Note: This story is a special contribution from The Angry Snowboarder.  Go to his website for hilarious, insightful and honest snowboarding revelations.

If there’s one thing that’s frustrating about the snowboard industry it’s all the false promises people dish out. What’s even more upsetting is the amount of people that just fuck you over for their own personal game. Yeah sure it happens in all industries and that’s fine, but most people in this one just dismiss it like nothings wrong with it at all or the fact that because who they work for is such a giant corporation the little guy can get bent over and have a broom handle shoved up their ass. News flash times are changing.

Case in point back in March I along with many other snow bloggers received a mass email invite from the Action Sports Group (Snowboarder Magazines) public relations manager to attend Ms. Superpark. Initially I was skeptical about this because why the hell would a magazine want an outside source covering their event, but after some discussion with a few of my friends that got invited I figured hey chances are it’s just part of them trying to re-brand their magazine and get more exposure.

Here’s the initial email:

Hello,

I’m Elishia Matta, the PR Manger for The Action Sports Group (ASG). I just wanted to introduce myself as we occasionally host events that would be of interest for your blog. In fact, at the end of the month SNOWBOARDER Magazine will be hosting its sixth Annual Ms. Superpark® event at Snow Summit in Big Bear, California.

I’ve attached an event one-sheet and a credential request form if this is something you might be interested in. If you would like to receive more information about this event or others in the future please do let me know.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to working with you!

Now the initial email seemed pretty straight forward but my skepticism came directly from two things on the press credential form.

Initial Press Request Form

The highly questionable parts

Now for myself and the few others that were invited that I talked to they seemed to think that the question of circulation /viewership and ad rates was a bit interesting. Like what does what we charge for advertising and how many people we have viewing what we’re doing really matter? But alas we all cast our speculations aside and started dialing in travel arrangements. I locked down a week off work, set up two and from travel at the airports, got a place lined up to crash, and set up what girls I specifically wanted to film. Pretty much everything that seemed like someone who had an open invite should do right?

So five days before the event this is the mass email those of us that registered to go received:

I am terribly sorry to have to do this, but I’ve just been made aware that our event insurance won’t allow us to have additional media on site as it is classified as a “closed event.” I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you’d still like to receive press releases from the event I will certainly send them your way.

My apologies again. I do appreciate your interest and hope that we can work together in the future.

Anyone find this a bit intriguing? Every person I’ve talked to that had told me they planned on going got the same thing. Now it’s pretty much known that Ms. Superpark and Superpark are Snowboarder Magazine specific events, so like I initially suspected why would I be invited to cover it and if they were going to open the doors to others wouldn’t they dial in everything? Plus after this who would trust them and want to work with them?

Now I’m not one to roll over and die so of course I sent an email back:

Elishia,

This is pretty unprofessional of you and I would think someone working for a giant media outlet like Source Interlink would fully know all the details of an event before inviting outside media sources.Also since when hasn’t Ms. Superpark or Superpark been a “closed event”?

As it stands I have now taken a week of work off from my day job which is what pays my bills, I’ve booked a non refundable ticket, set up travel, dialed in accomodations, and set up what girls I was going to be working with. You have now cost me money, time, content, and my reputation as I have to change all this because of your incompetence to make sure everything was dialed in.

After all this do you think I would ever want to work with you again? Please that bridge has now been burnt as I have no reason to ever trust you again. Your actions have consequences and you’re going to have to live with them and how they effect your agency.

Pretty much straight forward email of my disdain for this. But the more I talked to people the more we had to question why they had to ask for our viewership and what we charge for advertising. Something about this whole thing didn’t add up and seeing as I was locked in for my trip I was there. When rolling over the Ms. Superpark course there were definitely a bunch of people that didn’t look like they worked for the magazine or were the riders. I saw a bunch of dudes hitting features and they weren’t park crew. Oh but wait this was a closed event and they didn’t have proper insurance so how could this be?

Needless to say the consensus amongst those of us that got burned on this is that something wasn’t right and this dumbass working in P.R. either just started working there and thought she was doing a good job inviting us all. Or that it was a ploy to get numbers which just seems super fucked up and not right either. And the mainstream snowboard media wonders why magazines are dying and blogs are succeeding? Anyone got any valuable insights into this? Perhaps Pat “The Eye” Bridges or Chris “E Tree” Englesman could weigh in on why their corporate monkey did such a bad job?