/1999
Salary: Never more than $40,000 a year.

The world changes a lot in 12 years, oh boy. That was one thing SURFER Magazine taught me.
My last story for SURFER Magazine was a trip to Norway in October of 1999. My first story for SURFER Magazine was about a trip I took to the Basque country of Spain in 1984. That story-called You Wouldn't Read About It- was the first story I ever wrote and submitted to a magazine, and it got me hired at SURFER in 1989. At the time that was a huge honor, and when I started at SURFER it was a very different world. There were two surf magazines in the United States and maybe a half-dozen around the world. There was no Internet, no Mavericks, no tow-surfing and Santa Cruz surfers weren't famous.

When I started at SURFER I wanted to help elevate Santa Cruz and northern California in the world's eye, and I did so in 1990 when I wrote the first big article on Mavericks, a big-wave spot near San Francisco that has significantly changed the surfing world. I recently wrote a 24,000 word article for The Surfer's Journal about how much Santa Cruz has changed since the 70s. I had a lot to do with that.

Working at SURFER was fun and I was there during exciting times. I got to rub elbows with movie stars and royalty and I got to travel: Tonga, Brazil, Ireland, Norway, Mexico, Hawaii, Fiji. I didn't like living in Southern California, but I enjoyed the work. While at SURFER I worked on several of their TV shows and inaugurated the SURFER Magazine Surf Video Awards, which were a bear to put together, but a lot of fun to put on.

I lasted 10 years before I couldn’t stand living in San Clemente anymore, and ran back to the running waters and green trees of Santa Cruz.

Looking back on SURFER, it was quite a 10 years and now I am contributing to them again, including a monthly crossword puzzle and other small stories and features.