h1

“Magazines Are Here For Good,” Says Nikki Simpson, Founder Of The International Magazine Center in Scotland.  The Mr. Magazine™ Interview

May 26, 2026

Nikki Simpson is on a “one woman’s adventure” to help and support independent magazines worldwide.  Nikki sees the future of magazines in those independent titles that are being published worldwide on “a daily basis.”

She founded the International Magazine Center specifically for that purpose.  She writes about the Center, “My baby is the International Magazine Center – a membership organization supporting independent publishers and freelancers working in magazines.  We focus on teams between 1 and 10 people, most of which are owner-run.”

For the first time since establishing the Center, Nikki is bringing her workshops to the United States on June 12 and 13.  Titled “Magazine Are Here For Good,” the conference will take place in Portland, Oregon, and will run workshops on circulation, membership and publishing among other subjects.

I reached out to Nikki via Zoom and asked her about the International Magazine Center, and the Magazines Are Here For Good conference.  What follows is my interview with Nikki Simpson, founder of the Internation Magazine Center in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

But first, the soundbites:

On her goal with the IMC: “What I wanted to do was support independent publishers, teams of between one and ten in a company, because those were the people who were isolated and not just during the pandemic but all the time.”

On the total number of members in IMC: “We’ve got about 190 members and they’re all over the world. 80% of them I suppose are in the UK for obvious reasons but we’re expanding all the time and picking up new members in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and we’ve got a couple in Amsterdam.”

On why a conference in the United States: “I’ve been wanting to run an event in America for a while.”

On why Portland, Oregon: “I thought well if everything’s happening in New York then what’s happening on the other side of town? And so Portland seemed like a good place…”

On the role of digital in magazine publishing: “I always feel digital publishing is the add-on, it’s the way that people can access information if they can’t afford to pay for the (magazine).”

On her hopes for the Magazine Are Here For Good conference: “To meet people who are working in publishing basically.”

On what keeps her up at night: “Falling asleep on the couch usually trying desperately to do the hard sudoku and just getting nowhere.  I’m getting pretty good at sleeping…”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Nikki Simpson, founder of the International Magazine Center in Edinburgh, Scottland.

Samir Husni: My first question to you, tell me a little bit about this whole one woman’s adventure creating an International Magazine Center.

Nikki Simpson: Yeah, I love the way you put that one woman’s adventure. I suppose that’s exactly what it is really.

I used to work for a magazine publisher years ago and that’s where I fell in love with magazines. Then I went to work for PPA, which is the National Association for Magazine Publishers in the UK, and I was there for about four and a half years. I had a great time but there were elements of it that I found difficult, and I wanted to run my own thing, but didn’t feel that I could. Then I had a kid. He’s nine now, so I had him and when I came back, I just thought I really want to work for myself because if something’s going to drag me away from my son in this moment, my little baby, then it needs to be something that I really love.

But while I’d been at PPA I had this idea to open a physical building dedicated to magazines and that was what the original idea was. We were kind of trying to think about ways to attract people to come and live and work in Scotland and work in magazines obviously. When I left PPA and I had my child, I came back and thought I want to really spend time on that and see what comes of it. It is not a physical building in any way at all apart from this office that I’m sitting in, but what’s come of it is an international membership for magazine publishers. When I first started that, like the first two years, I couldn’t really quite find my niche because I was still talking to all the PPA members I knew in Scotland and nobody was used to communicating by video so it was difficult to run events internationally and then of course the pandemic hit and that’s when everything changed for me.

I realized that what I wanted to do was support independent publishers, teams of between one and ten in a company, because those were the people who were isolated and not just during the pandemic but all the time.  I had people coming to me who had been publishing for five, ten years and say, “do you know any other publishers” and I’m like “oh yeah I know a few.” They thought they were the anomaly, they thought they were the one crazy person in town. So, now we’ve got about 190 members and they’re all over the world. 80% of them I suppose are in the UK for obvious reasons but we’re expanding all the time and picking up new members in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and we’ve got a couple in Amsterdam and it’s just basically where I spend my time is where we tend to be able to pick up members and I love it.

Samir Husni: I see that you are coming to the States and you are doing the first conference or workshop in Portland, Oregon June 12 and 13. Why Portland and why did you decide to start with the States as your first international venture?

Nikki Simpson: That’s a good question. I think specifically Portland because I’ve been having conversations with a friend called Megan, Megan Schertler, I don’t know if you know her, she does a blog called In Real Life Media and she’s a massive print advocate, runs her own consultancy and so on.

Anyway, I’ve been talking to her a lot about events in the US and how most of them were happening in New York. She’d just been involved with a New York event, Mag Culture were running annual events in New York, and I knew of course that being New York there’s going to be hundreds of events going on full stop. The way I approach things in Scotland is I run maybe one event in London a year because everything happens in London in the UK.

So, for me it’s much nicer to run things locally in either Scotland or we run a regular Manchester event as well. I felt the same way about America. I thought well if everything’s happening in New York then what’s happening on the other side of town? And so Portland seemed like a good place, Megan introduced me to somebody who runs a magazine shop there and it looked like there was lots of great independent titles in the area. Then I heard that Broccoli was based in Portland and then one of my members, it turns out, Kitchen Table magazine, they’re in Portland as well. I thought well this is brilliant, all signs lead to Portland.

And then why the US in general? I don’t know, I’ve been wanting to run an event in America for a while. I think, I mean interestingly I’ve been speaking to quite a few people about this and they kind of said why are you coming to America now? This feels like not the best time for it and I kind of feel like well maybe, but if you know if everybody feels that way then maybe I should go against the grain a little bit and go well maybe what people need now is support right and that’s my job is to support independent publishers so why would I, why would I steer clear of that when something bad’s happening you know or something is controversial is happening depending on which way you look at things. I would much rather come and say well, I’m here to help and support you if you want it.

Samir Husni: You say magazines are here for good, I say we are going to have magazines as long as we have human beings.

Nikki Simpson: Yes, I am absolutely 100% on the same page with you on that. One the independent titles specifically are having a bit of a moment now, but I feel like that moment has been building for so long.

When I first started working in magazines, I’ve been working in magazines for about four or five years by that point, and I remember we did this exhibition on magazine publishing, and it was curated by Jeremy Leslie at Mag Culture. It was a fabulous exhibition and it was all these amazing new titles but I mean you could have chosen another 50 different titles, it was just those ones that he happened to choose and so I feel like that was when people really started to go oh okay there’s an alternative to mass media and there’s an alternative to the rhetoric around mass media and print is dying and so on. I just can’t bear that sentence, print is dead, print is dying, I’m like really, really, do you want to meet some of my members?

Samir Husni: My definition of what a magazine is, “if it’s not income paper it’s not a magazine.”  We never called television, radio with pictures, we called it television, why can’t we call those digital platforms some name besides magazine?

Nikki Simpson: Another name for it, that’s a good question.

I’ve got a friend who, well one of my members and friend, up until recently she was a digital publisher only and every time she’d come to my conference she’d say to me afterwards Nikki there’s lots of digital publishers out there who are doing great things too and I’m like I’ll think about that. Now she’s just started publishing in print as well and she absolutely loves it and her readers absolutely love it as well. I always feel digital publishing is the add-on, it’s the way that people can access information if they can’t afford to pay for the £30 or $30 in postage. But it’s not the place where people enjoy reading, it’s not the place where people go oh happy days my digital magazine has arrived. It’s just like oh okay well I need to read it, or I should read it or I can read it because I couldn’t afford the print version or whatever but it’s not everybody’s first choice, is it?

Samir Husni: I just picked up the first two issues of a new magazine from the UK, it’s a rap magazine called Rap Central Station, it’s an oversized rap music magazine and in one of their introductions they write, “scrolling ain’t reading. Texting ain’t writing,” which is amazing. So, what are your hopes for this conference in Portland?

Nikki Simpson: To meet people who are working in publishing basically. We’ve got two workshops in the afternoon so I’m running a workshop on how to turn your magazine into a membership and then Joe Berger, a circulation consultant, is running a circulation health check for people.  So, people can come along with their magazines and talk about their circulation.

Then we’ve got an evening social event where we’ve got Anja Charbonneau coming from Broccoli magazine and Brett Warnock from Kitchen Table magazine and the whole event is being sponsored by Neesh who are the company that are connecting publishers direct to retailers as opposed to going through a distributor so they’re going to be talking as well and then the following day on Saturday we’ve got a how to launch a magazine workshop for people who aren’t really actually working in magazines at the moment but who want to.

The idea is just to meet new publishers and to help support people. I’ve never been to Portland. In fact, I’ve never been to America so I’m excited to meet new people and to find new ways and approaches of publishing.

Samir Husni: before I ask my typical last questions, is there anything I failed to ask you about the International Magazine Center and about the Magazines Are Here For Good conference?

Nikki Simpson: That’s a big question.  As for the Magazines Are Here For Good conference, anybody that’s coming just don’t forget to bring your magazines. For the International Magazine Center, we run a whole series of training courses and events now.  I counted it up the other day I’m running 57 events this year albeit three of them are recurring events but 57 events and they’re all tailored for independent publishers.  What else can you say?  It’s a welcoming community I’m very non-hierarchical a lot of the events that I run are more about peer-to-peer learning.

Our conference is like the people that I invite to come and speak at it are a real range of people so we have people who aren’t even in the market yet, like they’re still students and they’ve maybe you know produced a magazine as a part of their course right through to you know CEOs of major companies,  so we try to really cover the spectrum there and I think that’s really important to for people to feel recognized it’s when you have that focus of teams of one and ten people.  Huge problems come from that, usually through lack of confidence , so like the majority of my members are teams of one and two people in a team, or you get one person and then they work with three or four freelancers, which means that they’re not sure about whether they’re doing things correctly or  where to focus their attention because they’re doing absolutely everything in their business.

You get that kind of moment of inertia when you have too many decisions to make, so it’s difficult for them to move their businesses. That’s something that we help with.

Samir Husni: My two typical last questions are personal questions:  If I come to visit Nikki one evening unannounced what do I catch her doing, reading, cooking, taking care of her child?

Nikki Simpson: Now gardening. We’ve got a big garden, and we stuck our garden through Chat GPT and we’re in the middle of building a dry-stone wall and then putting down you know making it split level and all this kind of thing.  I do a lot of swimming in my spare time I go to two different swimming classes now a week and I just want to work my way up to be able to do long distance sea swimming. That’s what I’m aiming for or even just a bit of scuba diving that would be nice.

Samir Husni: My final question is what keeps you up at night?

Nikki Simpson: Falling asleep on the couch usually trying desperately to do the hard sudoku and just getting nowhere.  I’m getting pretty good at sleeping, what tends to keep me up I often work late so that I can communicate with people over time zones but I think what keeps me awake at night is when I haven’t worked out in my head what the worst case scenario is because once I’ve discovered what the worst case scenario is, I can go okay, and so that will look like what it looks and that’s okay.  

But if I haven’t done that yet, I’m going oh my god it needs 300 people to come to my event and how am I going to get them, that kind of a hamster wheel in my head.

Samir Husni:  Thank you and good luck on your Magazines Are Here For Good conference June 12 and 13 in Portland, Oregon.

Posted in Across the Pond, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

h1

Nude Vs. Lewd: Art Lovers’ Magazine 1925-1927. A Centennial History: A Book-In-A-Blog Part 4. The Audience

May 21, 2026

A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:

The Audience

In case you are wondering how many artists and art students were there in the 1920s to support and sustain these magazines, the answer is simple: E.B. Hesser wrote in the first issue of ARTS MONTHLY PICTORIAL, “To the laymen, it is surprising how many people need this magazine in their daily word. Without exaggeration, we can point to the following figures: 24,000 photographers, 15,000 commercial artists, including theater lobby artists, 20,000 teachers of art in high and elementary schools, 3,000 advertising experts, 350 editorial and make up men on rotogravure sections of newspapers…”

He added, “All these in addition to thousands of advanced art students, and artists who are “live” enough to keep abreast of the newest compositional ideas. So it is easy to see that this magazine has a decided and distinct field to cover.”

Hesser was quick to add, “It should be regarded primarily as an art trade publication, but it is so edited that nothing therein should be offensive to a clean minded laymen.”

And Hesser was not alone defining his audience. MODERN ART AND STORIES identified itself as “A magazine devoted to the inspiration and technical development of the Graphic Arts. Published for the use of Artists and Art Students, not the general public.”

The same can be said about Paris Art magazine; “With this issue PARIS ART is introduced to art and camera students and all who are interested in the development of modern art.”

One has to wonder if the fact that those magazines are not aimed at the general public, with less than 65,000 possible population according to Hesser’s number, was just a ploy to avoid the troubles with the vice societies, the United States Postal Service, and The New York Daily newspaper that launched a crusade “to eliminate the art magazines from the newstands  (sic) resulted in a tremendous increase of the sales of these magazines should prove that the majority of our readers look upon these magazines as a means toward aiding themselves,” wrote the editors of Art & Beauty magazine in that same issue of April 1927.

However, the leading organization that was after the art magazines and other publications they considered immoral was the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

In the 1920s there was a non-governmental agency by the name of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.  The society was founded in 1873 to enforce laws for the “suppression of trade in and circulation of obscene literature, and illustrations, advertisements, and articles of indecent and immoral use, as it is or may be forbidden by the laws of the State of New York or of the United States.”

The society was a direct dissentient of the Young Men’s Christian Association and was spearheaded by Anthony Comstock, who served as the secretary of the society and as well as an agent and inspector for both the Society and the United States Postal Service.  (nyhistory.org)

Upon Mr. Comstock death in 1915, John S. Sumner succeeded him in the role of secretary and an agent and inspector for both the Society and the United States Postal Service.

This society was chartered by the New York state legislature, “which granted its agents the powers of search, seizure, and arrest, and awarded the society half of all fines levied in resulting cases.” Encyclopedia of Censorship, New York: Facts on File, 2005. Page 522.

One documented case on how this Society acted in New York City in the 1920s can be found in a one page editorial that Samuel Roth wrote in the March 1927 issue of Beau magazine. Under the heading “MR. SUMNER and BEAU” Samuel Roth, the editor and publisher of the man’s magazine wrote, “Thursday morning, January 27th of this year, I received word from the organization which nurses the sales of TWO WORLDS MONTHLY (Roth’s other magazine) and BEAU nationally that the February issues of these periodicals, which had already been shipped out to all points domestic and foreign, would not be distributed for sale upon the news stands (sic) of New York City.”

“Upon inquiry, I learned that Mr. John Sumner, secretary of that charming body of people known as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had communicated with the local distributing agency, and had informed it that if certain advance information concerning the impending numbers of TWO WORLDS MONTHIY and BEAU was accurate he would take immediate action against any company that would dare to distribute them in New York City.  The local agency had the alternative to refuse to distribute, which it did.”

Mr. Roth, with his lawyer, went to meet with Mr. Sumner.  He brought with him copies of the magazines that he found out that Mr. Sumner have not seen or read.  Mr. Roth told Mr. Sumner that the two magazines “are written and published for the sophisticated only, that neither by lewd pictures or lewd contents do we make appeal to the baser passions of mankind.”

Mr. Sumner promised Mr. Roth to look at the magazines overnight and would render a decision in the morning. “Came the dawn– and” Mr. Roth wrote, “confident and carefree, I went to see Mr. Sumner who very speedily dissipated my peace of mind. TWO WORLDS MONTHLY was quite alright, he said, and we could go ahead distributing it immediately, but BEAU, ah, that was a different story. It was absolutely unthinkable to let BEAU go out on the harmless news stands dripping with nudes which any little boy may purchase for fifteen cents. No, he did not approve BEAU and if I dared to issue it of my own accord he would unfailingly prosecute me.”

It’s that very fragile line that separates nudity from lewdity that the art magazines had to maneuver their way with the Society and the United States Postal Service.  That is the main reason the art magazines of the 1920s continued to emphasize that they are not for general public, but rather for artists and art students.

In the words of E. B. Hesser, the founder of ARTS Monthly Pictorial, he wrote, “The Magazine of Pictures for Artists and Art Students.” He added that the magazine “should be regarded primarily as an art trade publication, but it is so edited that nothing therein should be offensive to a clean minded layman.”

Unlike the rest of the art magazines, a new magazine appeared on the newsstands in January of 1925 with the name Art Lovers’ vowing to be completely different than the rest of the publications, yet it did not escape the wrath of Mr. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.  What follows is its story.

The first issue of Art Lovers’ magazine January 1925

To be continued…

Posted in Art Lovers Magazine, From the Vault, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, Nude Vs. Lewd | Leave a Comment »

h1

Art Lovers’ Magazine: Nude Vs. Lewd. A Centennial History: A Book-In-A-Blog Part 3. God Enters The Picture

May 10, 2026

A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:

Bringing God as the Defense Attorney

Under the headline “Tolerance” the editorial of Art Studio Life’s April 1926 stated, “In the Art field more than in any other may we find a wealth of beauty and inspiration that will soften life for everyone. WE do not claim that everything perpetrated in the name of Art is beautiful, but we do claim that nothing in true art can possibly offend any but those who, having tainted minds and questionable morals themselves, seek to smear the world with their personal tar of iniquity.”

The editorial concluded by stating, “They launch their attacks against all. In the name of religion, they seek to cover themselves by persecuting lovers of beauty. They purposely lose track of the fact that the greatest figure in history of the world was the incarnation of Tolerance, Christ. They seek to reform His world and His children, contrary to His Will.”

In another magazine, Art and Vanities, the editors didn’t stop at the necessity of nudity to the artist, but they went one step further bringing God into the equation of art and nudity.  In the September 17, 1926 issue of Arts and Vanities, the editors wrote “In order to create beautiful statuary, soul stirring canvases, and monumental works, he must grasp the significance of each line in the human body. To him the human form spells perfection. No one can improve on the works of our Creator.  We do not try. We seek only to understand and appreciate what he has given us in order that our lives and our hopes and aspirations may reach upward to the source of all good.”

And here is that powerful conclusion that sets the stage for all the nude art magazines of 1920s, “God was the first artist, he created plants, trees, animals, birds, and last but most beautiful, he created woman to adorn the universe.  Man in order to elevate the ideals of his brother man endeavors to interpret these works for the Master.  May we always do our share to help the artists in their struggle for the highest and most idealistic interpretations of Nature.”

In fact, Arts and Vanities went as far as placing a bible verse on its center spread of the October 17, 1926 issue that was displaying a picture of a half-naked woman.  (Yes, there were centerfolds before Hugh Hefner’s Playboy of the 1950s, the only difference they were only one spread).

Arts and Vanities was not the only magazine  using God as its defense attorney, Art and Life was doing the same.  Art and Life’s motto was The Body Beautiful, The Mind Intellectual, and The Soul Intuitional.  The editor wrote in the November 1925 issue, “This magazine stands consistently for the above program (their moto above). That the body may be beautiful it must be healthy, athletic, vibrant with life and action. The editor of this magazine believes that the nude body is inherently decent, the noblest work of the Creator, and those who look upon it as indecent, and to be hid from sight, have indecent minds; that nudeness and lewdness are in no way synonymous terms.”

In fact, earlier in the year, Art and Life magazine, raised the same topic in its July 1925 issue. In an editorial written by the magazine’s editor Guy Lockwood under the title “Concerning The Nude. What Is All The Fuss About?” He wrote “While we have strenuously defended the nude body as the highest work not only of art, but of the Creator, as well yet we are no more in favor of lewdness and real indecency than are those who are behind the movement to rid the news stands of objectionable publications.”

Lockwood added, “Real art magazines have endeavored to supply real needs in the line of figure study by publishing studies of the human body that give a knowledge of basic form and structure, proportions and action. These photographs or drawings, as the case may be, have necessarily often been nude, and Art and Life Magazine has published this kind of photographs and drawings, believing that in doing so this magazine was rendering a valuable assistance to real art advancement.”

Keep in mind that the aforementioned magazines were all in line with the tag line of Hesser’s magazine Arts Monthly Pictorial, “The Magazine of Pictures for Artists and Art Students.”  A lot of these magazines did not accept subscriptions, “but Art Clubs or similar organizations may order twelve copies or more shipped by express each month, to be used for instructional purposes,” stated the masthead in ARTS Monthly Pictorial.   Those art clubs and  the newsstands were the major outlets of the art magazines of the 1920s.

To be continued…

Posted in Art Lovers Magazine, From the Vault, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

h1

Art Lovers’ Magazine: Nude Vs. Lewd. A Centennial History: A Book-In-A-Blog Part 2

January 25, 2026

A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:

Image generated by AI

Chapter 1

Setting the stage:

Justifying Nudity in the Art magazines of the 1920s

© 2026 by Samir Mr. Magazine™ Husni, Ph.D.

AI generated title

An editorial in the September 17, 1926, Arts and Vanities magazine sums the status of art and beauty magazines that were sprouting like mushrooms amid what was once called The Roaring Twenties.  Besides the hundreds of mass titles, some of which are still published today, such as The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, TIME, and Better Homes and Gardens, there was a host of specialized magazines aimed at Art Students and Artists. However, the irony of those magazines is, with few exceptions, are also sold on the newsstands, defying the laws and regulations of the many ethics and obscenity commissions that were set by the states to insure lewd and obscene material is neither distributed on the newsstands nor sent by mail.

One of the earliest art magazines of the 1920s was the Edwin Bower Hesser’s ARTS Monthly Pictorial that was founded in 1922.  E. B. Hesser was a famous photographer in Hollywood, CA.  He launched the magazine with tag line of, “The Magazine of Pictures for Artists and Art Students.”

“While primarily a magazine of art for artists in every line of creative endeavor – to whom its great value is obvious –” wrote E.B. Hesser in the editorial of the May 1925 issue. He continued, “the publication of “ARTS MONTHLY PICTORIAL” is based on an appeal that is shared by everyone – the appeal of pictures.”

He was quick to add, ““ARTS MONTHLY PICTORIAL” opens to everyone, everywhere, the gates leading to beauty and art, bringing to many a joy they have never had open to them before.”

Defending Nudity

Hesser concluded his editorial by stating, “ARTS will not be guided by prudery in the selection of its subjects. But nothing will ever be published in it which could not be safely shown to young people. The nude – long recognized as inseparable from art – will of course be represented in its pages, but always in such a delicate manner that the magazine may enter any enlightened home, promoting higher ideals and a truer understanding of art.”

However, Hesser’s magazine was not the only one. There was a slew of art titles in the 1920s almost all claiming to be for artists and art students. Some of those magazines include, but not limited to,

All Arts & Photos Album

American Beauties

Art & Beauty

Art and Life

Art Classic

Art Inspirations

Art lovers’

Art Photos

Art Secrets

Art Studies

Art Studio Life

Art Visions

Artists and Models

Arts and Vanities

Arts, Fad, Modes

Fine Arts Quarterly

Modern Art & Stories

Modern Art Studies

Original Artists and Models

Paris Art

Real Art Studies

Sex Monthly

Tales of the Arts

The American Art Student and Commercial Artist

The World of Art

True Tales Of The ARTS

A sample of the art magazines on the newsstands of the 1920s

Almost without exception these magazines were not intended for the public, but rather for “Art Students, Art Lovers and Artists.” Some stated that they accept no subscriptions, so probably they were either sold on the newsstands or delivered by bulk to art schools and studios.

To clarify the point that the majority of these magazines were not aimed at the general public, the editors of Art and Vanities wrote, “The magazine is a strictly technical publication and aims to giver the artists the best art studies available.  We know full well that for many artists, it is almost impossible to work directly from the model. This is due to the fact that models are demanding more for their time now, than heretofore, and also because the services of really good models are in demand at so many of our current Broadway productions.”

The following statement from Arts and Vanities applied to most of the art magazines that carried nudity within its pages.  Art and Vanities “is not intended for general circulation. It is a text book for those who are striving to master the fundamental principles of Art.”

However, the magazine was very aware that non art students and artists are going to see the magazine, thus they wrote, “To those of the laity who glance through these pages, we must make one plea.  Try to understand that this magazine is a text for artists. Perhaps you do not understand that nudity in art is as indispensable to art classes as food and drink to you. The nudity which you do not understand is fully revealed to the artist. To him, this expression of art is absolutely necessary.  Without it he could do nothing.”

Art & Beauty magazine in its April 1927 issue wrote, “The studies in this magazine are photographs of paintings which appear in galleries the world over. They are pictures which any right thinking American citizen would be proud to exhibit in his home.  They tend to acquaint young Americans with the fact that there is nothing mysterious or surreptitious about the nude and the sooner this is realized the sooner will there be an understanding of what is rank and what is beautiful.”

To be continued….

Posted in Art Lovers Magazine, From the Vault, Innovation in print, Magazine Power | Leave a Comment »

h1

A Book-in-a-Blog: The History Of Art Lovers’ Magazine 1925 -1927… Part 1

January 19, 2026
Image generated by ChatGPT

A century ago, we were more culturally and artistically advanced. Magazines in the 1920s shined a very bright light on art and culture. One such magazine, albeit short lived, Art Lovers’ Magazine, is but one example of a cultural and artistic publication from 100 years ago when magazines ruled the media world. Here is its story:

Image generated by Grok

Introduction

Lewd Vs. Nude:

The Story of Art Lovers’ Magazine 1925-1927

First issue of Art Lovers Magazine

A century ago, marked the golden age of magazines. Giants like TIME, Reader’s Digest, The New Yorker, and Better Homes and Gardens were launched, and the industry was abuzz. Magazine launches flooded newsstands and mailboxes across the country, providing a singular source of information, education, and entertainment—all in one package. In the 1920s, magazines were the only mass media serving the American public “from sea to shining sea.”


Newspapers were local, and so was the theater. Radio didn’t achieve widespread popularity until the late 1920s, and even then, it remained largely localized. Movies in the early 1920s were purely a form of entertainment, gaining mass appeal later in the decade when sound was added to moving pictures.

For those who believe niche publishing is a recent trend in magazine publishing—think again. The 1920s saw the emergence of numerous specialized magazines targeting very specific audiences.

This book-in-a-blog focuses on one magazine in particular: Art Lovers’, which was published from January 1925 to January 1927. While the spotlight is on Art Lovers’, I won’t ignore the many other art magazines of the same genre that came before and after it.

Art Lovers’ never claimed to be, like many of its competitors, “a magazine for artists and art students”. Instead, it positioned itself as a magazine about art—and all that the word “art” entails. Like similar publications of the time, it featured nude art and imagery, but it also included extended fiction, stories, and articles by renowned authors and artists.

Art Lovers’ took an extra step in addressing its audience, clarifying that although the magazine contained nude images, they were not lewd images. Hence the title of this book-in-a-blog: Lewd vs. Nude: The Story of Art Lovers’ Magazine, 1925–1927.

I hope you will enjoy this weekly journey starting today and every Monday.

All the best

Samir “Mr. Magazine™ ”Husni, Ph.D.

Posted in Art Lovers Magazine, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

h1

2025: New Magazines On The Upbound…

January 14, 2026

I gauge my believe in the status of print on the fall and rise of new magazines. Please note that I did not say future of print but rather status.  As long as we have humans we are going to have print.  End of discussion.  And for those who know me and know my writings and analysis know that. “It is only a magazine if it is ink on paper: i.e. print.”

So it should come to no surprise when I tell you I was delighted when the post office delivered to my mailbox the first issue of Hoffman’s Media The Supper Club with Lydia Menzies. The same happened on Christmas Eve when the first issue of the magazine dedicated to the late chef Anthony Bourdain Roads & Kingdom landed in my mailbox.

Those two magazines were but two from a total of 69 new magazines that were launched in 2025, a number that showed an upward move compared with 2024 as the chart below shows.

Of note among the launches are Art Bar, Bonnie Christine’s Pattern magazine, Southlands, Outlander, Permanent Record, The Street, and Heartbeat.

An Editor’s Note: Starting next week, I will start publishing a book-in-a-blog about the status of magazines in general a century ago and one specific magazine that changed the status of Art magazines in the 1920s.  So, stay tuned.

Posted in Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views | 1 Comment »

h1

In-Depth Conversation With Roger Black: From AMERIKA To Big Bend Sentinel… The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With A Genius Art Director

December 18, 2025

 “This is a hard time to start a magazine. The country shaking like an old drunk. Who knows he has to give up the hoosh. Does not provide a climate of reason and ease that magazines thrive on. There is a recession.Magazines are collapsing left and right,” wrote Roger Black in his role as Editor of a magazine called AMERIKA in 1970.

Mr. Black was a student at the University of Chicago and editor of the students’ newspaper, The Maroon.  AMERIKA was forced to change its name after the dummy issue was published and the first and only issue published was called PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA.

I reached out to Mr. Black to talk about the story of AMERIKA and to get an update on what he is up to these days.  He told me that he’s “back actually doing a publication. And this is an urgent time for magazines and newspapers. We must find a way of keeping them going, keeping them independent.”

In fact, Roger Black wrote this week on his Facebook page under the heading “ROGER BLACK’S FAREWELL TOUR?” Join me at Big Bend Sentinel, where a team of innovative journalists is redefining local news.  We’re testing two old ideas. In the video (that accompanied the post) watch for the key words: “fact” and “art.”

Mr. Black continued, “I started this tour in 1973 as art director of LA (1973). Now, as acting Art Director and non-profit chair, I’m back to weekly newspapers! The real work is done by a small energetic band of editors led by Rob D’Amico, Sam Karas, Mary Etherington, and Ariele Gentiles.”

He adds, “Can weekly newspapers survive and flourish? Can we hold onto local journalism?” 

I reached out to Mr. Black to ask him about his original work on newspapers and magazines. I was mainly interested in the very first magazine, “AMERIKA” he edited while still a student at the university.  Needless to say, he is a wealth of information and he has left his thumb print on many national and regional publication throughout his career.  I hope you will enjoy this lightly edited conversation with a person who for years I called “a genius creative art director.”

Samir Husni:  You ask Chat GPT about Roger Black and it tells you, “Very influential in magazine and newspaper design,”  but no mention that you were an editor of a magazine back in 1970 while you were still a student at the University of Chicago.

Roger Black: Yes.

Samir Husni: And the magazine was called America with a K: AMERIKA

Roger Black: Well, that was the dummy. Later, it was PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA. There were only the dummy issue and the one and only first issue.

Samir Husni: So, tell me about your journey with AMERIKA.

Roger Black: AMERIKA was envisioned as Parade magazine (The Sunday newspaper supplement) for student newspapers.

In 1968, I was the editor of the Maroon, the student paper of the college at the University of Chicago. I must tell you, that was a very good year to be a student editor. And particularly in Chicago.

We had a lot of news. It was a big time for change. We started putting out a weekly magazine called Gray City Journal, which ultimately became its own publication.

So we started thinking that many student papers don’t have that kind of content. Harvard, Yale, and other elite schools do.

But in terms of magazine style, both entertainment and serious stuff, photojournalism and drawings, they didn’t really exist. If you go back and look at the 1960s’ student newspapers they were pretty dry.

A guy in the business school at the university, named Mark Brawerman, who is from California, came up with the idea.

A very sharp guy who just started school. He didn’t really have any business experience.

He thought that we could do this. One of the things that he did, and with my involvement, I thought it was a good idea, too, he started writing all the student newspaper editors and publishers saying, we have this idea.

Would you be interested in taking it? And we’re going to print a prototype, and you can decide. That was the reason for the prototype; we had to get the circulation.

I was interested in design. I had started doing some publication work before I got to college. I had a wonderful teacher named Robert Gothard, a famous typographer, who did student, alumni magazines, and other publications for universities and colleges and did other things, too. He was a great designer.

So, I got interested. He was the first art director of Print magazine, for example. I was really interested in magazines from really as a young kid. My mother worked for magazines.

We had written all these people, and we got enough responses that if we could print 200,000, we could have distributed them.

So I started working on the prototype. And it’s funny because my girlfriend at the time is listed as the art director. I don’t even remember her name now.

There you go. The prototype cover came from Kent State. It was from an art student there who did this kind of Andy Warhol homage after the Kent State shooting. And there’s more stuff of that inside. Anyway, I thought I could be a designer.

I looked at a lot of magazines. How hard can it be? So, I did this issue, this prototype. And by some wild set of coincidences, Sam Antupit, who is a great art director, the art director of Esquire at that time.

George Lewis did the covers, but he did the inside. And it was beautiful. He was doing a special issue of Print Magazine about magazines.

And he put this in a box called Hopeful Upstarts. We realized we were going to leave Chicago and move operation to New York. So, I got to New York and I looked him up.

And we had gotten some funding. We were starting to sell ads. But I couldn’t find an art director.

That was the funny thing. There weren’t a lot of people, if you think about it, Rolling Stone and New York Magazine only started in 1967. And before that, there were art directors at Esquire or at Town and Country or the fashion magazines, and Holiday magazine.

There were certain kind of visual magazines that had art directors. But National Geographic didn’t have an art director. Life Magazine didn’t have an art director.

It was not really one of those job descriptions that people, their mom said, you can be an art director. No one, no one really was thinking about that. And I couldn’t find any.

But Sam had this fantastic studio on, I’m going to say, East 52nd Street in a brownstone building. Later, the previous Citicorp Village was built there. But he was doing a bunch of different magazines out of the studio or doing designs, and redesigns.

He had a famous magazine artist, Richard Hess, who was his partner in that. So, it was called Hess and Antupit.

It was the name of the studio. And they were on the top floor. I was totally blown away how great it all was.

He did have student aides from SVA or Pratt or Cooper Union students working part time or as interns for him. What he couldn’t really recommend any other kids to be art directors. I finally came back and asked him if he would do it.

And by some miracle he said yes. And agreed to our price, which included all the type setting, all the illustrations and photos, the whole art project. He said he would do it for a fixed price.

I probably lost my shirt on it. He took over in that first real estate number one. It was really the designer’s Hess and Antupit.

I got to be the editor. So that was fun.

Samir Husni:  The dummy issue was called AMERIKA, and the first issue PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA, why did you change the name?

Roger Black: I’ll tell you the story why we changed the name.

We got a letter from the Catholic Church. They sent us an official letter saying that they have a magazine called America and we have the trademark, so you can’t use America even with changing the C to a K.

Of course, I knew even at age 20 that you can’t trademark a place name. You can’t put a trademark on America. So I wrote back saying, you can’t trademark a place name.

So, I’m ignoring their letter. They wrote back and said, well, how many lawyers do you have? Basically, I said, these people are going to give us a hard time. I’m going to just add a qualifier.

We added the phrase PRINT PROJECT AMERIKA.  We made it more experimental, new media feeling.

Samir Husni: The State Department didn’t send you a letter saying we have a magazine aimed to the Soviet Union called America.

Roger Black: Well, their magazine was only circulating in Russia. And we weren’t going to Russia. They are not allowed to distribute it here.

Samir Husni: In this digital age, where do you see print role?

Roger Black: Print magazines had a very good run. I like to say it was a hundred-year run. If you look at the magazines, like the late 19th century, magazines that started running art, photo engraving had come in.

They were impressive. And then you had with the invention, of rotary presses and linotype typesetting and all that. Magazines followed the newspapers in increasing press runs.

So you had the concept of mass magazines. That whole business model kept morphing. Everyone forgets about this, you know, like in 1995, the commercial web appeared and everybody said, oh, everything’s over.

But I don’t think the commercial web was much more of a kick in the head than the television. And before that, there was a similar abrupt change with radio. The idea that entertainment could just sit in your chair and not have to think and just listen.

Magazines like The Saturday Evening Post were really hurt by that. Because that was their position, at home after they were reading entertaining stuff. But they survived and they adapted.

I think that the biggest challenge for a contemporary magazine, and that also includes online, is the attention span problem and the way that the kind of addiction to the constant scroll, just going vertically with dozens of different things that you’re barely aware of what it is. You stop on a cat or whatever you want to look at.

That has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. We didn’t even know about TikTok 10 years ago. And Facebook seems for people my age now.

All that keeps morphing. Instagram had its moment in the sun. And everything, everything is always moving. My feeling is that print offers a new kind of respite for that.

In the way that radio seemed like a respite for reading. Print, going back to reading, is a relief from that addictive scrolling that everyone’s doing. Or just that very short attention span, you look at one thing, you look at another thing, you look at another thing.

That kind of short attention span gets tiresome after a while.  And why can’t I say that with any confidence? It’s because the long form media, like books or movies, are blasting ahead fun. I mean, movie says, the movie, the Hollywood studio business is once again in convulsions. With every year, there’s a headline that says, Hollywood is no longer the same. It will never be the same.

We don’t recognize it anymore. And they’ve been saying that since about 1920 since talkies came in. So that long form sitting in a movie theater or watching it on Netflix is a very compelling experience.

And people enjoy it. It’s still, there is a business model in the same way that music kind of changes business model from the time of the record business. Movies are too, but also books.

It’s very interesting to me to see things like the eBooks for the digital side, but also bookstores are coming back. There are new bookstores everywhere. And there are very niche bookstores.

Bookstores about cooking or bookstores about architecture. All over the place. It’s fairly like Marfa, Texas, where I am right now, it’s just a few thousand people, right? It has an extremely good bookstore that also has a quite a good art collection.

Now, Marfa may be a special town, they just finished a new library or a big addition to this little library in Marathon, Texas. Population 400. And every time I’ve been by it, it’s full.

A lot of kids. Why is that? Because there’s something very pleasant about holding a book and reading it. And getting it, one of the advantages that books have and movies have over the endless internet is that you finish the book.

I’ve read the magazine. I’m done. I finished The New Yorker.

Almost nobody can say that online. There is a real feeling of accomplishment. And of course, The New Yorker’s secret that Howard Gossage, the advertising man, pointed out when he was doing their advertising.

The cartoons in The New Yorker are the guilt reliever. Because you can go, page all the way through, get a few chuckles. You might read a talk piece or one or two other things.

And then you sit the magazine down and somebody says, and you mentioned something that you saw in The New Yorker.  I read it in The New Yorker. I read The New Yorker every week.

That’s a definite feeling of accomplishment. From a psychological point of view, there is satisfaction that comes from the phenomenon of the edition. This is a magazine.

This is the September issue of our magazine. Or this week’s magazine. Whatever.

And the same thing. You get to feel like you finished it. You go through it.

The online newspapers, you never finish. The digital crowd is very surprised that people like the PDF replicas of newspapers. Like The Dallas Morning News now presents that first.

If you go to their website, you get the replica first. Then you get the actual website. Because people know how that navigates.

They know where their stuff is. Everything’s in a familiar place. And things like PressReader made it increasingly easy to read on different devices.

The feeling about sessions, session time, completing an edition, very important. I think that magazines, in the same way that I think anthology, television like 60 Minutes will go on despite everything else. Now we still must work on the business model.

The numbers are much smaller than they used to be. We’re not doing mass magazine. But I think that quite a few people, we see people getting in and surviving.

And it’s delightful.

Samir Husni: Mr. Black, if someone comes to you and says, I want to start a new magazine, what do you tell them?

Roger Black: I really ask them, who’s your reader? I think it all starts with the reader.

Who is it you’re trying to talk to? Have you talked to them? You communicate with them. And I think that’s the way that we all got in the media have gotten in trouble over the years, is that we think that we’re the media. And it’s a two-way thing.

Reading is interactive. And I continue to find, maybe it’s because of my extreme age, I find reading the most effective kind of communication. It’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it’s inexpensive, as opposed to a video that you do on TikTok or YouTube.

That’s an effort. It’s a production. Maybe we don’t have a TV station like we used to.

And we’re relying a lot on Apple and the others to fix our video for us. But I think that having a group of people just writing, taking pictures and putting them together into a magazine, is very low cost compared to what the big guys are trying to do. And I think you can, if you make it good.

If you connect with the reader, it can work. And it doesn’t have to be high art. It doesn’t have to be the kind of level of journalism you’d expect in The New York Times or something else.

But if it can be good and readable, and is hitting a chord that people like, I think you can make it. One example you mentioned, Arena, the Santa Fe magazine, which is two old, French, encrusted print guys. One, John Miller, worked with me.

Owen Lipstein, somewhat controversial publisher from New York, who was the publisher of Smart Magazine, which I did in the late 90s with Terry McDonnell, only 13 issues ever published. Anyway, they got the idea of doing a big fat real estate magazine in Santa Fe, which of course, people in Marfa would say that Santa Fe is a real concoction of the real estate salespeople, which it may or may not be. But what they did to get the content, because they didn’t have a huge budget, and none of this stuff, no one is paying what Vanity Fair is paying.

I don’t think even Vanity Fair’s paying what they used to pay. But what John Miller, the editor there, and designer, did was to just do a lot of interviews. He had video, and some of the interviews were trimmed to just be the answers.

It was like a first-person article. Sometimes they would have a lot of pictures of their home, or they would go there. Sometimes it was just pick up what they could provide, the decorator, the designers, pictures of the house or whatever, or their potters, and they had stuff on their website.

Just thinking about it carefully and making it interesting with interesting people.

Basically, it’s all about the people in magazines. So you start with the reader, but then you give them stories about people to read.

That’s basically the core of every good magazine.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical two last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you you’d like me to ask?

Roger Black: I sort of expected you to say, why are you still doing this? Which is funny, I don’t know what else I would do. It’s like somebody says, why do you have this place in Texas out in the desert? And my answer is, I can’t think of anything, any other place I’d rather be.

I can’t think of anything else I would rather do than try to work with typography. We have Type Network, I’m chairman of Type Network, and we’re doing a wonderful collaboration with 100, more than 100 type designers and type founders with special custom design projects. Some of it is consulting, and some of it is type design.

I’m not a type designer, but I can connect them to the market. It’s a very small operation, but quite fun. I want to keep working.

My father worked till he was 80. And then, even later, he said, I never should have quit. So, the next question is, what are you doing now? As well as Type Network, I’ve come out to Marfa, and I’ve taken over by starting a new non-profit with Don Gardner from Austin, and Gonzalo Garcia Bautista from Mexico City.

We have started a non-profit, and we are now publishing this paper, which you can go to at BigBenSentinel.com. You can join and get the PDF, or we’ll mail it to you. For 60 bucks, we’ll mail it to you.

Folks, that price is going up, so act now.

Samir Husni: If I come unannounced to your house…

Roger Black: In Marfa, now? Well, it’s a marathon.  I also hang out in Florida. We’re still repairing from the hurricane last year.

And I have an apartment with my husband in Oslo, Norway. So, I kind of am nicely balanced.

Samir Husni: So, if I come unannounced one evening, what do I catch Roger Black doing to rewind from a busy day?

Roger Black: Reading. I’m still old-fashioned.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night?

Roger Black: I don’t stay up at night. I am a great sleeper.

I don’t know why. I go to bed early. I go to bed by 11 or so.

In the old days, I’d stay up late. My peace of mind results from, as you get older, you realize you must let things go and become balanced, or you’re always anxious. The other thing that helps me, has helped me in my whole life, is I have a colossally developed ego.

It doesn’t occur to me until years later that I could be wrong. It’s like later people point out, that was a complete disaster. And I say you’re right.

I was completely unaware of that at the time. And I still, you know, it’s like I tried to do that thing, Screensaver, I thought we could do a technology solution for reading digitally. And it turned out that it didn’t work beautifully.

It turned out that the publishers didn’t have a business model for that. So, I do find myself waking up sometimes and thinking about those things. But I go right back to sleep.

I’m not what you’d call a troubled old man.

Samir Husni: Thank you. Take care. Have a great day.

Posted in A Launch Story..., From the Vault, Innovation in print, Inside the Great Minds of Magazine Makers, Magazine Power, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

h1

Make It Free: A New Approach To Paywalls. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With CEO Wade Bradley.

December 10, 2025

If you are one of the more than 90% of people who exit the second you see a paywall on an article you want to read, fret no more.  There is a new approach to paywalls which allows you to enjoy free content on your favorite publisher’s website in return to accept to receive four promotional emails from the creator of this new platform:  Make It Free.

I reached out to Mr. Wade Bradley, CEO of Make It Free and had this engaging conversation to learn more about Make It Free and how it works for both the readers and publishers:

Samir Husni: My first question to you is, give me the elevator pitch of what’s Make It Free.

Wade Bradley: The elevator pitch is pretty simple. We enable consumers to enjoy free content on a publisher site while we pay the publisher.

So instead of publishers turning away 98% of their traffic that hit the paywall and immediately exit, they can now monetize that 98%.

Samir Husni: Give me the background. What makes you come up with this idea? Why do you want to help publishers?

Wade Bradley: Well, initially we had developed the concept for streaming. We utilized it to eliminate ads on free streaming sites.  Instead of seeing ads, they would receive four emails. We then realized there was a much more larger market domestically and globally.

Utilizing that technology and utilizing our patents in that technology on publisher paywalls.

Samir Husni: Can you guide me if I’m a publisher and I want to use your Make It Free, how does that work?

Wade Bradley: You sign up a contract and the contract is one year, but you stop it at any point with a 30-day notice.

At the end of the day, we bring in our specialized support team. They work directly with the publisher to put the code and the API (Application Programming Interface) onto their publisher paywall.

Samir Husni: You said that if I want to click on Make It Free, I have to give my email and accept to receive four emails from you.  What do you think will make the consumer give you his or her email if they are not willing to give it to the publisher?

Wade Bradley: Well, what we found with publishers and really all consumer product companies, is that if they give the email, there is a relentless approach to market to them. So on our modal, we state very clearly, read article for free. We will send you four branded emails.

You earn a reward coin for each email opened. So we incentivize the opening of the email, not the clicking. And we never sell your data.

I think that’s the key point. Because what we’ve seen is about 10% of people currently click our button that’s on the paywall. And it says read article free with Make It Free.

Then we get a 32% conversion on average. That is essentially because we’re telling them upfront, you’re going to get four emails.

So really a simplified process.

Samir Husni: Are you now fully operating with this model or you’re still in the testing stages?

Wade Bradley: No, we have publishers signed up. We have 16 months of data that proves out the 32% conversion.

And certainly what we’ve seen is that it varies based on geography, etc. But also based on putting it on the front end of your paywall. Meaning don’t give people five articles and have the paywall come up at the sixth.

People that are getting the best results are the groups that are doing it as a hard paywall or a semi-porous paywall. Maybe one, maybe two articles for free each month.

Samir Husni: I’m assuming that it’s available for newspapers, magazines.

Wade Bradley: Yes.

Samir Husni: Do you differentiate between a newspaper like, let’s say, The New York Times or a local newspaper, and magazines, whether it’s big or small? Do publishers get the same $0.10 per article regardless of the size or there’s a scale based on how big or small is the paper?

Wade Bradley: No, we don’t scale it based on the size of the paper. Because at the end of the day, each provides a valuable consumer.

Samir Husni: You said you’ve been at it for 18 months and you have data for 16 months. Has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some challenges and how you were able to overcome them?

Wade Bradley: Within which aspect? Within the industry, we started with news publishers and they get it.

It took us a while to get the messaging exact because a lot of groups thought their current paywall system would take care of this problem. The current paywall system actually created the problem. So when you have 100% of traffic being presented a paywall and 98% leave.

If they don’t click on the paywall, none of those algorithms and other neat things can be deployed. So what we realized is that we’re the front end of a paywall. The current paywall system is the backend.

And the backend attracts the people that have intention. I  want to get Fortune or Forbes, and I’m either going to register or pay. But the bulk of people and research has shown 90 to 95% at a minimum immediately exit when they see the paywall.

That’s where our system comes into play. Because instead of exiting, they’ve got another option. Read article free with Make It Free.

Samir Husni: You said your conversion rate based on those 16 months is 34%.

Wade Bradley: Approximately 10% of people that click the button on the paywall currently  32% return.  And it varies.

We had a group tested against sports. Only sports. It hit between 50 and 70%.

It’s much lower traffic, but the conversion rate is extremely high. We think magazines will excel because you have extremely important, lengthy  narrative, much more detailed than maybe a general newspaper would provide.

We expect to see uniquely  different numbers than what we’re currently seeing on average in the news.

Samir Husni: Do you have data on how many magazines offer paywalls?

Wade Bradley: It’s probably about 80%, if not more, conservatively. A paywall is a necessary element.

When everyone switched to digital, they thought this is Nirvana. We’re going to reach millions more people than we ever could reach. And we don’t have to print it.

But the ad rates are dramatically different than print advertising. When they started to realize how many more millions of people they had to have to be able to make up for the print value, it didn’t work. And that’s why paywalls came into being.

They solved one problem. But they really caused another that’s quite significant that we solve with Make It Free.

Samir Husni: Can you think of a question that I should ask you, but I did not ask you?

Wade Bradley: It’s pretty easy integration.

It usually only takes a couple of weeks to get it set up on a paywall. Then the first 45 days we’re conducting detailed analysis to which brands to match to those particular consumers.

After 45 days of analysis, publishers start earning daily revenue.

Samir Husni: I always conclude my interviews with two personal questions. If I come uninvited to your home one evening, what do I catch Wade doing? Cooking, having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a magazine or hitting Make It Free?

Wade Bradley: Well, at the end of the day, what Wade’s doing, Wade’s constantly working. Wade doesn’t drink, which is part of the California lifestyle.

At the end of the day, we’re continually working and adjusting what we can do to best benefit publishers.

Because as we benefit publishers, we benefit consumers. And both of those things benefit brands. Brands want this consumer.

These are very literate consumers. They’re excellent consumers. It’s an opportunity where a publisher can be able to now monetize that traffic they’ve been turning away and condition them to become a subscriber. There’s kind of a process leading up to that.

That’s what Make It Free allows them to do. They start gaining the engagement and trust of the consumer. Then the consumer quickly realizes, wow, I really like this magazine.

I’m continually coming here. I’m coming 10, 20 times a month. I should subscribe.

We send out a free quarterly newsletter or subscription offer to the the community using our service on their site. Because we want them to gain that 1st party data for the consumer. You simply must do it at the right time.

Up front in your face, here’s a paywall is not the right time.

Samir Husni: How many times they can hit the Make It Free?

Wade Bradley: As many times as they would like to read another article. So every single time they want to read another article, they hit Make It Free.

It’s a universal signup. So if they’ve signed up elsewhere and now come to a publication that has Make It Free, all they have to do is click agree and accept. They don’t sign up in each publication.

It’s universal. It’s really simple for the consumer. And as this becomes more pervasive across America, we think that the initial clicks are going to increase.

We see that on average, 4.2 times per month, the consumer returns and uses it again. With more city-centric news publications that just have a lot more news going on, or highly specific publications in financial technology, etc., that consumer is going to come more often.

Samir Husni: My typical last question is what keeps Wade up at night?

Wade Bradley: A lot of things keep Wade up at night.

Regarding the business, you know, we’ve gotten to the point where we already have now approximately 180 publications in our queue to integrate. That’s moving at a very quick pace. That’s one of the areas we’re highly focused on.

We’ve got our brand sales teams that are going to brands, and brands absolutely love this because they have a halo effect. They’re the ones providing the article for free. So on the  modal, when they sign up, they’ll see the brand.

And then the consumers will receive the offers from that brand. For brands, they’re getting for the first time ever an unduplicated, positive-minded consumer.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

h1

The Fabulist:  A New Speculative Literature Magazine With A Print First Business Model. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Josh Wilson, Editor & Publisher

December 1, 2025

Born from the womb of the web, The Fabulist launches its first print issue in 2026 after being a web only platform since 2007.  To quote Josh Wilson, the magazine’s editor and publisher, in his letter to the readers accompanying issue zero of the magazine, “In a world that’s glutted with disposable digital ephemera, we love working with print: It is a tactile, tangible, dynamic, and long-lasting medium that transforms your experience as a reader, and celebrates the meaning and value of the works we publish.”

Issue zero of The Fabulist, art by Glenn Buack

And Mr. Magazine™ can’t but 100% agree with Mr. Wilson.  There is no better place to combine “amazing stories, rich illustrations, and wild art,” than print.  The Fabulist publishers believe so much in print that they make their business model print first.

Intrigued by the concept and the business plan, I reached out to Mr. Wilson to ask him more about the inception of The Fabulist, the plans and the reason for the print magazine after being a web only platform.  We had a lovely conversation and learned the secrets behind the transformation from digital to print.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this lovely conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher of The Fabulist.

But first, the soundbites:

Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist

On the reason for print: “I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.”

On the background history of The Fabulist: “For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.”

On his background: “I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.”

On The Fabulist elevator pitch: “We’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.”

On the business model: “I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model.”

On the zero issue: “It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.”

On the art of curation in print: “There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.”

More on the art of curation in print: “I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for that the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.”

On the future: “We want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about.”

The first issue of The Fabulist, art by Sergiu Grapa.

To learn more about The Fabulist or to order a subscription please click here.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist:

Samir Husni: First, congratulations on the new magazine.

Josh Willson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Anybody that launches a print magazine today deserves to be congratulated.

Josh Wilson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Tell me, what’s the story of The Fabulist?

Josh Wilson: The story of The Fabulist

Well, way back in 2007, I kept getting my stories declined by magazines, and I decided to start a little blog, just a website where I could put my stories and those of my friends. About six months later, we began getting submissions, which was very strange because I never posted a submissions link.

People would just email us their stories. It turned out that we had been listed in a writer’s market called Duotrope. I don’t know who put us there, but we ended up in this writer’s market, and the submissions have been coming constantly since then, far more than we can deal with, and usually better than my own stories.

I took down all my stories and, for a long time, posted new work whenever we could get around to it. I would say about the mid-teens, 2015, 2016, 2017, we were at a reading event in San Francisco, where we live. I was approached by Elizabeth Gonzales James, who went on to become a novelist. She has two novels out, The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea. The Bullet Swallower is being developed for a feature film. She approached me before her first book contract and said, Do I need any help?

I remember being overwhelmed by submissions. I said, I could really use a hand managing all the submissions. She read a gigantic backlog of hundreds of submissions and said, You could do a story a week. Why don’t you?

I said, OK. We went with that. At that point, I realized we really should have a contract.

I contacted other publishers I know and asked them for advice. We made a writer contract. There are a few other steps to this.

One is that I realized there is a big difference between genre and literary journals. We were kind of in both places. The literary journals, you often pay a reading fee and don’t get paid for your work, to the extent that I would send a submission’s call to creative writing and MFA programs and get the department chairs sending me their work for this blog.

But the genre magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Asimov’s magazine, these all came out of the pulp era. There was a very strong writer’s advocacy movement. A lot of that business was pretty fast and loose. In the genre world, you don’t pay reading fees. You always pay the writers.

We decided we should at least do an honorarium. We grew that from $25 to $100 per story. Still operating at a loss. All digitally.

Finally, the final chapter for this evolution, in 2023, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, we were, I guess at the end of the worst of it. A colleague of mine here in San Francisco, Jennifer Joseph from Manic D Press, a great local imprint that has their work collected in the Library of Congress, their LGBTQ work, said that she’s going to AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. This was in Seattle.

Did I want to share a table, an exhibitor table at the book fair? I thought, yes, why not? I did that rashly because I didn’t have anything to sell because it was all digital, but I realized the contract that we had been using enabled us to make books. So I got an $80 color printer and began making chapbooks. And my colleague, our art director, Adam Myers, is a gentleman of very high production values.

We produced some beautiful books and they sold. They almost sold out. And I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.

For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.

This is after months of agonizing and product development. We got a small grant from CLMP, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, to hire a digital marketing specialist. Lots of thoughts about how to convert from a weekly digital blog to an issue-based periodical.

I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.

So that’s where we are. I guess that’s a little bit of a long intro.

Samir Husni: In 2025, it looks like a lot of independent publishers, like yourself, are rediscovering print and bringing print magazines to the market.You were born from the digital womb, bringing The Fabulist to print. Tell me, if you are going to give an elevator pitch about what The Fabulist is, what would you tell people?

Josh Wilson: My elevator pitch for The Fabulist is that we’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.

But with a literary bent, a magic realist bent, there’s a lot of interest in what’s been called new weird and new fabulism. And we feel that there’s a lot of terrain that is undeveloped for speculative fiction and speculative literature, poetry and art that doesn’t quite fit in genre. Genre has a lot of straight expectations.

We feel that there’s a lot more room to develop this stuff, that we don’t want to be constrained by the expectations of the market, that certainly there’s no limit to the work being produced — the fantastical work that’s not realist fiction, that’s not straight genre, that sometimes sits in between. And it needs a place, a beautiful home. We tried to develop that beautiful home on the Internet, and it worked.

We have a brand. We’re an established presence. But we didn’t have a business model.

I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model. I guess that’s longer than an elevator pitch.

Samir Husni: It’s a very tall building.

Josh Wilson: Yes. We’re on the way up.

Samir Husni: Your business model is based on giving subscribers, a free complimentary zero issue or a dummy copy. So what’s the idea behind this business model, giving the one issue free for people who subscribe and then billing them technically per issue?

Josh Wilson: Yes. Two reasons.

First, the per issue billing was something I observed and we observed in Patreon. It’s a creator’s platform. It’s like Kickstarter, but you make your contributions serially over time. And musicians and artists and so on use it and every month you pay $2 or $10 or whatever and you get a new song or a new story or a new piece of art. So, that seemed like a really viable model.

It’s been of interest in the journalism world as well, this monthly income. Rather than having it all happen at once in a cluster annually, it gives the reader a lot of flexibility to exit without having to make a full commitment. So, we decided, we tried a Patreon account and it did work, but we get double hit with fees.

Patreon takes 3% or 5% and the credit card company takes a percent, and we really wanted to reduce that friction. So, we are selling subscriptions without Patreon. We are going with a bimonthly for now and we hope to increase to monthly. So that’s why we’re billing per issue.

And the free issue was our marketing consultant, a gentleman named Neal Gorenflo. He is a marketing guy. He started a publication himself called Shareable, Shareable.net and it covered the sharing economy when that was first coming up.

He’s a very astute and accomplished marketing person who said, you got to have a free offer. You got to have a no risk trial. And we already knew we were going to forge ahead with the print periodical and had made this issue zero.

You called it a dummy. It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.

I had a whole bunch of those, you know, in a box on our shelf in our spacious corporate offices here. I thought, okay, let’s do it. Let’s use these.

I had to do another print run. We ran out. It’s been so popular.

I’m going down to San Jose to a printer a little later today to pick up another 150 copies.

Samir Husni: One of the things about print is you must do more curation than digital. As an experienced journalist, how is your curation takes place or the difference between accepting something for digital or accepting something for print?

Josh Wilson: We remain really concerned about quality control the whole way through. So, we did not and we never wanted to treat the Internet as a disposable medium where we could just throw stuff.

We always had a long review process. How will this look in our pages? How much work does the story need? It starts with whether we love it and we want to see it flourish. And if we love it, we’ll commit to it.

I would not say that we’re treating the Internet as more of an easy medium to throw stuff into.

There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.

I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for, because the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.

We try to make it beautiful and we’re going to do a design refresh and get that website up to speed. But, although it is a boundless medium, it is ironically much more constrained, I think, than print. Because you can’t do an interesting layout.

For all its dynamism, it’s much harder to make it an art piece. And with this print magazine, we want to make an art piece. This is collectible.

Samir Husni: When’s your first issue coming out?

Josh Wilson: January. We had to push it back because of the two holidays, there’s no way we can get the proof back. And then everybody’s going out of state at the end of December.

So mid-January, we aim to have that out and then bi-monthly afterwards. I was just looking at the new cover and it’s great. It’s quite different, too.

Samir Husni: Is there any question I’m supposed to ask you, that I did not ask you?

Josh Wilson: I suppose you could ask me about the state of genre and literary publishing in print and online. I find that fascinating and something I’ve gone deep into over the summer, although I might talk a little bit.

Samir Husni: So tell me about the competition. Who’s out there?

Josh Wilson: The interesting thing is a realization that the folks here aren’t competing. The audience for written-text genre fiction, fantasy and science fiction mostly, and the stuff that spills out over into the literary edges of that, is substantial and undiscovered and undeveloped.

There are a lot of conventions and conferences that happen nationally and globally, science fiction and fantasy conventions and comic book and movie conventions and the ones that are game conventions. And there’s some overlap, some Venn diagram overlap, but the literary conferences are tiny. The World Science Fiction Convention, where they give out the Hugo Awards, it’s one of the highest awards in genre fiction, only gets about 8 to 10,000 attendees, whereas Comic Con in San Diego or Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia gets tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of attendees.

These people do read books, maybe not a full percentage of them. But a lot of people are genre fans without ever knowing that they’re genre readers. They watch movies, they watch TV, they love Star Trek, they love Star Wars. They’ll follow the movies and the characters.

The same is true in the literary world. When I was at AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Conferences conference in LA, we covered all our expenses, including travel and conference registration and housing.  We covered all our costs.

A lot of it was these young MFAs walking up to our table and realizing that they could do genre, that they weren’t stuck in a realist, forgive the term, a realist ghetto. There was a lot of room for them to follow their interest and desires.

We broadly feel that the audience is vast and undeveloped. And there isn’t a national, there aren’t national scale, mass media scale consumer magazines. They’re more literary journals.

So, we’re all working together. And there’s a lot of great ones. Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Analog are all the warhorses from the pulp era.

There’s a host of amazing online magazines that sometimes have print as well. Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare magazine, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny magazine are really sort of among the top tier of these online magazines that do issues in e-books. And sometimes audio books as well.

But also release all the stories for free on the web. So, there’s this freemium model. And then they’ll do print on demand for print.

I think we may be distinct in really going, switching hard to print first. The editor of, publisher of Clarkesworld, Neil Clarke, who’s an analyst of the industry and an accomplished publisher, pointed out that he goes where the readers are. He has an audio book version.

The people who listen to audio books are different from the ones who read online or who read e-books even. They’re all distinct. And he has a print on demand magazine.

We may be, The Fabulist, may be taking a risk on going so hard on print first. But we are at break-even. We, in about three or four weeks, we sold more than 100 subscriptions with an online ad campaign.

And it’s very interesting to realize that we have such a latent audience. We were getting one to five subscriptions every day. And the subscription drive ends tomorrow.

We’re going to assess, redesign it, redeploy it around our issue one with the new cover. The fact that you must go where the readers are is, as Neil (Clarke) says, is absolutely true. And we want to do audio books.

We can do e-books. And we want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document. This is a distinction.

There’s another magazine, Reckoning magazine, that also does a beautiful print document. And then eyedroppers out their content for free. I feel that that’s an exciting approach that you can do because audiences don’t overlap. Digital is a loss leader. And digital content enters social media and the Internet as a sort of promotional mechanism for your publication.

The print people who are repeatedly exposed to it, they realize they want the magazine. Although there’s a specific strategy we did. We have a landing page.

We show off all the interiors. We boast about the contributors. Try to showcase our production values.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions. If I come uninvited to your home one evening, what do I catch Josh doing? Cooking, having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book?

Josh Wilson:  I’m cooking. I love to cook. I’m feeding other people. I want them all to eat, so I try to do a good job.

And I’m usually listening to an audio book while I’m cooking, because I can’t read it. Right now, I’m listening to Barbara Tuchman, the historian.

She’s got a great book called The March of Folly about governments doing stupid things over time. After dinner, ideally, everybody else cleans up and I go back to work.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Josh Wilson: Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about. But I have been sufficiently exhausted that I usually fall asleep quickly.

I’m reading a great book that is keeping me up. It’s a new version of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s called Kalivas by the author Nick Mamatas, who is one of our book reviewers.

And it’s in the future. And there’s been a cataclysm. And Caliban/Kalivas lives on the Farallon Islands off San Francisco.

His mother was a nanotech Sycorax. The witch was a nanotech engineer. And Prospero is a techno magnate in this post-human society who invades the island and colonizes it.

And it’s a romp. It’s a great read. That’s been keeping me up a little too late.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Thank you and good luck.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

h1

The Week Junior: The UK Successful Magazine That Is Meant To Be Read.  The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Anna Bassi, Editorial Director

November 21, 2025

Ten years ago, a new magazine was born in the UK: The Week Junior. A news weekly for children that saw a “proper return to things being print-first, magazines being print-first, and not just a vehicle for a toy.”  Anna Bassi is the editorial director of the magazine. She has been at the magazine since its launch and is still as passionate about The Week Junior as she was on day one.

Anna Bassi’s work with children’s magazines started over 30 years ago.  After 20 years of editing such magazines, she got disillusioned with children’s magazines. She left the field of children’s magazine publishing because “I had a growing realization that we were spending more money on the cover mounts, and less and less money on the content,” Ms. Bassi told me.

She added, “I’d see children, grabbing their magazines, tearing the toy off the front, chucking the magazine on the floor, and it couldn’t even be looked at. And it was just, and we spent so much time talking about the packaging for the toy, it had to look as though it could be shop-bought. And then the budget for the editorial content would be halved and halved again every year.”

Then, something like magic happened.  She was recruited to launch The Week Junior magazine, “a great thing to be involved in.” She told me, “It’s a joy to be working on something where the investment actually is in the content and nothing else. It’s a real privilege.”

To read the story of this privilege, please join me in this conversation with Anna Bassi, editorial director, The Week Junior, in the UK, but first, the soundbites:

Science & Nature, Science, Nature, Lab, staff, employees, the week junior

On reading on paper: “The experience of reading on paper is so very different to reading on a screen, and it’s increasingly the case now, so perhaps we’re a little bit ahead of ourselves back in 2015.”

On the role of the magazine: “We can create news that is made for children, and that didn’t mean that we wouldn’t address important or complicated or serious issues, it just meant that we would do it in a way that was very clear for our readers, like a conversation with them.”

On the tone of the magazine: “One of the principles of the magazine is not to be a teacher, it’s a conversation. We’re trying to have a conversation with the child, we’re trying to meet them where they are, and if anything, we’re the slightly smarter, older sibling of our average aged 10-year-old reader.”

On the content of the magazine: “There’s something around the way a print magazine is curated, that thought that goes into which story goes where, which picture goes where, how a child experiences a page, which is very different to the on-screen experience.”

On launching during a crisis: “There’s something about launching into an adverse situation. It pulls teams together, and it clarifies the purpose of the magazine.”

On her ten-year journey: “There have been loads of challenges, but it’s been, I should say it’s been great fun more than anything else. It’s just an honor and a privilege to do something like this, to create a magazine for children.”

On the many extensions of The Week Junior: “We have a lot of extensions. We’ve been very busy. The first extension was the launch of The Week Junior Science and Nature magazine in 2018.” 

On more extensions: “We launched a podcast in 2019 called The Week Junior show, which is still released every week, we just recorded our 10th birthday episode this morning.”

On her advice to someone launching a magazine: “Do your research, know your audience, respect your audience, I think is key.”

On the design of the magazine: “We needed to do to be different, but also to be useful, was to make a magazine that was genuinely accessible. So, it is designed to be read. The way the pages are laid out is very deliberate. It’s about being able to navigate that page easily. You know where it begins and where it ends.”

On what keeps her up at night: “Not so much these days.  Sometimes the news keeps me up at night, I do worry.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Anna Bassi, editorial director, The Week Junior, in the UK.

Samir Husni: You just celebrated 10 years of The Week Junior, tell me about the genesis of the magazine. Why would you start a print news weekly for children in this digital age?

Anna Bassi: It seems like a crazy idea, doesn’t it? The origin of The Week Junior dates back more than 10 years, in fact even before my time with it.  I was the launch editor here in the UK, but there has been around a year’s worth of development work on the idea prior to me joining. It had been born from the realization that The Week magazine, which obviously is also a UK publication, had many schools subscribing to it for their secondary school age pupils, so these are kids who are 12 years and over, and it became increasingly clear that perhaps there was an opportunity there to bring news to a younger audience, and to do so in print, which seemed counterintuitive at the time, but all of us who work on the magazine, and all of those who are involved in the development of it, appreciate that tangible quality of a paper magazine.

The experience of reading on paper is so very different to reading on a screen, and it’s increasingly the case now, so perhaps we’re a little bit ahead of ourselves back in 2015. Parents now are realizing that screen time is addictive, that it can be counterproductive. It doesn’t have to be an either-or situation, but that there are real benefits to children not spending quite so much time on screen, so we felt they would appreciate that offer of an alternative to the screen.

For children, because most of us readers are subscribers, it’s something they own, when you look at something on screen, you don’t own it, it’s fleeting, it’s gone, and you can get lost quite easily as well. Also, you are not experiencing the same depth. Finally there’s something around the way a print magazine is curated, that thought that goes into which story goes where, which picture goes where, how a child experiences a page, which is very different to the on-screen experience, which is good in its own right and has many benefits, but this idea of something being put together with real care and thought as to how a child will read and see and experience what we’re giving to them.

Samir Husni: When you launched the magazine, when the first issue came out, was it an instant success?

Anna Bassi: Well, we had about 5,000 subscribers before we launched, we’d marketed it exclusively through The Week magazine in the UK, and when we launched, we thought that most of our readers would be the children of  The Week readers, but as it turned out, it was a bit of a word-of-mouth success, those early subscribers were real advocates for the magazine and shared it with their friends who bought it for their parents.

The first issue was a launch into the unknown, because there was a lot of rhetoric around kids not loving print and why would they want to know about the news, that’s just for adults.  But that was also part of the reason why we launched, that there was an assumption that news is just for grown-ups, but actually children do see and hear the news, whether it’s an overheard conversation or they might have heard something on the radio or on the TV, and sometimes having that partial information is worse than having no information, so our thought was we can take control of this and we can create news that is made for children, and that didn’t mean that we wouldn’t address important or complicated or serious issues, it just meant that we would do it in a way that was very clear for our readers, like a conversation with them.

One of the principles of the magazine is not to be a teacher, it’s a conversation. We’re trying to have a conversation with the child, we’re trying to meet them where they are, and if anything, we’re the slightly smarter, older sibling of our average aged 10-year-old reader.

Our first issue put us to the test.  We planned a wonderful celebration launch issue, and in fact the week before we launched the magazine, there were a series of terrible terror attacks in Paris.  We had to tear up our plans and lead with that as our cover story, which was very difficult to do, but it also meant that we very quickly had to live up to the promise that we’d made to ourselves and to our new subscribers, that we wouldn’t shy away from the difficult stuff.

We quickly were able to establish the blueprint for telling those sorts of stories, which we’ve unfortunately had to use many times since, but it’s been enormously helpful.

Science & Nature, Science, Nature, Lab, staff, employees, the week junior

Samir Husni: There are similarities between the launch of The Week Junior in the UK and The Week Junior in the US that was ready to launch when Covid hit…

Anna Bassi: Terrible echoes of it. The same thing happened, we were working away, preparing for that first issue to launch. We wheeled out the celebration cover that we planned for the UK launch, and again, it all had to be torn up and started all over.

There’s something about launching into an adverse situation. It pulls teams together, and it clarifies the purpose of the magazine. Many parents here in the UK and then obviously later in the US were incredibly grateful to The Week Junior for being that voice of calm and clarity in a somewhat kind of chaotic and catastrophic environment.

Samir Husni: So those 10 years, has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some challenges?

Anna Bassi: There have been loads of challenges, but it’s been, I should say it’s been great fun more than anything else. It’s just an honor and a privilege to do something like this, to create a magazine for children.

There have been many challenges and obviously the news agenda has been difficult around the world. There have been conflicts, pandemics, and political upheavals. I don’t think there’s ever a week when there isn’t a story that we really have to sit quietly with before we can begin to tell it.

Covid was both a challenge and an opportunity because we all had to retreat to our homes with our laptops and find a new way of working, we’d always worked together in an office prior to that, we also had to rip up all the plans we had for content that we planned around live events and interactive experiences and places that kids could go to and completely redraw our planning for the whole year and base that around what can you do from your home or within a very small local environment.

One of the things that we launched in 2020 was our summer of reading campaign, which we knew that that summer many kids were not going to be going anywhere much further than their back garden or the local park, there would not be holidays, experiences would be limited, and books present that opportunity to escape the everyday, to get out of your world, to meet new people, to find new places.

We launched a summer of reading campaign encouraging children to read through the summer and tell us about what they’ve been reading. That was a challenge that became an opportunity that became a success. We ran it for four years here in the UK, I think it’s still running in the US. The only reason we stopped running it here in the UK is because we launched our own children’s book awards and that then took the place of the summer of reading challenge.

Samir Husni: You had so many extensions, you’re not limited just to the weekly magazine, can you tell me about those extensions?

Anna Bassi:  We have a lot of extensions. We’ve been very busy. The first extension was the launch of The Week Junior Science and Nature magazine in 2018.  That’s a monthly magazine here in the UK that was born out of the revelation from research that we’d done with our readers that what they really wanted more of was more science and more animals, so we thought why not launch a magazine that’s just all about science and animals, so that’s now entering its seventh year.

We launched a puzzle magazine in late 2019, unfortunately that didn’t survive the pandemic, it wasn’t a subscription magazine, it was run on newsstands sales and that collapsed during the lockdowns. We launched a podcast in 2019 called The Week Junior show, which is still released every week, we just recorded our 10th birthday episode this morning.

We have a book publishing deal with Bloomsbury in the UK and internationally.  We’ve so far published five books with them. We’ve published two novelty gift books.  We’ve published two guides so far; a guide to the environment and a guide to politics, and we’ve got money and sports coming out next year.

We launched our book awards which we’ve been running now since 2023. We held our third book awards event at the end of September this year and that’s become a huge industry gathering now. That’s a children’s book publishing world here in the UK, and it’s been enormous fun to develop and launch it with the help of the events team at Future (The Week Junior’s publisher).

What else is there? Of course, we launched in the US in 2020. We have newsletters, we have endless ideas, we have a digital edition, we’re still playing around with social media and seeing what more we can do there with video and so on.  There’s still plenty more to come.

Samir Husni: You sound very positive on the future.

Anna Bassi: I am.

Samir Husni: Do you think we are seeing an increase in print? We’ve seen a lot of print magazines coming to the marketplace more than last year and the year before.  Suddenly people are rediscovering print. Do you think that trend will continue or is just a nostalgic fad?

Anna Bassi: I think it will continue.  I feel very positive about it.

There’s a return to valuing, to go back to what I was saying in the beginning, something that’s tangible. You see the same thing happening with music. The sales of vinyl and CDs are going up. My own children like collecting vinyl and CDs and they like paper as well, so I feel positive about it.

Although the magazine market, and I don’t know what the situation is in the US, but certainly here in the UK, the number of magazines is fewer. Several companies have closed and a lot of titles have closed over the years. Those that are left, there’s a passion for them and there’s a recognition that if you can produce something that’s of a high quality, which The Week Junior is, and you invest in making something that is genuinely worth having, people will be prepared to pay for it and they will value it. There’s a renaissance coming. I’m very excited about it.

Samir Husni: If somebody comes to you and said, Anna, I want to start a new magazine. What advice would you give them?

Anna Bassi: Do your research, know your audience, respect your audience, I think is key.

Think about what they care about, make sure that you’re really feeding their interests, make sure that what you do can be trusted. Trust is a big and important thing these days, especially in the time of fake news and AI and all the rest of it. So do it well.

If you’re a publisher, be prepared to invest in it. These things aren’t cheap. And if you’re going to do it well, you have to be prepared to spend money to do it well and it will pay back.

Samir Husni: Excellent. So, tell me, is there any question I needed to ask you that I didn’t ask you so far?

Anna Bassi: I can tell you a little bit about the way The Week Junior has been designed, which is interesting and important and has been a factor in our success as well.

When we launched here in the UK, we launched into a very busy marketplace. At that time there were many, many children’s magazines. The newsstands were an absolute riot of color.

Many magazines had cover mounts with plastic toys and characters, Disney magazines, Thomas the Tank Engine. So a very crowded place. And we launched with a very simple magazine with no cover mounts, which didn’t have a brand that was recognizable to kids.

And it wasn’t a kind of a riot inside, in the same way as many of those magazines are. Many of them, their design, they look beautiful. They’re very appealing.

They’re obviously very brand led as well. And what we knew we needed to do to be different, but also to be useful, was to make a magazine that was genuinely accessible. So, it is designed to be read.

The way the pages are laid out is very deliberate. It’s about being able to navigate that page easily. You know where it begins and where it ends.

There are also multiple entry points to every single article. There are fun facts, and there are sidebars, and there are boxes. And all of those are there to help lure in the child who may be the reluctant reader.

The child that doesn’t want to read something long, but they might read something that’s short and funny. And then maybe that will tempt them to read something else and get more involved.

We also consulted guidelines around designing printed materials for people who are dyslexic. So we chose the fonts very carefully.

And the fact that most of our type is black on white, or a very light tinted background, is also led by that set of guidelines. So everything that we’ve done, every word is obviously incredibly carefully thought about. Every picture is very carefully thought about.

The layout itself is fundamental. That’s the secret sauce.  It might look plain to eyes that are accustomed to other children’s magazines, but it’s read.

It has been read since day one by kids whose parents will tell us, my child doesn’t like reading, or my child has always struggled with reading. They love reading Junior.

I’ve been working in children’s magazines for almost 30 years now. I’ve been through all of that I’ve done, I’ve made those magazines that are a riot of color with crazy typography, and things splattered all over the place. I look back at it now, And I think, I thought I was doing the right thing. But I wasn’t helping any children to read.

Samir Husni: If I come one evening to your home unannounced, what do I catch Anna doing, reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?

Anna Bassi: All the above.

But also, two years ago, I moved into the house that I’m in now. And it’s been an enormous renovation job. So you’d probably find me if I’m not cooking, eating, drinking wine, or watching TV, or reading a book, which I don’t really do enough of. I’m usually scouring auction sites and eBay, and furniture recycling schemes for pieces of furniture that I can pick up and place in my house.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Anna Bassi: What keeps me up at night? Not so much these days.  Sometimes the news keeps me up at night, I do worry.

Whenever a big and upsetting news story breaks, I wonder, how are we going to do this? How are we going to tell it? Are we going to tell it? That will keep me awake at night. And then in a positive way, I guess I can be kept awake with ideas, new ideas for doing new things in new ways.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

Older Entries »