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Chattanooga-based True North Custom Publishing is introducing Xplor magazine. Along with construction underway on a 7,000-square-foot headquarters for the Outdoor Chattanooga initiative, the quarterly publication marks another major new commitment to marketing the area on its natural treasures.

“We want to be known as a place where people want to come and live and work and bring their businesses,” says Rob Healy, the former businessman who leads the initiative promoting Chattanooga’s adventure and outdoor recreational activities. The privately funded magazine will deliver that message to local adventure sports enthusiasts as well as to those in what Healy calls Chattanooga’s “X region”—the area defined by an “X” with tips in Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville and Knoxville.

“Outdoor Chattanooga sort of lit my fire,” says David McDonald, CEO of True North Custom Publishing. “I met with Mayor [Bob] Corker, and with Rob Healy did a lot of thinking and looking at the market for an outdoor magazine. We saw what we thought was a great niche category for True North in a market—outdoor-focused publications—that seemed to be under-served.”

Xplor is beginning as a free publication mailed to 50,000 people, whose buying habits are hoped to present a desirable target audience for advertisers. About a month before ad sales were to close on the inaugural issue, 22 pages had been sold to local and national advertisers. Ultimately, True North hopes to expand circulation to 100,000 and to begin selling magazine subscriptions. A magazine published in Virginia with a similar focus, Blue Ridge Outdoors, has a press run of over 100,000 and is in its tenth year of publication.

Whether or not readers and advertisers embrace the quarterly, Chattanooga residents are held harmless as to the venture’s financial risks. “The city of Chattanooga and Outdoor Chattanooga have no money in this project,” McDonald says. “It is completely funded by True North from the beginning.” If Xplor makes money, “then True North makes money, but if it does not, then Xplor has cost Outdoor Chattanooga or the city absolutely nothing.”

In either case, the magazine will advance Outdoor Chattanooga’s mission of fostering the public impression of the community as good for business and pleasure. And its timing nicely coincides with the building of the group’s headquarters on the north shore of the Tennessee River, where a Roper Corp. manufacturing facility stood. The new building and surrounding park—complete with an elevated walk through naturally filtered wetlands—will serve as a central location for anyone interested in learning about locations for outdoor activities. It also will host meeting space for outdoor interest groups and educational programs.

Bigger picture plans for Outdoor Chattanooga include a wellness campaign for government workers, which could be adapted for private companies, and support for groups that want to start outdoor events. “We want to develop events—the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta is certainly a model—that Chattanooga owns and wouldn’t be worried about moving somewhere else,” Healy says.

If such dreams come to fruition, outdoor enthusiasts in the region will be able to read about it in the new magazine. And no doubt a long retired network newsman would admit about his earlier harsh pronouncement on the Chattanooga’s environment: “And that’s the way it was.”

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