Off the Tongue is a column that appears reguarily in Rapid magazine.

In 2009, Gawker.com called out the editor of Men’s Health, David Zinczenko, for copying and pasting old cover lines onto new magazine covers. Turns out Zinczenko has been recycling cover lines since 2004. To be fair, editors are always looking for what readers want and trying to deliver it to them. Men, if we are to believe Zinczenko, here’s what we really want: “Six Pack Abs” has been used on five Men’s Health covers, “Lose Your Gut” on five, and “Get Back in Shape” has run on 10 covers in five years. You get the idea.

Publishers track newsstand sales and editors run cover lines to entice readers into picking up a copy. A few magazine cover power words are: free, easy, shocking, secret, new, ultimate and sex. Virtually any magazine at the checkout counter of a grocery story uses these. Cosmo works all of them into a single cover story: “Shocking New Free and Easy Secrets to Ultimate Sex.”
Good cover lines are an essential part of selling magazines and, dare I say, are a lot like good pickup lines. You only have a few seconds to ignite a certain emotion and intrigue a person into buying the publication or letting you buy her a drink.
Magazine experts say editors should not be too clever on the cover. Satisfy a need and give readers the short answer fast. But sometimes it’s fun to break the rules. One of my favorite cover lines was a small print, bottom of the page story that ran on Outside magazine—”My Girlfriend Rappels Me: Inside the Crazy World of Adventure Dating.” Being happily married, I didn’t give them my five bucks, but the editors did get my respect for being clever.
A few years back on the cover of Rapid’s sister publication Adventure Kayak—I should note, a magazine with an older, more mature readership— we had a little too much fun when we ran these two cover lines: “Kayak Porn—Behind the Scenes with Bryan Smith” and “Derek Hutchinson: Why we Suck.” It was our editor’s mother who first noticed and expressed her disappointment at seeing the words porn and suck on the same cover. A dozen subscribers cancelled their subscriptions.
Over the years, I’ve learned that not-so-interesting stories don’t produce great cover lines. If we can’t make it sound intriguing in five words, it’s probably not all that interesting inside at 1,500.
The opposite is also true. A well-crafted, seductive headline usually makes for an interesting story.
This spring we were following tweets from @wwheadlines who has taken this idea one step further. Not burdened with having to publish or even write the accompanying stories, @wwheadlines tweets great headlines that would certainly intrigue readers and sell magazines. Here are some of my favorite whitewater headlines we can’t run, at least not yet:
Professional Kayaker Sets New World Record for Uses of the Word “Epic”
Upon Closer Inspection Steve Fisher Appears to be a Robot
Young Guns Celebrate 15th Anniversary of “The Future of the Sport”
Groundbreaking Kayaking Film to Feature Paddling Set to Rap Music
Following Breakup, Attractive Female Paddler Single for 3.4 Seconds
Eskimo Kayaks Announces Plans to Update 1989 Outfitting with 1994 Outfitting
River Karma Being Revamped to Include Competitive Scoring System
Poll Shows 63 Percent of Americans Still Oppose SUP Marriage
Aging EJ Forgets which Boat he is Supposed to be Hyping
In a Shocking Turn of Events, Sponsored Kayaker Recommends Sponsor’s Product
Grumman to Release All Aluminum Playboat.
– Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Rapid.

 This article originally appeared in Rapid, Fall 2012. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

Butt End by Kevin Callan is a column that regularly appears in Canoeroots and Family Camping magazine.

I love presenting to a crowd of paddlers. I always have. I’ve been standing in front of canoeists for over 25 years, ranging from quaint evenings at small-town libraries to Madison, Wisconsin’s Canoecopia, a show I once described to a U.S. border guard as a Star Trek convention for canoeists.

I used to prepare some sort of script to keep me organized, but gave that up a number of years ago. I’m just too hyper to stick to a script. Besides, a set dialogue doesn’t necessarily work, especially during Q&A period. You just never know what’s going to come up.

Quirky questions are de rigueur: Where do I purchase bear-proof fencing for my canoe trip? How do I convince my canoe partner to carry more gear? Are you the same Kevin Callan that’s a murderer? Is your wife single? And, just recently while presenting inThunder Bay for the Friends of Quetico, How did your schoolteachers deal with your attention deficit disorder?

I’ve been abused by landowners who hated me for promoting a canoe route neighboring their cottage or camp. I’ve been belittled by part-time historians who beg to differ on a point of historic fact. And there was the time I was embarrassed in a packed university auditorium by an outdoor professor and her lawyer friend who threatened to have me sued for writing about her wilderness exploits (even though they were good and honorable exploits).

On another occasion, a government official disrupted a presentation I was giving on dealing with bears and took over the lecture with her counter points because she thought I was telling too many jokes. True story. That was the only time I lost my temper during a show and actually kicked her off the stage.

The embarrassments aren’t limited to cross-examination, either. I’ve mispronounced place names, both forgivable— Chiniguchi and Tatachikapika—and unforgivable—vagina instead of Regina is one of the more humiliating examples. Once, my tongue slipped when I tried to say Reese’s Pieces and the words came out Reese’s penis.

I’ve had my fly down for a 90-minute presentation, and sat on a chocolate bar just prior to the show while wearing beige pants. I’ve even done the classic, pre-show water-splash-on-my-groin-while-washing-up-in-the-bathroom and got caught trying (in vain) to dry my pants with the wall-mounted air-dryer.

Being mistaken for another writer who was wrongly convicted of murder or being accused of suffering from ADD is well worth it though. Why? Over the years, I’ve actually witnessed a few paddlers out on canoe trips that I originally met during a presentation. More than once, they’ve claimed that it was my inspirational talk that convinced them to head out on their adventure in the first place.

The most memorable of these moments occurred after a presentation I gave in Restoule Provincial Park in which I told everyone about a magazine cover story I had just written titled How To Make Love in a Canoe. After the show I wandered back to my campsite beside the water’s edge and spotted a canoe floating in the moonlight. Two heads suddenly popped up and the couple inside yelled out, “Thanks, Kevin.”

– Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Kevin Callan believes there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

This article originally appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Fall 2012. Download our freeiPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

Base Camp is a regular column in Canoeroots and Family Camping magazine.

Every summer my parents rented a small cottage on a small lake. We swam in the lake, hiked a little and fished a lot. We fished mostly for smallmouth bass. Smallmouth bass, if you don’t know, love frogs. And so, frogs were bait.

At the time, you could buy frogs. But since we had more time than money, we spent hours stalking around the squishy edges of frog ponds. Catching frogs was even more fun than fishing.

We started every trip to our secret frog pond in rubber boots and came home in goo-caked bare feet. Some kids used nets to catch them, but if you were quick, it was better to use your hands. Slowly, slowly, slowly we‘d crouch into position. Fingers together, hand open, we’d hover above our little green prey waiting for just the right moment. SPLASH! Like lightning you snapped down on it so that your palm was on top of the frog and your fingers clamped around it, plucking it from the weeds before it could duck out of sight. If you were good, you’d get one for every five attempts.

After a few trips around the pond, the ones that got away on the earlier laps were even harder to catch because they were now a little… jumpy.

Frogs, scientists say, have reason to be jumpy. Frog populations have been declining worldwide with nearly one-third of the world’s amphibian species now threatened with extinction. Since 1980, when I was at the top of my frog catching game, 200 species of frogs have completely disappeared. Save the Frogs, a non-profit organization dedicated to, well, saving frogs, says that an onslaught of environmental problems, including pollution, infectious diseases, habitat loss, invasive species, climate change and over-harvesting for the food industry are to blame.

People say if you have a healthy frog population, you have a healthy environment.

Frogs spend some time on land and some time in the water and because they have sensitive skin that can easily absorb toxic chemicals, frogs are especially susceptible to environmental disturbances. Biologists around the world believe that the health of frogs is indicative of the health of the biosphere as a whole.

I’d like to put forth another theory. I believe that if we teach children the joys of catching frogs, some of those kids will grow up to rid the environment of hurtful toxins. In fact, I don’t think we need to teach them; I think we just need to point them toward a frog pond and turn them loose.

You see, we weren’t just gathering bait, we were learning about the environment. We were engaging with nature, playing in it, sink- ing in it barefoot up to our knees. Sure, putting frogs on hooks was a bit mean, but let’s not overreact and pull our kids from the swamps where they can study, understand and connect with nature. Kids, after all, weren’t identified by Save the Frogs as a contributing factor to declining numbers.

The regulations on fishing with frogs vary from region to region. Where I live, it is now illegal to use all but one species—the northern leopard frog—as bait. Instead, anglers use millions of petroleum-based, frog-like artificial baits that I’m not so sure are better for the environment, or the frogs. We’ll leave that one in the hands of the great biologists of tomorrow. But we’ll have to wait; right now they’re in swamps with their hands full of little green frogs.

– Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Canoeroots & Family Camping.

This article originally appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Fall 2012. Download our freeiPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.