Mr. Magazine

“I think that’s going to depend somewhat on that brand. What is its identity? What is its target audience? I think it would be hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer to that. Certainly that print component has such an enormous part in continuing to ensure your permanence and credibility. And obviously we’ve seen that a lot with many digital brands and TV brands going into print rather than the other direction when you look at the success of say, Allrecipes or the Magnolia Journal. So, I think it depends on your audience, but that print piece still plays such an anchor role in defining who your brand is.” Trevor Meers (On whether he thinks a legacy brand can exist today without its print component)…

 Celebrating the richness of life in the Midwest, Midwest Living magazine is dedicated to providing its readers with a wealth of region-specific information and inspiration, focusing on travel and events, food and dining, and home and garden, as well as other editorial content that entertains and informs about the area. Founded in 1987, the magazine is a legacy brand that is unequivocally proving that longevity is all about innovation in content and the magazine’s editorial content director, Trevor Meers, is leading the way for those innovations.

I spoke with Trevor recently and we talked about a few of those amazing innovations in print that the magazine is implementing with its May/June issue, such as augmented reality between its pages, using QR codes to virtually bring the pages to life. And the thematic profiles of content that also begin with that issue, which will focus on how vitally important the cabin lifestyle is in the Midwest.

The magazine may be sporting a reputation of excellence that is over 30 years old, but it’s certainly not resting on those laurels comfortably, Instead, the publication is using Trevor’s word of the times for Midwest Living – reinvention, and practicing it.

Indeed. Midwest Living is keeping print moving forward, while being proud of its innovations and digital footprints as well. Mr. Magazine™ bids you enjoy this great conversation with a man who has dubbed travel, food, home and design, and adventure the DNA of his brand, Trevor Meers, Editorial Content Director, Midwest Living/Meredith Travel Marketing Content Studio.

But first the sound-bites:

On his view of the job of editorial director today versus when he joined Midwest Living in 2003:The biggest change that I’ve seen is we’re all required to be more entrepreneurial. We’re still journalists at heart, but we all are tasked with looking for ways to see where our brand can go next. And that’s been a really exciting development for those of us who embrace it, which we certainly have at Midwest Living. To not just be doing the stories, but be thinking about ourselves as brand leaders, and that really goes to the idea  of being out of the office, which I reference in my bio, and that’s relationship building. So, certainly we’re in the travel category, so we’re out visiting the destinations we cover constantly.

On how he would define Midwest Living:Midwest Living certainly draws on the tradition of brands like Sunset and Southern Living that were our predecessors, and when Midwest Living was created in the late ‘80s, certainly those brands were part of the template that was looked at to create this one. So, Midwest Living is a mix of home and garden, food, and travel. And we are the only journal of life in the Midwest and we capture all of those passionaries’ for our readers. I talk a lot about the travel category with Midwest Living, because that’s one of the first obvious endemic categories for us, in terms of advertising. So, we’re clearly a staple for a lot of advertisers in the travel category.

On what differentiates an ink on paper brand that also has a digital presence from just any blogger or individual out there who tells you about great places in the Midwest to visit:Certainly brand has a lot to do with that. And that’s obviously a staple for Meredith as a whole, we have these strong brands that built up their credibility over time. We haven’t just appeared on the scene; we’ve been around and we’ve proven that we’re trustworthy. And we’ve proven that we have staying power. One of the great advantages still, not just for brands but for print specifically that I like to point to is discoverability.

On whether he thinks any legacy brand can exist today without its print component:I think that’s going to depend somewhat on that brand. What is its identity? What is its target audience? I think it would be hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer to that. Certainly that print component has such an enormous part in continuing to ensure your permanence and credibility. And obviously we’ve seen that a lot with many digital brands and TV brands going into print rather than the other direction when you look at the success of say, Allrecipes or the Magnolia Journal. So, I think it depends on your audience, but that print piece still plays such an anchor role in defining who your brand is.

On what would be his lead if he were writing an article about the many changes that have taken place in publishing and magazines and magazine media:I’m thinking of words more than a full lead and reinvention is definitely one of them. And the successful brands, the successful content leaders over the last decade have been the ones who are willing to reinvent and that can be in a variety of ways. And we’ve really done that well and successfully at Midwest Living, whether that’s looking for different revenue streams or defining your voice as your audience is potentially changing.

On whether the last 13 years has been a walk in a rose garden for him:(Laughs) I don’t know that anyone would call the media landscape a walk in a rose garden for the last 13 years, but I think it’s all in how you look at it. You choose to embrace this as an opportunity, and that’s what we’ve done. We have looked at this as a chance to get to do things that we haven’t done before.

On what he looks for in potential employees from a human resources perspective:The core is still good reporting when I’m looking for a particular editor or writer, because that will never change. Now your tools might change and the way you go about gathering that information, but if you don’t have good reporting instincts and drive to find the best story, you’re going to struggle regardless of the platform. And you asked earlier about one thing that differentiates legacy brands from other brands that might pop up and come and go, and I think that solid reporting is a big part of that.

On the highlight of accomplishment for him at Midwest Living:One of the things that I’m proudest of at Midwest Living is I’ve been the editor for almost four years now, and when I took over in 2015 we looked at a brand that needed a shot in the arm, in terms of thinking about, not just the way it looked, but also the kinds of stories we told. But we knew that we had a legacy brand that was strong, so we had to figure out the right way to adapt a brand to a new era while preserving what we had.Recently a friend of mine, another editor in the industry, was giving a talk and she said that if you want to look at a brand that has reinvented itself while holding on to its core DNA, look at Midwest Living. And I think that’s one of the highest compliments; that we’ve been able to understand who we are while recognizing that there are different ways that we can go about carrying out that same DNA.

On the biggest challenge he’s faced at Meredith and how he overcame it:I think the biggest challenge is one that’s ongoing and that is when you have so many opportunities in front of you now, you have to choose. And because of all of the different platforms and the different ways that we can tell stories, we have more ideas that we can execute on, so it’s a matter of choosing where we should tell that one, which avenue should we go down, in terms of whether it’s a custom product that we might be able to work on, where should we invest those resources. I had a professor once who called it the economizing problem, which is unlimited wants and limited resources. And it’s a good problem to have that we have more great ideas than we can execute, so that way we get to pick the best of them. And that’s exciting but it’s challenging to pick them and figure out the best path to take.

On how he balances his time between Midwest Living and the content marketing, custom publications:There are a few answers to that question. One is we do have separate teams, we have editors and designers who focus just on Midwest Living and we have some who work just on the custom products. And my creative director and I have a hand in all of that, but we do have teams that are dedicated to those. So, that allows those folks to really concentrate specifically on their topics and their audiences. There are some things that are different, but if you’re doing  good content marketing, there aren’t going to be that many differences. You still want to tell a good story.

On whether he feels Midwest Living is helping to unite all of the Midwestern states to be more relevant and real to people:I definitely think we have helped to define the region after 30-plus years of doing this. There are 12 states that are officially a part of the Midwest, and that was originally sent out by the U.S. Census Bureau and we kept with that definition of our 12 states. And there are still pockets just like there is in any region. There is a place that just calls themselves the North, when you get into places like Minnesota, but the identity of the center of the country has been increasingly coalescing over the last few years. I think a lot of it has been brands like Midwest Living and they’re putting it all together in a cohesive storyline and helping people recognize what’s going on in this region even if you’re a resident of it.

On anything he’d like to add:I’d like to talk a little bit about the exciting new innovations that we have going on at Midwest Living. Coming up in our May/June issue are a couple of special features going forward. One is its theme is the cabin issue, and cabin culture if anyone knows the Midwest, it’s an important part of the Midwest culture. So, we’re going to cover that in more aspects, in terms of locations where you can go to rent cabins. We’re going to be doing stories about families who have renovated theirs, to get the home and design angle. We’re doing food stories about chefs who do outdoor cooking and how you can do that at home. And decorating for your cabin. So, that will all be covered with our theme.

On what he would have tattooed upon his brain that would be there forever and no one could ever forget about him:I would like people to think that there’s a person who embraces reinvention. Personally, I don’t do really well with people who talk all of the time about how things were. There are a lot of good things from the past that we want to hang onto, but we need to test all of that to make sure it’s really the best way to keep doing it. I said earlier that I’m interested in what’s effective and what’s true, not simply what’s familiar. So, reinvention can be scary and painful, but it’s also what makes life an adventure if you’re willing to see it as an opportunity.

On the biggest misconception he thinks people have about him:Well, I would lump myself and the Midwest into one answer on that. The Midwest as a whole, including all of us who cover it, is a far more relevant region than a lot of people give us credit for. We have about 52 million consumers within the Midwest, about 21 percent of the population, and so it’s a vast audience that a lot of products aren’t reaching with their media messaging. And if you look at our spendable income, our dollar is worth about a dollar and eight cents in the Midwest compared to other regions. So, if you just think about a consumer in any region and increase their income by eight percent, think what they could do with that.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home:It’s a bit of a busman’s holiday with me and my family, because we cover a lot of travel at our magazine, but we love to travel, so a lot of times you will find us flipping through a guidebook or an Instagram feed or it might even be a U.S. Forestry Park map, planning our next adventure. I count myself very fortunate that I’ve landed at a place where I get to do so much of my work in a category that I personally love. And if you look at our living room raw, it’s going to look like a bit like a Tetris puzzle because we’re always trying to find room for more of the photos from our trips because we like to relive those memories.

On what keeps him up at night:I’d say, going back to relatively the same answer that we talked about with the biggest challenge, and that’s really choosing the best way to use our resources. And when we see so many directions that we could take a story, it’s picking the one that we think is going to give us the biggest exposure and have the best results for our readers.

 

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Trevor Meers, Editorial Content Director, Midwest Living/Meredith Travel Marketing Content Studio.

Samir Husni: You’re the third editor in chief of Midwest Living and it has been published now for almost 33 years. And you’re also the editorial content director for the Travel Studio at Meredith. I read part of your bio and it said that you “spend most of your time scheming ways to escape the office in search of more food, adventures and interesting people.” Tell me about the job of an editorial director today versus when you joined Midwest Living in 2003.

Trevor Meers: The biggest change that I’ve seen is we’re all required to be more entrepreneurial. We’re still journalists at heart, but we all are tasked with looking for ways to see where our brand can go next. And that’s been a really exciting development for those of us who embrace it, which we certainly have at Midwest Living. To not just be doing the stories, but be thinking about ourselves as brand leaders, and that really goes to the idea  of being out of the office, which I reference in my bio, and that’s relationship building. So, certainly we’re in the travel category, so we’re out visiting the destinations we cover constantly.

But we’re also getting to know our clients and as we’ve really realized to a stronger degree than we have in the past, our brand leaders are such great spokespeople for what story we’re telling. And that’s valuable; we take that out to our advertisers and represent our brand in that way.

Samir Husni: You referred to Midwest Living as being in the “travel category.” If you met someone on the street and you told them you worked for Midwest Living, how would you define that brand, because the first thing that comes to some people’s minds would be Southern Living or Sunset, a regional magazine, yet you just defined it as travel. So, how would you truly define Midwest Living?

Trevor Meers: Midwest Living certainly draws on the tradition of brands like Sunset and Southern Living that were our predecessors, and when Midwest Living was created in the late ‘80s, certainly those brands were part of the template that was looked at to create this one. So, Midwest Living is a mix of home and garden, food, and travel. And we are the only journal of life in the Midwest and we capture all of those passionaries’ for our readers. I talk a lot about the travel category with Midwest Living, because that’s one of the first obvious endemic categories for us, in terms of advertising. So, we’re clearly a staple for a lot of advertisers in the travel category.

But obviously we have an important role in helping to define the taste of the food and home design and gardening in the region, just as Sunset and Southern Living has throughout their history. But travel is especially important to us because that’s been able to give rise to a really robust custom content that we’ve launched off the brand in a big way here in the last four years.

Samir Husni: You mentioned when we started this conversation about the importance of journalism. In this day and age where anyone can blog or Tweet or write anything about travel or places they like or don’t like, what differentiates an ink on paper brand that also has digital extensions and a digital presence from just anyone out there telling you about a great restaurant or a great place to visit in Iowa?

Trevor Meers: Certainly brand has a lot to do with that. And that’s obviously a staple for Meredith as a whole, we have these strong brands that built up their credibility over time. We haven’t just appeared on the scene; we’ve been around and we’ve proven that we’re trustworthy. And we’ve proven that we have staying power. One of the great advantages still, not just for brands but for print specifically that I like to point to is discoverability.

The digital world has done a lot to segregate us off into intellectual feed fills where we can set things up to only feed us the information that we already either know about or agree with. And when you purchase a magazine, I talk to our editors about the fact that’s really a contract with the reader. Giving a contract to a trusted team of curators to present content that know you’re going to like even if you’re not sure you know anything about it yet. You’re trusting that these people have the taste and that they understand this audience, that they’re going to give me information that I am going to find interesting and it’s going to be reliable.

Samir Husni: Do you think any legacy brand can exist today without its print component?

Trevor Meers: I think that’s going to depend somewhat on that brand. What is its identity? What is its target audience? I think it would be hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer to that. Certainly that print component has such an enormous part in continuing to ensure your permanence and credibility. And obviously we’ve seen that a lot with many digital brands and TV brands going into print rather than the other direction when you look at the success of say, Allrecipes or the Magnolia Journal. So, I think it depends on your audience, but that print piece still plays such an anchor role in defining who your brand is.

Samir Husni: You’ve been at Midwest Living now for 13 years. As a journalist, let’s imagine that you’re writing an article about the many changes that have taken place in publishing, magazines and magazine media; what would be your lead in that article?

Trevor Meers: I’m thinking of words more than a full lead and reinvention is definitely one of them. And the successful brands, the successful content leaders over the last decade have been the ones who are willing to reinvent and that can be in a variety of ways. And we’ve really done that well and successfully at Midwest Living, whether that’s looking for different revenue streams or defining your voice as your audience is potentially changing.

So, we really look a lot at thinking about holding to what is effective and what is true, not just what we used to do. And that might mean, as I said, different revenue strategies, it could mean different platforms. To some degree you’re thinking about being platform agnostic, thinking where’s the best place to tell that story. And many times that’s going to be across multiple platforms.

Samir Husni: Has it been easy for you, difficult, challenging; or has it been a walk in a rose garden for the last 13 years?

Trevor Meers: (Laughs) I don’t know that anyone would call the media landscape a walk in a rose garden for the last 13 years, but I think it’s all in how you look at it. You choose to embrace this as an opportunity, and that’s what we’ve done. We have looked at this as a chance to get to do things that we haven’t done before.

I talked about being entrepreneurial at the beginning, and I think that’s really drawn out the content creators who have that entrepreneurial strength. And some people didn’t even know they had it in them until a new landscape was put out there and they started looking at it as new ways to tell stories that hadn’t even been thought of before. And if things hadn’t changed we probably wouldn’t have ever tried that. But now that we have a chance to we can see all of these advantages to telling stories in different ways.

Samir Husni: As you interview and hire people for jobs at Midwest Living and at the Travel Studio at Meredith, are you looking at things differently today than, let’s say, when you were hired? From a human resources perspective, what do you look for in potential employees?

Trevor Meers: The core is still good reporting when I’m looking for a particular editor or writer, because that will never change. Now your tools might change and the way you go about gathering that information, but if you don’t have good reporting instincts and drive to find the best story, you’re going to struggle regardless of the platform. And you asked earlier about one thing that differentiates legacy brands from other brands that might pop up and come and go, and I think that solid reporting is a big part of that.

The visual aspect is also huge, so your editors need to be able to take some photography that can be used, they need to be able to capture video, they need to be able to do a good interview in audio, in case we decide to turn something into a podcast or something like that. So, that’s a broader skillset. Where we used to segregate more between a print journalist and a radio journalist, there are specialties within that skillset, but we do need more of a general purpose person who can capture that kind of content.

And an ability to tell a story in some different voices, because there is going to be a different voice in your print piece versus how you write that on Instagram, or even potentially on Facebook being different from Instagram. And having the ability to adapt your voice to the proper platform is something that we really watch for.

Samir Husni: In your own experience, if you recall your tenth year at Meredith, what would you consider the highlight of accomplishment for you or the moment you said wow? Can you pinpoint a specific moment?

Trevor Meers: One of the things that I’m proudest of at Midwest Living is I’ve been the editor for almost four years now, and when I took over in 2015 we looked at a brand that needed a shot in the arm, in terms of thinking about, not just the way it looked, but also the kinds of stories we told. But we knew that we had a legacy brand that was strong, so we had to figure out the right way to adapt a brand to a new era while preserving what we had.

Recently a friend of mine, another editor in the industry, was giving a talk and she said that if you want to look at a brand that has reinvented itself while holding on to its core DNA, look at Midwest Living. And I think that’s one of the highest compliments; that we’ve been able to understand who we are while recognizing that there are different ways that we can go about carrying out that same DNA.

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest challenge that you’ve faced at Meredith and how did you overcome it?

Trevor Meers: I think the biggest challenge is one that’s ongoing and that is when you have so many opportunities in front of you now, you have to choose. And because of all of the different platforms and the different ways that we can tell stories, we have more ideas that we can execute on, so it’s a matter of choosing where we should tell that one, which avenue should we go down, in terms of whether it’s a custom product that we might be able to work on, where should we invest those resources. I had a professor once who called it the economizing problem, which is unlimited wants and limited resources. And it’s a good problem to have that we have more great ideas than we can execute, so that way we get to pick the best of them. And that’s exciting but it’s challenging to pick them and figure out the best path to take.

Samir Husni: How do you balance your time between editing a major print magazine, with almost a million in circulation and with a web presence, and doing the custom publications? Is there any difference between creating a content marketing, custom publication than creating a general interest, regional magazine?

Trevor Meers: There are a few answers to that question. One is we do have separate teams, we have editors and designers who focus just on Midwest Living and we have some who work just on the custom products. And my creative director and I have a hand in all of that, but we do have teams that are dedicated to those. So, that allows those folks to really concentrate specifically on their topics and their audiences. There are some things that are different, but if you’re doing  good content marketing, there aren’t going to be that many differences. You still want to tell a good story.

And I think many of the clients that we work with on the content marketing side have gotten much more savvy about that, in that a few years ago they would also come to us dictating exactly what they wanted the message to be. Now they’re hiring us and saying that we know the audience, here’s the way we’re generally trying to go, tell that story in the way that you think will resonate with our audience.

I think we’ve seen a real increase in the quality of a lot of content marketing that’s done by the better companies. So, at the core it’s still telling a good story; it’s still doing content that you know readers are going to be interested in.

Samir Husni: When Midwest Living was launched the challenge was that people did not believe that there was something called the Midwest. There was Chicago and Des Moines, there was Kansas City, there was St. Louis, do you feel that misconception is still there now or has Midwest Living help to unite all of these Midwestern states?

Trevor Meers: I definitely think we have helped to define the region after 30-plus years of doing this. There are 12 states that are officially a part of the Midwest, and that was originally sent out by the U.S. Census Bureau and we kept with that definition of our 12 states. And there are still pockets just like there is in any region. There is a place that just calls themselves the North, when you get into places like Minnesota, but the identity of the center of the country has been increasingly coalescing over the last few years. I think a lot of it has been brands like Midwest Living and they’re putting it all together in a cohesive storyline and helping people recognize what’s going on in this region even if you’re a resident of it.

 Samir Husni: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Trevor Meers: I’d like to talk a little bit about the exciting new innovations that we have going on at Midwest Living. Coming up in our May/June issue are a couple of special features going forward. One is its theme is the cabin issue, and cabin culture if anyone knows the Midwest, it’s an important part of the Midwest culture. So, we’re going to cover that in more aspects, in terms of locations where you can go to rent cabins. We’re going to be doing stories about families who have renovated theirs, to get the home and design angle. We’re doing food stories about chefs who do outdoor cooking and how you can do that at home. And decorating for your cabin. So, that will all be covered with our theme.

We’re also launching this as our first Smart issue, so we’ll have augmented reality available throughout the issue, both in the editorial and the advertising. So readers will be able to bring a lot of the stories to life with QR codes and they’ll be able to hear from the chefs behind the recipes, they’ll be able to see a furniture maker making furniture. It’s a great example of how print continues to innovate and Midwest Living specifically continues to find new ways to tell stories through the print avenue.

Samir Husni: If you could have one thing tattooed upon your brain that no one would ever forget about you, what would it be?

Trevor Meers: I would like people to think that there’s a person who embraces reinvention. Personally, I don’t do really well with people who talk all of the time about how things were. There are a lot of good things from the past that we want to hang onto, but we need to test all of that to make sure it’s really the best way to keep doing it. I said earlier that I’m interested in what’s effective and what’s true, not simply what’s familiar. So, reinvention can be scary and painful, but it’s also what makes life an adventure if you’re willing to see it as an opportunity.

Samir Husni: What’s the biggest misconception you think people have about you?

Trevor Meers: Well, I would lump myself and the Midwest into one answer on that. The Midwest as a whole, including all of us who cover it, is a far more relevant region than a lot of people give us credit for. We have about 52 million consumers within the Midwest, about 21 percent of the population, and so it’s a vast audience that a lot of products aren’t reaching with their media messaging. And if you look at our spendable income, our dollar is worth about a dollar and eight cents in the Midwest compared to other regions. So, if you just think about a consumer in any region and increase their income by eight percent, think what they could do with that.

So, that’s a message that we want to get out there about a region that also has so many innovative things happening, in terms of the chefs and the performing arts, and even the landscape, because people underestimate how great it really is. The Midwest by nature, we tend to be very self-effacing, and a big part of the new Midwest Living approach is we need to be louder and prouder about this region that we cover.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; or something else? How do you unwind?

Trevor Meers: It’s a bit of a busman’s holiday with me and my family, because we cover a lot of travel at our magazine, but we love to travel, so a lot of times you will find us flipping through a guidebook or an Instagram feed or it might even be a U.S. Forestry Park map, planning our next adventure. I count myself very fortunate that I’ve landed at a place where I get to do so much of my work in a category that I personally love. And if you look at our living room raw, it’s going to look like a bit like a Tetris puzzle because we’re always trying to find room for more of the photos from our trips because we like to relive those memories.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Trevor Meers: I’d say, going back to relatively the same answer that we talked about with the biggest challenge, and that’s really choosing the best way to use our resources. And when we see so many directions that we could take a story, it’s picking the one that we think is going to give us the biggest exposure and have the best results for our readers.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“I think one of the things that I believed at the time I started Make was that I could do a more visual magazine in print than I could do online. And online sites, every page looks almost the same. And I think the idea of focusing and then developing that attention of someone is something that magazines are particularly good at.” Dale Dougherty…

“I think a good publishing company is a franchise that can last multiple generations. And many have. That’s kind of been my goal; how do I keep it going? I think we’ve had a lot of initial growth in the magazine to get where we are, we’re at about 100,000 circulation. And it’s kind of stable there. But I think it would be really hard to do that as just a digital website, in terms of having a business model behind it. I think there are a lot of reasons why the web and the Internet are important and we use it, but it doesn’t really give you a business model today. And I hope we can, overtime, migrate some of this and make it work, but the feedback we get from people is actually that they like the tangible product.” Dale Dougherty…

 

Curiosity, ideas, and people. Three ingredients in Dale Dougherty’s business plan for a successful company, which includes a magazine, events and an entire movement of creators. Dale is a man who had the idea that bringing communities of people together to talk technologies and DIY projects would be a fantastic way to engage and connect. He wasn’t wrong. Maker Faire is one of the largest celebrations of invention, creativity, curiosity and hands-on learning that is inspiring the future and showcasing the best in global makers. And the print magazine is the cornerstone and foundation for all things “Maker.”

I spoke with Dale recently and we talked about his awesome ideas involving creativity and hands-on educational experience. And the word experience is key to Dale, because in all things “Maker,” it’s about the experience. From the children who get involved to the adults who bring their own brand of learning to the table, Make Magazine and Maker Faire is a brand that encourages and promotes the people’s ideas. It’s all about the engagement.

Enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Dale Dougherty, founder and CEO of Maker Media as he takes you on this magnificent journey of excitement into the world of technology and creativity.

But first the sound-bites:

On why in this digital age he focused his brand on making things with your hands:Probably the biggest reason is that people do it. It’s counter to a lot of what we’re told, but people use their hands. They actually like it and they find it rewarding, compelling and satisfying. And actually, a pathway into understanding technology is to play with it and to use it and to take it apart and put it back together, make it do things that it wasn’t intended to do. And I think people have always done this, whether it’s technology and computers or steam engines and mechanical things.

On how he began in 2005:I had developed a series of books called “Hacks” at O’Reilly Media and it was largely how people would, from a software perspective, hack software to make it do what they wanted it to do, getting information from different sites and creating something. And usually it was fun and kind of playful, and they were doing projects. And one of the books in that series was about an early digital recorder and they were taking it apart and they were replacing it, and they were updating it and putting in a new hard drive. And it just opened the door a little bit to the kinds of things we do on our computer, making modifications, customizations and personalization. And we’re going to expect to do it across our entire world.

On how he put the whole concept of Make and the Makers together:I think it evolved, meaning first of all, it was finding real people doing stuff. One time I said to Tim O’Reilly, who ran O’Reilly Media, that I thought it was Martha Stewart for geeks. (Laughs) Tim and I, in our work, had always heard of discovered community, like technical communities specifically. These are open-source developers or people that were building some of the infrastructure for the Internet. And just getting to know who they were, what they did, what motivated them, and how they became who they were, was very informative.

On the Maker Faire and whether it was a stroke of genius:I don’t think it was a stroke of genius by any means, there’s always a lucky part of things you do. You find the right people to help you do things and those things actually work out. But the simple conception was that I wanted to find a way to feature makers and their work and make it possible for people to talk to them. I didn’t know if it would work, but I thought it was still worth trying.

On the biggest challenge he’s had to face:I think one of the biggest challenges is paddling upstream, that nobody believes in magazines and nobody believes in events. And getting the capital to do what we’re doing and making money off of what we’re doing is always a struggle, but I think we’ve achieved this certain level of stability and consistency. I heard someone on a podcast recently talking about someone in the media having to get over the idea that it’s a technology company and it’s going to get that kind of return in the market. And I think that’s kind of right. A technology company might come into existence and be gone in six months, because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

On what happened with the magazine called Craft that he tried to produce:We did about two and a half years of Craft and I think a couple of things happened. One is at the time I started Make there was an emerging Indie craft movement, which I found really fascinating. And we feature that at Maker Faires. It was certainly more of a female audience and what was fascinating to me was these were largely women who did not learn crafting from their mom or parents, but they learned from each other and they learned it in an urban setting, taking classes or in other places. I thought we could start with Craft and then end up in a similar place to Make, in terms of how technology was transforming crafting and how crafting itself was a technology.But in 2008, I was faced with a choice and I just didn’t have any capital to fund growing both magazines, so I just needed to consolidate. It was during the recession and I just had to make a choice.

On anything he’d like to add:Going back to that experience, I think one of the things is there is a particular experience of a magazine. If you watch a movie, you’re not trying to text and do a bunch of other things, and I think with most of our online media, we’re in an environment of distraction, not focus. And yet, unlike a book, which is sort of a single narrative, a magazine is richer and takes you in a different direction, it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. As you mentioned earlier, the experience itself of a magazine is still something that is going to stay with us.

On the biggest misconception he thinks people have about him:That’s interesting. I’m very passionate about what I do and sometimes I think that can get played against you. This passionate business person – people will say, well, you should just be looking at the numbers or you should just look at the business, and I guess my goal has been to find a way to make this business work and find a way to serve this audience, because there’s something really valuable here. And sometimes, I think that gets played back as well, you should just focus on the business.

On what he would have tattooed upon his brain that would be there forever and no one could ever forget about him:The message of our Maker Faire is that we’re not just consumers, we’re also producers. We can create things and that’s actually such a human thing, we don’t want to lose it.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home:I do live in wine country on the weekends, I have a small winery, but you might find me doing that. But I’m getting a little too old to drink that much wine. Reading is probably my biggest interest. I do enjoy sports and other things too, all of the teams, but I think the origins of what I do in Make is in curiosity. How do I learn about things? How do I learn about what people do? I find reading is the greatest way to do that.

On what keeps him up at night:To some degree, it’s just running as a business, balancing the social value. Some people think we’re non-profit, and we’re not. So, figuring out how to make this a sustainable business. In the long run, I’ve kept it going 15 years. I want to make sure somehow I can set it up so it continues after my life and because of the value to society and the need for this.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Dale Dougherty,  founder and CEO of Maker Media.

Samir Husni: You’ve been in the “Making” business since 2005, 13-plus years, producing Make Magazine. Tell me in this digital age, why are you doing something that requires handwork, or combines their brains and their hands at the same time, to focus your brand on?

Dale Dougherty: Probably the biggest reason is that people do it. It’s counter to a lot of what we’re told, but people use their hands. They actually like it and they find it rewarding, compelling and satisfying. And actually, a pathway into understanding technology is to play with it and to use it and to take it apart and put it back together, make it do things that it wasn’t intended to do. And I think people have always done this, whether it’s technology and computers or steam engines and mechanical things.

Samir Husni: If you could go back to 2005 and tell me what got you into this?

Dale Dougherty: I had developed a series of books called “Hacks” at O’Reilly Media and it was largely how people would, from a software perspective, hack software to make it do what they wanted it to do, getting information from different sites and creating something. And usually it was fun and kind of playful, and they were doing projects. And one of the books in that series was about an early digital recorder and they were taking it apart and they were replacing it, and they were updating it and putting in a new hard drive. And it just opened the door a little bit to the kinds of things we do on our computer, making modifications, customizations and personalization. And we’re going to expect to do it across our entire world.

And the applications of the future won’t be just on a screen, they’ll be really all around us, because chips and other things will be in stuff and data and sensors and things will be available to us, so how do we think more broadly about that. How do we do that for our home or our car, or just fun things in our lives that we want to do. The idea in some ways, was as I started to do a book series, I thought this is actually hard to fit into book-length chunks, but it actually might make a magazine. So, the original idea was Hacks as a magazine title, but then my kids kind of pushed back on that, they didn’t get the hacking thing very much.

And stepping back, I have to say an important point in doing the research was that I actually saw people doing this and that’s where it came from. The “Hack” series was finding out what people were doing and having them tell how they did it. So, I’ve always been interested in how-to information and the sharing of that. And what fascinated me as I looked back at magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, really back to 1918, 1930s, 1940s, up to Popular Electronics in the ‘70s, it had very much that kind of spirit of how-I-do-stuff. And I really liked that, so in this consumer society that we live in people don’t believe they can do stuff as much. And products are created that sort of keep them out rather than let them in.

And it’s just a hunch in a way that there were people out there who knew how to do this stuff and if I could find them and share what they were doing with others, we might create more people who could do stuff.

Samir Husni: It seems to me that the whole concept of Make and the Makers is based on a three-legged stool of creativity, community and innovation. How did you put that concept together?

Dale Dougherty: I think it evolved, meaning first of all, it was finding real people doing stuff. One time I said to Tim O’Reilly, who ran O’Reilly Media, that I thought it was Martha Stewart for geeks. (Laughs) Tim and I, in our work, had always heard of discovered community, like technical communities specifically. These are open-source developers or people that were building some of the infrastructure for the Internet. And just getting to know who they were, what they did, what motivated them, and how they became who they were, was very informative.

I’m not an engineer, I was an English major in college and I was self-taught in computing and all that. But I knew how they thought and I knew in some ways how they worked. And as I came up with the idea, I would just find more people doing it. And so I was really trying to capture that. And what we’re probably known for now more than the magazine is Maker Faire, which we started a year afterward. And that was just sort of on the recognition that I was moving a lot of people to the magazine and I thought that these were really interesting people and talking to them, their eyes light up and their enthusiastic, and they care tons about what they’re doing. And we don’t get to meet them in any other way; they’re not on TV, they’re not in the newspaper. So, I wanted to really connect with them.

And I wondered if I could combine an art fair, science fair, craft fair and even a county fair, and bring those people together and just ask them to share their projects with other people. And let people talk to them. And I figured we’d see if it worked.

We had a pretty good turnout our first year, about 15,000 people, which is larger in scale than most craft fairs and art fairs and science fairs. And it really just gave me a sense that people are really hungry for this and it was fresh and creative.

And going back to the innovation thing, the question is how do you create innovators; where do they come from? What is it they do before they’re innovators and are recognized as innovators? And I think our traditional answer is they went to school and learned to become innovators. And that’s actually not true. I think they practiced innovation in ways that they didn’t call it that. And it was very much in the spirit of play, like how do I fix something or take something apart? Or how do I combine two things that aren’t supposed to work together?

So, when I started the magazine, I was pretty serious that I wanted it to be about play, not about productivity or how do you make things to make a living. That was a possibility that I was open to, but it seemed that all of this occurred just because people enjoyed doing it. Just the way that some people like to cook and some people like woodworking. And that sort of gave me the identity for the magazine. This is a magazine full of projects, using technology in ways that might be unusual or cool. It wasn’t about fixing your toilet, but it was about what YOU could do, not about what someone else was doing.

If you look at the development over the years of a Popular Science and a Popular Mechanics, in their origins they weren’t trying to be very practical magazines about things that people did, like building a birdhouse or your own two-car garage. It all sort of began with the phrase: this might seem like an unusual project, but it’s something that you can do. I thought it was like an invitation to do stuff, so I wanted the magazine to be primarily about these projects that whether you did them or not, you learned how to do things that you might want to do.

Samir Husni: Most magazines today, it takes them maybe five years, ten years, some magazines 100 years, to be in the event business. But you did it sort of right out of the gate, a year later, after you did the magazine, four issues in you created the Maker Faire. Was it a walk in a rose garden for you or a stroke of genius?

Dale Dougherty: (Laughs) I don’t think it was a stroke of genius by any means, there’s always a lucky part of things you do. You find the right people to help you do things and those things actually work out. But the simple conception was that I wanted to find a way to feature makers and their work and make it possible for people to talk to them. I didn’t know if it would work, but I thought it was still worth trying.

A lot of what actually fascinated me about Make and Maker Faire was that it was kind of running in an almost diagonal direction compared to where the tech industry was going with Facebook and apps. I was thinking that one of the reasons for producing the magazine is it’s tangible and I really thought that people would collect it because I had come across people’s collections of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. In fact, for maybe the first 10 years I produced Make Magazine in a format that was identical, the digest format, that was identical to those early magazines. And it was really intended to be that, because there was something collectible about that format. And I thought nobody knows what website you read and what you find on it, but let me put these things on your desk or in your home or out on the table and people will find them and start talking about  them.

I actually think the key thing, especially in events, is that you learn from what you do. I think too much sometimes goes into planning and trying to make it perfect and to know everything. And one of the things that we’ve learned over the years is that we’ve determined in this that we wanted a family event. I think the magazine was targeted for males, probably 35 and up, maybe not targeted, but that’s kind of where the audience is. But we wanted a family event and we wanted kids there and to make it fun and enjoyable, so that whether you were into this or not, you could still get exposed to it and that worked.

Over the years, it’s been remarkable how many kids are there. It has almost become an educational event, because parents are coming and bringing their kids, saying I want them exposed to this. This is something they don’t see in their world, they don’t see at school. And these are creative, clever people who have original ideas that they make real.

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest challenge in your journey, in this last 13 years, if you could pinpoint to one major challenge that you’ve faced and how you overcame it?

Dale Dougherty: I think one of the biggest challenges is paddling upstream, that nobody believes in magazines and nobody believes in events. And getting the capital to do what we’re doing and making money off of what we’re doing is always a struggle, but I think we’ve achieved this certain level of stability and consistency. I heard someone on a podcast recently talking about someone in the media having to get over the idea that it’s a technology company and it’s going to get that kind of return in the market. And I think that’s kind of right. A technology company might come into existence and be gone in six months, because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

But I think a good publishing company is a franchise that can last multiple generations. And many have. That’s kind of been my goal; how do I keep it going? I think we’ve had a lot of initial growth in the magazine to get where we are, we’re at about 100,000 circulation. And it’s kind of stable there. But I think it would be really hard to do that as just a digital website, in terms of having a business model behind it. I think there are a lot of reasons why the web and the Internet are important and we use it, but it doesn’t really give you a business model today. And I hope we can, overtime, migrate some of this and make it work, but the feedback we get from people is actually that they like the tangible product.

I had this one note from a reader and he said that he waited for the magazine to come and he started clearing out his garage and arranging for it, and the day it came he sat in his chair and he spent two or three hours on the magazine. He said he was filled with dozens of ideas of things that he wanted to do over that next month or two. (Laughs) And I thought, that’s exactly what I wanted. The magazine becomes an experience, like a movie, but more than being an end of itself, it’s a launching unit encouraging you to do things yourself. And that’s where the real is. You don’t need cooking magazines unless you cook. The idea is you become a better cook, you try out new things. And culturally I was trying to create that environment around technology and just the idea of making.

 Samir Husni: I teach that as journalists we have to be more than content providers, we have to be experience makers. And Make is a great example of that.

Dale Dougherty: I think experience is still the primary currency here and as much so as the experience that goes on in the person’s head, and in a sense, what they do with their body and do things in the world as a result. And I think that’s why Maker Faire made sense to me.

One of the interesting challenges that I had early on is when we did our first Faire in New York, we ran a couple in Austin and then we started in New York, but I was getting a lot of requests from people asking why I didn’t do one in Seattle or one in Boston, and then eventually Tokyo and other places. We just didn’t have the ability to do it and so we ended up writing a playbook, meaning guidelines on what Maker Faire is and how to produce it. It wasn’t so much on just the event, but more this is a community event, so you need the community to engage; you need to discover the community of makers and have them be a part of this event, otherwise it doesn’t make sense.

And so we began licensing the Faire in a pretty lightweight manner, to community groups, science centers and some businesses. And in the last couple of years we’ve had about 200 Maker Faires per year in 44 countries. We have a producer network of people that we work with and talk to, but they’re kind of run independently as well.

Samir Husni: You tried to duplicate the same thing that you have done with Make with a magazine called Craft, what happened there?

Dale Dougherty: Yes, we did about two and a half years of Craft and I think a couple of things happened. One is at the time I started Make there was an emerging Indie craft movement, which I found really fascinating. And we feature that at Maker Faires. It was certainly more of a female audience and what was fascinating to me was these were largely women who did not learn crafting from their mom or parents, but they learned from each other and they learned it in an urban setting, taking classes or in other places.

I thought we could start with Craft and then end up in a similar place to Make, in terms of how technology was transforming crafting and how crafting itself was a technology. Thinking about things like wearable computing today, involving textiles and electronics. But in 2008, I was faced with a choice and I just didn’t have any capital to fund growing both magazines, so I just needed to consolidate. It was during the recession and I just had to make a choice.

And I think it also possibly points to something I had to realize, in our heart we weren’t magazine publishers, we were really community organizers and other things. And I kind of think of it as an association model; you exist because this group of people values what you do, and how do you serve them? It isn’t just through magazines, it’s also through events and maybe through other kinds of things like workshops or other ways to learn to do things. And that’s generally from where we evolved. I can’t imagine doing a magazine on another subject today, partly because it’s hard.

Samir Husni: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Dale Dougherty: Going back to that experience, I think one of the things is there is a particular experience of a magazine. If you watch a movie, you’re not trying to text and do a bunch of other things, and I think with most of our online media, we’re in an environment of distraction, not focus. And yet, unlike a book, which is sort of a single narrative, a magazine is richer and takes you in a different direction, it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. As you mentioned earlier, the experience itself of a magazine is still something that is going to stay with us.

I think one of the things that I believed at the time I started Make was that I could do a more visual magazine in print than I could do online. And online sites, every page looks almost the same. And I think the idea of focusing and then developing that attention of someone is something that magazines are particularly good at.

Samir Husni: What’s the biggest misconception you think people have about you?

Dale Dougherty: That’s interesting. I’m very passionate about what I do and sometimes I think that can get played against you. This passionate business person – people will say, well, you should just be looking at the numbers or you should just look at the business, and I guess my goal has been to find a way to make this business work and find a way to serve this audience, because there’s something really valuable here. And sometimes, I think that gets played back as well, you should just focus on the business.

I think a lot of what we’ve done really well with a small team over the years is we have actually stimulated out of a magazine. We’ve created a movement of people that work independently of us, but we’ve created something – this sort of association where people in their hearts belong to something meaningful to them. And they want their kids to belong to it and it helps to shape and define their lives.

Samir Husni: If you could have one thing tattooed upon your brain that no one would ever forget about you, what would it be?

Dale Dougherty: The message of our Maker Faire is that we’re not just consumers, we’re also producers. We can create things and that’s actually such a human thing, we don’t want to lose it.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; or something else? How do you unwind?

Dale Dougherty: (Laughs) I do live in wine country on the weekends, I have a small winery, but you might find me doing that. But I’m getting a little too old to drink that much wine. Reading is probably my biggest interest. I do enjoy sports and other things too, all of the teams, but I think the origins of what I do in Make is in curiosity. How do I learn about things? How do I learn about what people do? I find reading is the greatest way to do that.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Dale Dougherty: To some degree, it’s just running as a business, balancing the social value. Some people think we’re non-profit, and we’re not. So, figuring out how to make this a sustainable business. In the long run, I’ve kept it going 15 years. I want to make sure somehow I can set it up so it continues after my life and because of the value to society and the need for this.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“What’s interesting is it’s a word that gets overused now, this idea of influencers, but I think magazines and magazine brands and magazine editors were the original influencers. And when somebody wants to know something about whatever the topic is, travel or cooking or parenting or fashion or outdoor sports, or just whatever, magazines are sort of a shortcut to all of that knowledge.” Linda Thomas Brooks…

On February 5, 2019 at the beautiful Henry R. Luce Auditorium in New York City, 300 of the most influential people in the magazine media industry, including presidents and CEOs, top publishers, notable editors,  advertisers and working press, representing the decision makers from both publishing and content, will gather together to explore the power and influence of magazine brands and to celebrate magazine media’s long-standing, trusted relationship to both consumers and marketers.

The year 2019 also designates the 100^thanniversary of the MPA – The Association of Magazine Media and Mr. Magazine™ (circa 1919) will step through the portals of time to discuss some of the top titles being published during that exceptional year of magazines. Just as today, there were ups and downs during that year, but magazines were on hand, reflecting society’s interests and issues, and of course, Mr. Magazine’s™ 100-year-old counterpart was there too, tabulating and buying every first edition he could get his hands on.

I spoke with MPA’s President and CEO, Linda Thomas Brooks recently about the American Magazine Media Conference and her upcoming third anniversary (January 15) at the helm of the MPA. Linda is excited and jubilant about the MPA’s marvelous past and about where the association is headed into the future. From Magazine Media 360° to the MPA’s Social Media Report which tracks social media performance, Linda is proud of the accomplishments the MPA has realized before and during her almost three year tenure.

And with the Kelly Awards ceremony and the Top 13 Hottest Launches of 2018, presented by today’s Mr. Magazine™, the February 5 event is chocked full of more fun, excitement and knowledge than can be believed.

Mr. Magazine™ hopes to see you there! And Mr. Magazine™ 1919 certainly invites you to attend as well, before it’s too late and he has to return to the magazines of the past.

So now, please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Linda Thomas Brooks, president and CEO of MPA – The Association of Magazine Media (with comments by Susan Russ, as well).

But first the sound-bites:

On the upcoming 100^thanniversary of the MPA and why she thinks magazines and magazine media have lasted so long: I have 100 reasons, but you don’t need 100 reasons. What’s interesting is it’s a word that gets overused now, this idea of influencers, but I think magazines and magazine brands and magazine editors were the original influencers. And when somebody wants to know something about whatever the topic is, travel or cooking or parenting or fashion or outdoor sports, or just whatever, magazines are sort of a shortcut to all of that knowledge.

On whether the upcoming conference is time to dwell on the past, on what a great 100 years it has been, or look forward to the next 100 years and the future: All of the above, of course. I think we need to own this amazing history that we have, but obviously looking forward is a big part of that. All of these brands have amazing plans, they’ve already made amazing transitions in their business and how they look at things. So, we’re going to celebrate all of that.

On how she feels the MPA is still as relevant today as it was 100 years ago: I haven’t been around for too many of those 100 years (Laughs), but what’s interesting is the issues that were at the forefront 100 years ago are still relevant: dealing with how magazines get into consumers’ hands, and the postal, etc., but our role now is so much broader. When the MPA was started magazines had one format, one life, they were printed magazines. And now our magazines are print, digital, mobile, social and video content and they’re so robust and so dynamic. And why we’re relevant is because we have to stay on top of that, whether that’s things like measurement, like our social media engagement report where we try to put some metrics to it, or helping to advocate for issues that are important in the digital landscape, whether that’s privacy or any of the data issues.

On the points of differentiation between magazine media and the rest of the mass media that’s out there, especially in this day and age: It’s funny somebody else asked me if I had to say the one word that was going to be important in 2019 and I said it would be credibility and that was sort of my word because again, the digital media ecosystem, it’s a really interesting place; you can get lost for a long, long time in the content that’s out there. Some of it’s really good and some of it’s entertaining and some of it’s really horrible and some of it is downright evil. And not just the content, that’s not even getting into the data collection and the data uses. So, the credibility that magazine brands have, the care that they put into the content that they produce, again, across formats, is a really important distinction.

On whether she thinks people should take the conference as a whole package or should they make sure they don’t miss one certain topic: Well, they absolutely must be at my remarks, of course. (Laughs) No, seriously, I think it is the whole package because we’re addressing so many different issues across the day. Some of it talks about the print legacy, some of it talks about the way people are transforming across formats and using things like Instagram; some of them are business side people, some are editors. So, I think they’re all important, but if you look at them in isolation, you’re going to miss the bigger picture, which is how will those pieces come together.

On the longevity of magazine brands and magazine media and why we don’t celebrate them more: We’re going to. And it’s great that you’ve been helping us sort of figure out the trajectory and the path. A publisher asked me recently, they were doing an internal sales meeting and he was looking for some fun facts, and I gave him some of those to say that we really need to own this. It’s funny, I think the industry, and not just the magazine industry, but the broader media marketing industry sort of shied away from the word legacy like it was a bad thing. And I talk to people about that all of the time and ask them: isn’t a legacy what we all want? We want to leave professional legacies; we want to leave personal legacies for our children and our grandchildren, for the people who work for us.

On any other plans for celebration this year of the MPA’s 100^thanniversary: I’m not sure about another special event, but hopefully we’ll be celebrating all year in the way that we talk about the business and the things that we highlight and through the facts and amazing background pieces that you’re uncovering. Part of what the MPA does is help our members come to grips with business issues and we spend all year working really, really hard internally with our members. And so I think looking for some additional opportunities to not only do the hard work, but even if it’s just a moment or two of celebration or the reflection of just looking back on what we’ve accomplished, I think that’s a really important thing.

On approaching her own third year anniversary with the MPA and whether she would liken it to a walk in a rose garden or similar to the marathons that Michael Clinton likes to run: Every day is a walk in the park. It’s funny, Michael and I have gotten comments about it, and I haven’t done as many marathons as he has, but I’m a runner too and I’ve done a number of them. In a lot of ways, I do liken this job to a marathon, because you know, in every job you have good days and you have bad days, you have challenges that didn’t exist, you have things that crop up that you have to deal with, and we always try to remember and to take the long view.

On the one thing she is most proud of accomplishing in those three years: Number one is really sort of focusing on new analytics that help explain the complexity of the magazine ecosystem, so Magazine Media 360, which actually preceded me, I can’t take credit for it, but I think we’ve enhanced and made that better, made it bigger and easier for people to use, and to really help explain how our magazine brands come to life across channels.

On anything she would like to add: Obviously, we’re really excited about the people who are going to be on the stage and sharing their perspective, but the cool thing about this conference too is just the interaction between all of the attendees. So, you’ve been coming long enough and you probably remember that we did that strolling lunch last year, and the impetus for that was our attendees, our members love talking to one another. They don’t want to sit still in one spot, they want to keep the conversations going.

On this being the first time the conference is being held at a magazine publisher’s instead of a hotel or conference venue: As far as we know, yes. Susan has a few more years than me, but we’re both relatively new, but yes, as far as we know this is the first time. And we’re really lucky. Meredith’s facility is so fantastically beautiful and we know that they get a lot of calls for that space, from inside and outside the industry. It’s just an incredible space and we’re really lucky that they’re willing to allow the industry to use it and for people to gather there, because it’s going to be fantastic.

And now for the lightly edited interview with Linda Thomas Brooks, President and CEO, MPA: The Association of Magazine Media:

Samir Husni: On February 5, 2019 during the American Magazine Media Conference, the MPA will be celebrating its centennial. Why do you think magazines and magazine media have lasted so long?

Linda Thomas Brooks: I have 100 reasons, but you don’t need 100 reasons. What’s interesting is it’s a word that gets overused now, this idea of influencers, but I think magazines and magazine brands and magazine editors were the original influencers. And when somebody wants to know something about whatever the topic is, travel or cooking or parenting or fashion or outdoor sports, or just whatever, magazines are sort of a shortcut to all of that knowledge.

Somebody put hours and hours of work into collecting and editing and curating this amazing set of information that I can just pick up on a whim and gain from all of their knowledge and perspective. That continues to be a very valuable package for consumers. I could go on the Internet and find all of that stuff, but Holy Cow, I don’t have time to do all of that. I have a day job.

Samir Husni: As you look forward to the conference in less than three weeks, are you going to dwell on the past, on what a great 100 years it has been, or you’re looking forward to the next 100 years and the future?

Linda Thomas Brooks: All of the above, of course. I think we need to own this amazing history that we have, but obviously looking forward is a big part of that. All of these brands have amazing plans, they’ve already made amazing transitions in their business and how they look at things. So, we’re going to celebrate all of that.

SamirHusni: How do you feel that the MPA is still as relevant today as it was 100 years ago?

Linda Thomas Brooks: I haven’t been around for too many of those 100 years (Laughs), but what’s interesting is the issues that were at the forefront 100 years ago are still relevant: dealing with how magazines get into consumers’ hands, and the postal, etc., but our role now is so much broader.

When the MPA was started magazines had one format, one life, they were printed magazines. And now our magazines are print, digital, mobile, social and video content and they’re so robust and so dynamic. And why we’re relevant is because we have to stay on top of that, whether that’s things like measurement, like our social media engagement report where we try to put some metrics to it, or helping to advocate for issues that are important in the digital landscape, whether that’s privacy or any of the data issues. So, we have a much bigger job now that magazines themselves are much more diverse businesses.

Samir Husni: I noticed some key words for the conference this year, such as trust and credibility. What do you feel are the points of differentiation between magazine media and the rest of the mass media that’s out there, especially in this day and age?

Linda Thomas Brooks: It’s funny somebody else asked me if I had to say the one word that was going to be important in 2019 and I said it would be credibility and that was sort of my word because again, the digital media ecosystem, it’s a really interesting place; you can get lost for a long, long time in the content that’s out there. Some of it’s really good and some of it’s entertaining and some of it’s really horrible and some of it is downright evil. And not just the content, that’s not even getting into the data collection and the data uses.

So, the credibility that magazine brands have, the care that they put into the content that they produce, again, across formats, is a really important distinction. And I think both consumers and marketers are starting to figure that out because there’s a lot of stuff out there that is unhealthy for a brand, unhealthy for a person to read or consume; unhealthy for our society.

Samir Husni: Needless to say, the conference is the largest gathering of magazine and magazine media makers in the country. If you were to point to one session, would it be the C-suite insights, the sales and marketing leadership, the business transformation; I mean, do you think people should take the conference as a whole package or should they make sure they don’t miss one certain topic? In other words, you might miss this, but definitely don’t miss that.

Linda Thomas Brooks: Well, they absolutely must be at my remarks, of course. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

Linda Thomas Brooks: No, seriously, I think it is the whole package because we’re addressing so many different issues across the day. Some of it talks about the print legacy, some of it talks about the way people are transforming across formats and using things like Instagram; some of them are business side people, some are editors. So, I think they’re all important, but if you look at them in isolation, you’re going to miss the bigger picture, which is how will those pieces come together.

Samir Husni: As I look back at some of the history of magazines, I’ve been researching magazines from 1919 and also looking at the charter of the MPA and the folks who founded it, there are more than 55 magazine titles, brands, that are still being published today and more than 100 advertising brands that are still in business today. Can you think of any other entity that has survived through thick and thin, good and bad, the way magazines have? And why don’t we celebrate magazines even more?

Linda Thomas Brooks: We’re going to. And it’s great that you’ve been helping us sort of figure out the trajectory and the path. A publisher asked me recently, they were doing an internal sales meeting and he was looking for some fun facts, and I gave him some of those to say that we really need to own this. It’s funny, I think the industry, and not just the magazine industry, but the broader media marketing industry sort of shied away from the word legacy like it was a bad thing. And I talk to people about that all of the time and ask them: isn’t a legacy what we all want? We want to leave professional legacies; we want to leave personal legacies for our children and our grandchildren, for the people who work for us.

So, I think the fact that these magazine brands have this unbelievable legacy, and by the way, many of them were the earliest adopters on new ways to bring their brands to life too. And I think that is something that we need to celebrate more than we do.

Samir Husni: I know that the AMMC is going to be the beginning of the celebration for the MPA’s centennial, but what other plans do you have this year to celebrate such a milestone?

Linda Thomas Brooks: I’m not sure about another special event, but hopefully we’ll be celebrating all year in the way that we talk about the business and the things that we highlight and through the facts and amazing background pieces that you’re uncovering. Part of what the MPA does is help our members come to grips with business issues and we spend all year working really, really hard internally with our members. And so I think looking for some additional opportunities to not only do the hard work, but even if it’s just a moment or two of celebration or the reflection of just looking back on what we’ve accomplished, I think that’s a really important thing.

And sometimes just like in your everyday life, you have work to do and errands to run and you forget to stop and smell the roses, so to speak. And so we’re going to try and incorporate those moments all year.

Samir Husni: Talking about celebration, you’re approaching your own third anniversary at the MPA. Tell me, do you feel this journey at the MPA has been a celebration for you, a walk in a rose garden, or maybe one of those marathons that Michael Clinton likes to run?

Linda Thomas Brooks: (Laughs) Every day is a walk in the park. It’s funny, Michael and I have gotten comments about it, and I haven’t done as many marathons as he has, but I’m a runner too and I’ve done a number of them. In a lot of ways, I do liken this job to a marathon, because you know, in every job you have good days and you have bad days, you have challenges that didn’t exist, you have things that crop up that you have to deal with, and we always try to remember and to take the long view.

And to say that there are hard things that we need to help remember, there are issues on which we need to advocate, but always remembering why we’re doing it, which is that these brands matter. They matter to marketers and to consumers and to the world at large. And we want to make sure that we help those brands perpetuate themselves. I don’t want to live in a world where all media is crowdsourced. I want our brands to be around to inform and engage people and to bring people together on the basis of facts and culture and inspiration, and enlighten people. Those are all really important societal elements, beyond just advertising and marketing.

Samir Husni: If you look back at your three years so far with the MPA, and someone cornered you and asked you to name one thing you are most proud of, what would it be?

Linda Thomas Brooks: (Laughs) Can I have two?

Samir Husni: (Laughs too) Okay, the art of the deal, go ahead.

Linda Thomas Brooks: Number one is really sort of focusing on new analytics that help explain the complexity of the magazine ecosystem, so Magazine Media 360, which actually preceded me, I can’t take credit for it, but I think we’ve enhanced and made that better, made it bigger and easier for people to use, and to really help explain how our magazine brands come to life across channels.

And then related to that, the social media engagement tool is just another example and we have more tools in the works to help quantitatively explain the benefits of magazine media content. So, I’m really proud of that because it changed from just sort of an esoteric conversation to something that we can really point to the data and say: look, you don’t have to believe me, here are the comparable data facts that really prove the value of magazine brands.

And then also I think related to that is the focus again on quality content and helping to explain to people what goes into a magazine. Why is that such a beautiful thing? What’s behind it? And I know you’ve seen it, we did the first one at your conference, the Bubble Charts, where we deconstructed edits to show people what goes into it. We’ve done a number of those and some other exhibits and conversations like that.

I think for a while, as an industry, we forgot to explain to people why what we do is different than somebody just sitting down and opening their laptop and sharing their perspective. And so focusing again on the content and the quality of the content, and the process; what is the editorial process and what goes into it? I think that’s a really important element and another thing that I’m really proud of.

Susan Russ: And I would add conversations. Linda has conversations literally all day, every day. And I think that has really moved the deal in many, many areas, whether it be among the board, among our members, the people who are out on the street every day, and the marketers and the advertisers. So, there is a lot of really good, healthy conversation.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Susan Russ: I’ll just say that we obviously want everyone to attend the conference, but the agenda is really packed with star-studded magazine media luminaries. We have editors in chief from all over the spectrum of types and size, new magazines and older magazines, and I can’t remember any conference that has had such representation from so many leaders that are doing this business every single day.

Linda Thomas Brooks: Obviously, we’re really excited about the people who are going to be on the stage and sharing their perspective, but the cool thing about this conference too is just the interaction between all of the attendees. So, you’ve been coming long enough and you probably remember that we did that strolling lunch last year, and the impetus for that was our attendees, our members love talking to one another. They don’t want to sit still in one spot, they want to keep the conversations going.

So, we’re doing a similar thing this year at lunchtime, so that people have real food and don’t starve, but also have the chance to talk with one another. It’s not that they don’t know each other, but it’s hard for people to work in time for that in their day jobs. So, having that time to share and celebrate, to give one another some ribbing, just whatever it is, is really cool.

Then the awards at the end, including the recognition that you help us with, but also the Kelly’s and the people that we’re honoring from the industry. Again, I think just taking a few minutes to celebrate what is good and the work that gets done in our business.

Samir Husni: Isn’t this the first time that the event actually takes place at a magazine publisher’s and not at a hotel or a conference venue?

Linda Thomas Brooks: As far as we know, yes. Susan has a few more years than me, but we’re both relatively new, but yes, as far as we know this is the first time. And we’re really lucky. Meredith’s facility is so fantastically beautiful and we know that they get a lot of calls for that space, from inside and outside the industry. It’s just an incredible space and we’re really lucky that they’re willing to allow the industry to use it and for people to gather there, because it’s going to be fantastic.

And also I think it’s a cultural shift. I think for many, for a lot of years in the business people were sort of very competitive; a publisher from one house didn’t necessarily want to be at the other guy’s house, and I think that’s all changed now. People are still competitive in the marketplace, of course, but their very collegial and I think that they understand that there are many aspects of the business in which it helps to collaborate.

Samir Husni: And that sends a great message as far as the MPA’s centennial, because when the association was formed, all of these competitors, all of these 19 competitors, came together to help the membership and to help promote the business, rather than to promote their individual titles. It was more of a collective force, all working together from all of the aspects of the industry. And 100 years later, almost the same thing is happening.

Linda Thomas Brooks: Yes, here we are again.

Samir Husni: Thank you.