How @NYCSurfReport is fighting influencers, private equity and crowded waves
The new daily NYC surf report that started this summer is about much more than wave height.
A few weeks ago, Benjamin Gibbes Doughty was standing on his Rockaway Beach rooftop at 7am, looking at the ocean and contemplating the problem that has plagued experienced surfers of every generation in every lineup around the world: kooks.
The lineup was full of them — the inexperienced, careless or over-confident newbies who Doughty said have increased in number since the pandemic — about 100 by his count already. The problem? There were not enough actual waves: maybe a two-wave set every five minutes, the wind ripping off shore and flattening everything, the high tide gobbling the rest up and barely anything breaking.
The culprit, he realized, was Surfline, once an international bible that anyone could turn to for surf cams, reports and forecasts for breaks around the world. Like so many other once-good things, Surfline was acquired by private equity in 2020 and has suffered through a classic profit-oriented, AI-stained enshittification process ever since. The site’s report had called for big waves in the Rockaways that day.
“Just because Surfline had put that out, it just packed out the beach,” he said. “Selfishly I'd rather them get it wrong than get it right.”
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