Surf Media's Grom-In-Chief

Those who think print is dead have never met Tanner Bromberg, the Hawaiian surfer who edited and published a grom-focused surf magazine when she was only 8 years old

- Ashtyn Douglas-rosa

In an era marked by the slashing and folding of print publications and the majority of advertising dollars being diverted to all things digital, starting a brand new print magazine wouldn’t seem like something someone of a younger generation would strive for. But 11-year-old Tanner Bromberg, the “grom-in-chief” of Grom It magazine—an actual hold-in-your-hands publication created for surfers under the age of 18— believes that print is far from dead.

The idea for creating a grom-specific surf magazine came to Bromberg a few years ago, when she was the ripe old age of 8 and packing for a long flight from Hawaii to South Africa to visit her mother’s side of the family. “I think it was 32 hours of flying, so I asked my dad to buy me a kids surfing magazine,” remembers Bromberg. “We looked everywhere and we couldn’t really find anything, so I was like, ‘Hey why don’t I just make one?’ On the plane ride there I took my journal and started jotting down ideas.”

After returning from South Africa with a journal full of plans for grom-based media domination, she took her ideas back to school on the Big Island and started surveying her fellow second-grade classmates on what they think should be the name of the magazine. “Grom It” apparently hit home for many of the 8-year-olds.

“One day she forced Bruce [Bromberg’s father] to the computer and was like, ‘OK, let’s print out my magazine,’” says her mother Kerry. “They wrote out the magazine and printed it on some paper and stapled it together. I honestly thought this is where it was going to go, but she was like, ‘So how do we make this into an actual magazine?’ We were actually Googling ‘how do you make a magazine?’”