The Outdoor Network Closes its Doors After 15 Years
October 20, 2004 - OutdoorEd.com
The Outdoor Network (TON) has closed its doors after 15 years serving the outdoor industry. TON was founded by Dave Secunda after the 1989 International Conference on Outdoor Recreation and Education (ICORE). The idea was to create a forum for information sharing and the Outdoor Network Newsletter was launched. Five years later in 1996 TON launched its Web site. The other owners of TON included Josh Bernstein and Mikal Bellicove. In 2002 TON was acquired by David Lasky of Outdoor Campus Engineers and launched a new publication, The Outdoor Law Quarterly, a journal focusing on legal and risk management issues.
TON has seen financial difficulties over the past several years. With the huge increase of resources on the Web, paper publications like the Outdoor Network Newsletter fell on hard times. The company struggled to get the newsletter published on a regular basis and although there were a number of promises made to subscribers about expanded services and a shift to a completely electronic format, those changes never materialized. In July the Law Quarterly was sold to SNEWS® (http://www.snewsnet.com), a trade publishing group for the outdoor and fitness industries, prompting speculation that TON was going under. Owner Lasky issued an email to subscribers in July to "quell any rumors about the collapse of The Outdoor Network." Unfortunately for the outdoor industry, TON closed its doors in September. Updates to the Web site stopped in August and various parts of the Web site ceased functioning in October.
The Jobs portion of the Outdoor Network has been sold to a new company which is scheduled to launch a new Web site next week. That site will only offer job information. There currently are no specific details available about the new company.
The Outdoor Network Web site will remain online for some period of time but with no new content. David and his predecessors, Mikal Bellicove, Josh Bernstein and Dave Secunda all brought a huge amount of energy to our field trying to dessiminate information. Hundreds of programs that have benefited from their work. All of them deserve our gratitude for working so hard without much recognition.
The online resources of the Outdoor Network online articles and PDF versions or the archives of 15 years of the paper Outdoor Networker are still on the site. These are a valuable resource for our community and I hope that we can find a way to preserve those. As you can imagine, David has put significant personal funds into the business over the years, he is very interested in talking to anyone who is interested in purchasing the rights to these files.
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