23/11/2009New Website to Bookmark

Calm and Fearless is a new website that is a cross between a blogazine and a literary review for aficionados of wild places and adventure. If you would welcome considered reviews and opinion on these themes from a respected journalist, then it is a site that will almost certainly be worth your while bookmarking.

Launched by the writer Ed Douglas, Calm and Fearless, takes it's name from a Coleridge letter and is described as: "an online arts magazine for the great outdoors." The site is very clean looking, clearly taking its lead from established mainstream literary review sites.

Ed says his motivation for launching Calm & Fearless: "Comes from the dwindling space offered by print magazines to reviewing critically what's out there." He is keen to stress that at the moment the site is still buggy and to bear with him while it is all sorted.

Commenting on the changing nature of journalism today, Ed said: "Since the immediacy of news reporting is open to anyone, the emphasis is shifting to placing a premium on the experience of the writer and their ability to give an event context."

No one could doubt Ed's pedigree in delivering what will hopefully be an erudite outlet for thought provoking reviews, that will hopefully not be too concerned about keeping advertisers 'on-side' when it comes to saying 'it-as-it-is'.

Ed isn't one to naturally blow his own trumpet. When asked in a 1998 interview with Everest News to say a little more about himself, he replied: "It is not natural for the English to talk about themselves. You can call it false modesty if you like, but I was brought up to believe, as a journalist, that I am not the story."

His name has been a familiar byline to features and comment in the climbing press since the mid-eighties when he established On the Edge - forerunner of today's Climb magazine. In 1993 he launched the international mountaineering journal Mountain Review. A former Associate Editor for Climber magazine and Alpine Journal Editor ('98 - 2003) he has also written several books (Chomolungma Sings the Blues, Regions of the Heart and Tenzing: Hero of Everest). For the latter, Ed was described by Outside Online as combining: "a lifetime of climbing experience with a deft literary style to craft perhaps the best mountaineering biography ever written."

He currently writes regularly for The Guardian where he has his own profile page and is busy ghost writing an autobiography of the man who uttered the immortal words in 1979, "C'mon arms do yer stuff", while climbing Lord of the Flies for the cameras - yep, you guessed it - Ron Fawcett.