Mr. Magazine

“I think there is a place for a curated service, a lifestyle, entertainment, culture, food magazine. It’s not like we’re trying to rewrite the rulebook. We’re just trying to do a really good magazine, which I think after working in media for so long, I’ve really learned how to do.” Shirley Halperin

To say Shirley Halperin, the new editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine , is passionate about magazines, would be an understatement.  Halperin launched her own fanzine as a teen and became an intern at High Times magazine before moving to US Weekly to work under celebrated editor Janice Min, whom she credits with nourishing her editorial skills.

An immigrant who spoke no English when she first arrived in the United States from Israel is today a master of the English language and a skilled and talented editor.  Over the last three decades she practiced her editing skills in a host of consumer and trade publications.  She moved to Los Angeles approximately twenty years ago and the first thing she did was subscribe to Los Angeles magazine.  She thought that was the best vehicle for her to navigate the city.  That familiarity with the magazine became her guiding light as she assumed the leadership position at the magazine and as she carries the new torch to help shed a celebratory light on the city through the pages of the magazine.

“Let’s look at the magazine with a tourist’s eyes. Look at this beautiful city that we live in that has so many different climates and so many different places you can go, and such a multicultural makeup,“ she told me in a fun engaging conversation we had last week.  She added, “The food scene has really been elevated and fashion has been elevated and it’s become the destination for cannabis tourism — all of these things that have happened in the last 10 to 15 years deserved more shine in the pages of the magazine.”

Judging by the few issues she’s edited so far, her statement above rings very true.  Just look at some of the cover stories below and take a look at the current April cover that will hit the newsstands shortly.  As Shirley told me, “ I am bringing the art of magazine making to the magazine.”  Indeed she is.

Enjoy my conversation with Shirley Halperin, editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine.  But first for the sound bites:

On her vision for the magazine: Let’s bring the ooh-la-la back to LA magazine. 

On changing the magazine culture: When I came in, the first thing I wanted to do was just cheer up the place.  It was a little bit of a downer… The covers were like about fires, mudslides and is the apocalypse coming?  Is California going to fall off into the ocean?

On the role of a city magazine: I always like to say we curate your free time. There is a place for a curated service, a lifestyle, entertainment, culture, food magazine. It’s not like we’re trying to rewrite the rulebook. We’re just trying to do a  really good magazine.

On the magazine readership: I think our readership is older.  They came up with magazines.  They remember Los Angeles magazine. This has had a lot of celebrities and politicians and sports stars. And it has made its impact locally.

On the role of AI creating content: In terms of delivering the content that we deliver, it is high quality content.  And it’s using these years and years of all of our editors experience into putting together a really high quality editorial product. I just don’t think of AI as editorial.

On her most pleasant surprise since assuming the job: Learning the diplomacy of working in a team, keeping the peace, keeping people happy, making sure you have a business plan and a vision.

On her biggest challenge: The business side… It’s really about finding the advertisers, finding the companies that you can grow with.

On adapting to a digital world: It took a while for the print world, the old guard to come around to digital. And now we’re expected to be experts in digital… I would say I’m an expert at making a print magazine. Absolutely. But am I an expert in digital? I’m still learning.

On the separation between church and state: I definitely think the wall has been grayed a little bit even at very mass market magazines.  Major national publications by big publishers are doing a lot of advertorial and sponsored content.  I understand why they’re doing it. It is a must for the business.

On AI and Sora and truth and misinformation:  What we bring to our readers is authenticity.  We vet our articles.   All of the sources are fact checked.  They go through many eyeballs. That’s something that AI doesn’t do. It’s like how do you know what’s real? 

On bridging the gap among the magazine readers:  The magazine readership is very wealthy and doesn’t always know street culture or where the best tacos are or any of those things. I’m really trying to bridge those worlds.  L.A. can feel like a very vast sprawl. But in a sense, we have a very tight community and we need to bring that sense of community back.  So that’s  the overarching theme.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Shirley Halperin, editor in chief, Los Angeles magazine:

Samir Husni: Congratulations on being the new editor of Los Angeles magazine, the magazine for the second largest city in the country.

Shirley Halperin: Thank you.

Samir Husni: You have a great responsibility almost one in every four Los Angeles folks read the magazine and the digital site. What’s your goal? What’s your objective of leading such a magazine after your illustrious career in so many other publications from Entertainment Weekly to The Hollywood Reporter to Variety?

Shirley Halperin: Well first of all, what an honor to speak with you. You are the man of magazines and I’ve been following your work for a long time. So thank you.

Samir Husni: Thank you, Shirley.

Shirley Halperin: When I moved to LA from New York in 2005, almost 20 years ago, the first thing I did was subscribe to Los Angeles magazine. I didn’t know anything about my city, I didn’t know where to go, what to eat.  I found the magazine to be an incredible resource, and really made me feel like I had a new home, like I knew what my new home was.  So I was always a very big fan of this magazine.

In terms of my goal for the magazine when I came in, the first thing I wanted to do was just cheer up the place.  It was a little bit of a downer. It had been after COVID, which granted was incredibly challenging, especially for magazines. The LA Magazine covers were about fires, mudslides and is the apocalypse coming?  Is California going to fall off into the ocean?

And after COVID, we all needed to be lifted up. So my vision for the magazine was, let’s bring the ooh-la-la back to LA magazine.  Let’s look at the magazine with a tourist’s eyes. Look at this beautiful city that we live in that has so many different climates and so many different places you can go, and such a multicultural makeup. The food scene has really been elevated and fashion has been elevated and it’s become the destination for cannabis tourism — all of these things that have happened in the last 10 to 15 years deserved more shine in the pages of the magazine. And I know this because I was a subscriber.

I wasn’t looking to leave Variety, but the position became available and the people who bought the magazine I knew well, especially Ben Meiselas, who’s a very interesting media figure. It just felt right. This is the magazine that I loved and I really feel like I could put my touch on it and make it more for all of LA as opposed to one small segment of LA, which was a very wealthy part of LA.

LA is much more than that. So that was my overarching vision, is to look at it with tourist’s eyes. Remember what it is that we love about this city. Highlight the things that this city has really excelled in, especially in the last five to 10 years. And that is mainly food and culture. That was my vision.

Samir Husni: I took a look at your LAmag.com and it feels like you are now more of a daily with a monthly print publication?

Shirley Halperin: Kind of. I think all the magazines have had to adjust to this.  What information do you provide to your readers on a daily basis?  And what is the stuff that you really you put a team on, editors on,  you have it vetted and looked at by several different people.  It’s like two different products.

I don’t see us as a daily news site necessarily, but I see us as a daily site. I feel like we need to connect with our with our community every day.  And what people are talking about. So if one day it’s the graffiti towers, there’s these abandoned buildings in Los Angeles that have been tagged and now people are like, is this an art project? Is this vandalism? That’s very pertinent to everyday life in in LA.  So I’m just trying to find those stories with a very small team.

I started in magazines running my own little magazine, my own little fanzine, and I had a very small team.  So I feel like I went back completely full circle to 1995 when I was starting out.

Samir Husni: As you look to implement your goal for Los Angeles magazine, what do you think is the role of a city magazine in this digital age? What’s the role of a printed city monthly magazine?

Shirley Halperin: Well, it’s highly curated. I always like to say we curate your free time. What are you going to do on the weekend? Where are you going to go eat? Which neighborhoods are you going to visit? Are you thinking of moving? What is this neighborhood like? What is it like by the hills? What’s it like by the ocean? I feel like there’s a place for that because there’s not a lot of print publications left in Los Angeles. We just broke the news that L.A. Weekly was laying off most of its edit staff. The L.A. Times is really in a mess right now. It’s not like we have a lot of competition.

There is Angeleno and there’s a couple of other magazines here. But I don’t think that they provide the sort of service magazine that we do, which is putting our editors on curating your best life in Los Angeles. I joke that I wish the new generation would embrace print magazines the way they embrace vinyl records.  Can you imagine if one day, like all the gen alphas are like, we just want print,  that’s my dream.  I think our readership is older.  They came up with magazines.  They remember Los Angeles magazine. This has had a lot of celebrities and politicians and sports stars. And it has made its impact locally.

So locally, yes, I think there is a place for a curated service, a lifestyle, entertainment, culture, food magazine. It’s not like we’re trying to rewrite the rulebook. We’re just trying to do a really good magazine, which I think after working in media for so long, I’ve really learned how to do.

Samir Husni: What role do AI and Sora play in the making of Los Angeles magazine? What are you doing to ensure that readers continue to put their trust in the magazine content?

Shirley Halperin:  What we bring to our readers is authenticity.  We vet our articles.   All of the sources are fact checked.  They go through many eyeballs. That’s something that AI doesn’t do. It’s like how do you know what’s real?  We want to touch on what’s real. Now, if that means that there’s going to be immersive exhibits you can do in L.A. that use AI, well, that’s fantastic. But in terms of delivering the content that we deliver, it is high quality content.  And it’s using these years and years of all of our editors experience into putting together a really high quality editorial product. I just don’t think of AI as editorial. I love what it can do.

We use it sometimes to try out headlines. It’s very useful, but it does still come down to the editor saying this is the headline that’s going to work best in terms of our readership, the SEO, all of that. I fully expect L.A. to be among the leaders in bringing together innovation in AI.  We’ll see what that does to the news business.  It’s very sort of vague right now.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant surprise since you accepted the job as editor in chief?

Shirley Halperin:  How much amazing food I get to eat. (she laughs).  What has been surprising? Learning the diplomacy of working in a team, keeping the peace, keeping people happy, making sure you have a business plan and a vision.  And I’m surprised that myself, having been a number two and a number three for a long time, that I was able to take all of those  skills that I learned from editors that I really look up to, like Janice Min, who I worked with for 12 years, like my friend Lori Majewski, who’s doing a lot of writing for us, and Jeremy Helligar at People.

Those are the people that taught me to edit. And now I’m taking all of those skills and using them. That’s what surprised me is my sort of ability to filter all of that information and all of that knowledge from working in the trades, from working at massive entertainment magazines, from working at Us Weekly, where you had to live and die on the newsstand, taking all of that and putting it into this this project has been fulfilling and surprising. 

Samir Husni: What was the biggest challenge?

Shirley Halperin:  The biggest challenge is the business side. I think back to the days of 1999 and 2000 when there was so much money out there from the dot.com boom and it filtered its way to the print magazines. That is no longer the situation. Now it’s really about finding the advertisers, finding the companies that you can grow with.

There’s a lot of really amazing local companies that start in L.A. whether it’s like food or products they start in Erewhon and Whole Foods and then they make it across the country. We need to build with those brands and with those companies. So the business side has been challenging.

Not everyone knows the media world, the traditional print media world. There’s a lot of a learning curve with our owners, which who have been great and super supportive, but they’re not in the media business. So that’s been challenging.

That’s not to say we should still do it this way, but there is a wisdom to this and the wisdom is X, Y and Z.  I just love magazines. I grew up loving magazines. My dream was to be the editor of Bop magazine, which was a teeny bopper magazine, and I became the editor of that magazine.

I’ve fulfilled a lot of my magazine aspirations. But that doesn’t mean that the love for the media has gone away. It really hasn’t.  I’m just as motivated and ambitious today with magazines. But yeah, the business side is a challenge. Print is a challenge.  Finding a balance for your revenues from events, from digital, your traditional advertising, activations, all of the things that didn’t really exist when I was coming up. Now that’s the bulk of the business.  So it takes a lot of business thinking as opposed to purely editorial.

Samir Husni: Do you believe there is still a wall between church and state or that disappeared to the digital revolution?

Shirley Halperin:  I don’t think it’s purely digital. I definitely think the wall has been grayed a little bit even at very mass market magazines.  Major national publications by big publishers are doing a lot of advertorial and sponsored content.  I understand why they’re doing it. It is a must for the business. It’s revenue and you need it.

When I came to Variety, they had a similar situation. They didn’t have a music section. They brought me in because they saw that there was a music business and they wanted to tap into it.  A lot of that was figuring out where there were business prospects, so what kind of editorial package can I put together that can be sold and turned into an event and a moneymaker?  My first task was we need you to come up with a new music franchise for this magazine.  I said I’d always wanted to do a thing called Hitmakers, which is you take a song and you break apart every person who worked on that song — the songwriter, the producer, of course, the artist, but also the team, the marketing team, the A&R team … Those are the people that actually like get into the grooves of the music.  We did this event. We tried it for the first year.  It went really well. Now it’s in year seven. It’s a giant event, hundreds of people and major advertising goes into that issue.

There’s table sales and there’s sponsorships.  It turned into a moneymaker. But that doesn’t take away from the editorial vision, which is let’s break down these songs and really see who is responsible.  A lot of people take credit for a hit song and say I worked on that. I came up with that. But it actually is like probably a dozen to 20 people that it takes to make a hit song.

That’s an example of something where it’s like, is that line blurred? I don’t know. I see it more as collaborative. What are your goals on the business side? What are my goals on the editorial side? And how can we come together with the understanding that this needs to be profitable? It’s not a purely editorial product.

There is a marketing and an advertising component to it. How can we make it work for us?  I’m always thinking of things where we should call this brand and do this special activation that it always involves print of some sort. So maybe it’s a display outdoors.

Maybe it’s something that folds out in our magazine. But it’s something that you can’t get on the Internet. That is what a magazine provides.

That goes back to like my teeny bopper days where I wanted the biggest poster of Duran Duran that I can buy at my local supermarket for $2.95. And that was the magazine that I bought. So I’m still trying to come at it with that with that idea.

And that’s why I’m like Gen Alpha, please embrace magazines. Let us make beautiful products for you. That’s kind of my philosophy on it.

Samir Husni:  Way back city and regional magazine used to have the best off and the worst off. And then, they stuck to the best off. Do you think city and regional magazines have to focus more on the positive things in town?

Shirley Halperin:   Absolutely. That was one of the things I was thinking about when I took the job is to shine a light on the city.  Yes, we have a lot of problems. There’s a homelessness crisis, and the fentanyl pandemic hasn’t come here, but it will.

There’s social media and there’s kids that are having trouble. They’re all incredibly important. And we do shine a light on them.  But I really just wanted to bring back that positivity.  L.A. is made up of mostly transplants. The reason people move here is because they want the sunshine. They want the quality of life. They want a backyard. They want to have pets.

They want to be able to drive to the to the mountains to ski, and the ocean to swim. So, I just wanted to bring that focus back to that. Just thinking of all the people that moved to L.A. or that live here and don’t really know their city or were holed up for three years during the pandemic and have to rediscover their city.  All of these things were stuff  that I thought of.  There’s a lot of things that I want to do that I still haven’t done. But they all celebrate the city.

I grew up in New Jersey and went to spent my early years in New York.  There were alt weeklies like  the Village Voice, the New York Press,  and all of these publications, free weeklies that were available around the city.  They were a resource. It saddens me that they’re no longer around. But I’m taking the feelings and the connections that those  alt weeklies brought and trying to bring it into L.A. magazine.

It’s a challenge. The magazine readership is of a higher income bracket and doesn’t always know street culture or where the best tacos are. I’m really trying to bridge those worlds.  L.A. can feel like a very vast sprawl. But in a sense, we have a very tight community and we need to bring that sense of community back.  So that’s  the overarching theme.

Samir Husni:  So before I ask you my personal questions, is there anything I did not ask and you would like to add?

Shirley Halperin:  That’s such a good question.  I ask a lot of my interview subjects that same question. It sounds like a really dumb question, but it’s actually important because, like, you know, you’re not a mind reader. And it’s often that last thought that I find ends up giving you something more.

So is there anything you didn’t ask about?

I spent 13 years in the trade world, which is a very different animal from the consumer magazine world.  The print advertising situation is not as dire. They need those Oscar campaigns and Emmy campaigns.  I learned a lot about how this town works, which even though it’s a regional publication, it’s not an entertainment publication. This is an entertainment town. And I really feel you need to know that world coming into a position like this as an EIC at L.A. magazine.

So I would just give a lot of credit, even though these products, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Variety were not newsstand titles. They still were incredibly educational in terms of how you hit the town and you hit a particular industry.  You work to cover it well and work with it well.

I think those skills really came in handy. Again, thanks to Janice (Min) for bringing me on to THR and showing me the way.

Samir Husni:  My two final questions.  If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking?

Shirley Halperin:  Probably cooking.  I love to cook.  Another pandemic thing that I picked up, I became obsessed with cooking and quality vegetables and produce.   It’s another reason why I moved to Los Angeles, just for the good produce and the good food.

I would probably be watching bad reality TV. I might be listening to a podcast about some crime that happened forever ago.  Or I might also be watching a documentary about some long lost blues musician. I’m just like a real sponge of knowledge.

We had an event last week. It was our L.A. Woman event honoring Kris Jenner as Woman of the Year.  I didn’t launch it, but rethought it for L.A. magazine. Among the honorees were Elizabeth and Catherine An, two sisters who came from a Vietnamese refugee family and went on to build a food-fusion dynasty here in California via the restaurant Crustacean.

I also emigrated, from Israel, and I didn’t speak English when I got here. So all of my immersion and ESL classes were with refugees who were coming from Vietnam or other parts of Southeast Asia at the same time.

And when I was in college at Rutgers University, I was a history major and studied the Vietnam War, which, of course, taught me a lot about America and our politics.  Then to see these incredibly successful two Vietnamese women, I immediately thought about all of the Vietnam studies that I’d done. You know, so it’s just like the sort of like passion for history that’s still there.

I’m so happy and thankful for it. I think a lot of it is because of my family, being Holocaust survivors and then moving to Israel and then moving to the U.S., It’s like we’re a real immigrant story. And I’m fascinated by other immigrant stories.

Samir Husni:  My last question is what keeps Shirley up at night these days?

Shirley Halperin: I’m always thinking about stories that are like three to four to five months away. Another thing I learned at the trades was the value of a good anniversary, you know, whether it’s like the launch of a major studio or someone’s birth or someone’s death or someone’s legacy.

I’m always thinking about like, oh, it’s 2024. What happened in 1964 that we could mark this year or maybe 84?  Should we be looking at 84? Is it an 80s year right now? These are the things I think about as I’m going to sleep. Isn’t that ridiculous? No,  it’s fun.

It keeps your mind working.

Samir Husni:  Thank you

“I think that the opportunity for ADWEEK is really to transcend the category of trade publication and to evolve into a business intelligence resource platform tool for not just advertisers and marketers and people who are in the brand world, but also media, technology, publishers, and ultimately the aspiration for us to be as valuable and as essential to CEOs and CFOs.” Will Lee

“I want to capture the executive or the director’s 8 to 10 minutes of their morning media diet, however long that is, and however they consume it, but really be essential to them on a daily basis.” Will Lee

From a hefty background in magazine media to a role at NPR, Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK, is now set to transfer an industry publication to a major resource platform tool to advertisers, marketers and people who are in the brand business world.

He brings his passion and dedication to an industry in dire need of such passion and dedication.  A lot has changed since ADWEEK was launched in 1979.  The industry that the magazine was launched to serve is not the same in 2024 and the magazine itself is not the same.  High hopes and plans are in store for ADWEEK.

To check on those hopes and plans I reached out to Will Lee, who was appointed CEO eight months ago and we had a very pleasant and futuristic conversation. 

But before you read the entire conversation, here are the soundbites:

On his view of the ADWEEK community: What I mean by community is not just convenings and gatherings, but really having a very core group of people who help shape ADWEEK both from external side and inside.

On the role of Sora and AI: I happen to think Sora is something that we need, and generally video. Video based AI is something that we as a publication and as experts really need to help marketers and advertisers understand how to use it and also what the dangers are.

On the trust factor of AI: But if we can figure out a way to use AI to service the information that we already have and the information that we’ll be creating,  people will trust us as opposed to GPT-4 or Gemini.

On the role of print in a digital age: I believe in the ability of a print publication to create a relationship with the consumer that is very different than digital or social or audio or other formats. And the reason that is, it’s  almost an evergreen resource.

On the role of the magazine cover: It’s about having covers that get people’s attention and  say something and are meaningful to the audience. Because, again, these covers, these magazines have to have real utility. So that’s the thing I’m going to stress with the magazine, is that it is very, it is an important and essential utility.

On his job at NPR: So this was almost like a sabbatical that I took in public media. What I would say specifically about NPR, is that NPR actually is a very sophisticated commercial business, if you will.  Obviously, it’s a non-profit, but it thinks like a commercial media company.

On the changes of the media business model: That the notion of scale and audience size as a predictor of commercial success, that correlation is completely going to change

On looking at the future of the business: I think about the agency landscape and about what will happen to creative agencies as a result of Sora and all the rest of the AI tools, as well as how quickly the internet and web publishing are going to be drastically altered over the next two years.

On his views of the open web: We’re about to enter a phase of the open web, which is going to be literally one million times worse than what the blogosphere looked like in 2005. If you think about the barrier to entry was very low, anybody could start a blog and there was all this terrible, low quality content out there. Some of it got monetized and some of it didn’t.

On what keeps him up at night: The way that our media is now shaped from a financial standpoint and from a business standpoint, where so much of the, the media that is high quality, you have to pay for, and you have to pay a lot for, I think is a real problem.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK.

Samir Husni: Congratulations. It has been eight months since you’ve become the CEO of ADWEEK.

Will Lee: Yes.

Samir Husni: I read you are going to transform ADWEEK from an industry publication to a platform that will reflect that advertising, marketing, journalism that’s taking place in 2024. Can you give me a brief roadmap on what your plans are?

Will Lee: Sure.  I think that the opportunity for ADWEEK is really to transcend the category of trade publication and to really evolve into a business intelligence resource platform tool, however you want to describe it, for the not just advertisers and marketers and people who are in the brand world, but also media, technology, publishers, and ultimately ask for the aspiration is for us to be as valuable and as essential to CEOs and CFOs. Also other members of the C-suite as we are to marketers and advertisers.

Now, of course, the brand ecosystem is still the core of our audience. So we want to be able to serve them in the ways that they need to, but really we want to become a much more valuable resource to the entire ecosystem and to the entire executive team in terms of  a roadmap. That’s sort of the overall vision.

In terms of the roadmap it’s a few things:  One is to continue to raise the standard and the level of our content product. So that is creating new and better email products, for instance, creating new and better audio and video products, and also to use the magazine in more essential and interesting ways. I want to capture the executive or the director’s 8 to 10 minutes of their morning media diet, however long that is, and however they consume it, but really be essential to them on a daily basis.

It is about elevating the level of the product. So if you go beyond that, then in terms of the customer continuum for ADWEEK, there’s the editorial content and there’s our event business, right? We’ll continue to evolve that and connect our editorial and content to our live events in a much, much deeper way. So that’s another part of the roadmap. 

The third part of it is really building community. What I mean by community is not just convenings and gatherings, but really having a very core group of people who help shape ADWEEK both from external side and inside.  Really have a way of connecting all of that into one continuum for our audience.

Samir Husni: You have a trusted brand. How are you going to deal with all the untrusted things that are taking place? From folks using AI to create deep fake videos or whether the new Sora that is coming soon, that’s going to create video from a short text.  What are your plans to combat the negatives of AI and Sora and all the other new technologies that’s coming up?

Will Lee: Sure. I happen to think Sora is something that we need, and generally video. Video based AI is something that we as a publication and as experts really need to help marketers and advertisers understand how to use it and also what the dangers are.

From an editorial standpoint, we need to be curating the best information.  Both from experts internally, but also from the industry to help people understand how to navigate that. There’s a possibility that video AI and particularly, and maybe source specifically, could be the subject of an entire conference for us? Going forward and getting people to talk about it and to understand what the challenges are is really important.

Separately, because we’re a trust resource, one of the things we’ll be working on is using AI to sort of confine the amount of information that you can get from ADWEEK. In other words, almost create  an AI portal or a bot, if you were some kind of product that uses the 45 years of information that we have at ADWEEK to inform the consumer. So we can use it to our benefit.

Obviously, the large language models are going to scrape our stuff from the web and other places.  But if we can figure out a way to use AI to service the information that we already have and the information that we’ll be creating,  people will trust us as opposed to GPT-4 or Gemini.

Samir Husni: In the last few days we’ve seen that those sources are deeply untrustworthy.  When ADWEEK was started in 1979 the status of marketing, the status of advertising and the status of journalism were completely different that we are seeing today. How are you going to use the print edition of ADWEEK to reflect the true value of advertising, the true value of marketing, the true value of journalism, or what directives are you giving to your people?

Will Lee: It’s a really good question, Samir.  As you know, my background, my last job was at NPR and we had a  legacy media source there as broadcast radio. Before that I was with People, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and so on.  I really believe in the ability of a print publication to create a relationship with the consumer that is very different than digital or social or audio or other formats. And the reason that is, it’s almost an evergreen resource.  

The thing that we need to do in our magazine going forward is to be very high utility.  It can’t just be pretty pictures and interesting graphics, but it has to be a utility. I talk about it like the magazine should almost be like a Harvard Business School case study that you actually want to read. In other words, like it’s something that you can keep around, you can pass around, you can, you can refer back to it. And of course that product will be very, very closely tied in and integrated with our digital product and our other products.

But how we can transform ADWEEK, the magazine into something that someone wants to keep,  so for instance, if you think about the Harvard Business Review,  we all have stacks of Harvard Business Reviews  in our homes that we don’t want to throw away because we’re worried that we’re going to miss something. And yet you might not read the entire thing.  In fact, you might not read any of it.  I want ADWEEK to have that level of staying power and I think it can. We just put Christina Aguilera on the cover, which, you know, isn’t exactly what the HBR would do. The reason that it’s important for us to have people like Christina on the cover, and we’ve got some celebrity covers coming up.

It’s about having covers that get people’s attention and  say something and are meaningful to the audience. Because, again, these covers, these magazines have to have real utility. So that’s the thing I’m going to stress with the magazine, is that it is very, it is an important and essential utility.  We had Naomi Osaka on the cover. It’s not about having celebrities or not celebrities on the cover. We did a cover with DoorDash,  and we did a cover about their Super Bowl campaign.

Samir Husni:  Just a fun question, in your previous jobs The Hollywood Reporter or Entertainment Weekly, or People, did any celebrity ever ask you to be on your digital page or on the magazine cover? 

It’s a good question. It’s interesting at EW once we started to reduce the frequency, we started to do more digital covers, which were essentially these great assets, short form videos, for social platforms, Instagram, TikTok, and they were beautiful and lushly produced, kind of more so than the print covers. I think the interesting thing about digital covers is just how widely they can be seen, because it still has real meaning for someone to be on a cover like that.

There were people who obviously  wanted the cover.  Particularly People, because it’s still so widely distributed.  The power of a cover is, it’s staying power.  It’s always there. It’s a physical asset.  I’ll tell you this, it’s amazing how many times I get on a call with somebody from an agency or from a brand marketer, and they’ll have a framed cover of ADWEEK in their office and say look, I still have this from when I was on the Hot List cover or whatever.

So it’s actually really, it’s an important asset for us. And I really enjoy the craft. And so it’s, I feel lucky that we still do it.

Samir Husni:  You came to ADWEEK from NPR. So you saw the not-for-profit reporting and dealing with media. How is it different to be working for-profit now? 

Will Lee: Oh, so many ways, Samir, so many ways. Actually, all of my career before NPR was in the for-profit sector. So this was almost like a sabbatical that I took in public media. What I would say specifically about NPR, is that NPR actually is a very sophisticated commercial business, if you will.  Obviously, it’s a non-profit, but it thinks like a commercial media company.  We did a lot of things to license in terms of business development, in terms of even corporate development considering lots of different kinds of M&A and partnerships and so forth, which very much like, are like commercial media.

I think the one thing that is significantly different is from a mission and from a goals standpoint, serving the American public is so much in the forefront of what NPR does, which I don’t think, if you went and asked the CEOs of ten publishing companies, that would be the first thing that comes out of their mouth in terms of like what their mission, what their goals are, which is fine because they have a different set of  stakeholders. But, the thing that was inspiring to me that I loved about NPR, and frankly is going to be really important in 2024 is NPR’s ability to, and the importance of NPR’s service to the American public.

Samir Husni: If you look at the status of marketing or advertising today compared to your previous years, your previous career, how would you describe it? Are we better off? Are we worse than it was? 

Will Lee:  You know we can talk for an hour about this.  Let’s just take advertising specifically. Obviously with what seems like a true cookie-less future happening like in real time, that will change significantly.  Anybody who publishes on the web can make money, It just will, it will change the cost of things, it will change how consumers are targeted.

That will have significant ripple effects on the businesses that I’ve worked with. Until a year and a half or so, that the notion of scale and audience size as a predictor of commercial success, that correlation is completely going to change.

Now, I can’t tell you whether what the true statistical sort of wavelength and amplitude of there is, but it’s going to change significantly.  And I think, that will alter, how media are created. I think also that in marketing, because of the way that the economy has been, so unpredictable over the last year and a half, I think marketers are in a very different situation,  I wouldn’t say that they’re in a very dynamic moment, which is to say their budgets are more under scrutiny.  Their role in growth and in driving the business forward is much “murkier” than it has been in a long time.

ADWEEK’s place in all of this is to help, to quote somebody I spoke to recently, “so it’s kind of messy right now.” And I think one of ADWEEK’s roles is to un-mess that mess.  To be a good curator, to be  good way of helping to clarify.  I don’t pretend that we’re going to have the answers, but I think through all of our different audience touch points, editorial, events, experiences, and community, I think we do have a way to, to help. And so I think it’s a really exciting time for ADWEEK. I think about the agency landscape and about what will happen to creative agencies as a result of Sora and all the rest of the AI tools, as well as how quickly the internet and web publishing are going to be drastically altered over the next two years.

I think this is a really, really interesting time to be at a B2B publication, looking at the landscape as a whole.

Samir Husni: So if you think anyone who has access to a laptop or a phone can be a publisher, is that a good thing or a bad thing? 

Will Lee: I don’t think I have a binary answer there.  I do think that my consumption behavior has changed significantly over the last two and two and a half years where I read a lot more individually published newsletters from people that I trust.  Casey Newton, a platformer, I’ll read across all of my span of interest. Instead of reading a brand, I read individuals.  I do think that the individual contributor is an important force. The notion of anybody being able to create movies, webpages and all this sort of thing.

There’s significant danger there.  We’re about to enter a phase of the open web, which is going to be literally one million times worse than what the blogosphere looked like in 2005. If you think about the barrier to entry was very low, anybody could start a blog and there was all this terrible, low quality content out there. Some of it got monetized and some of it didn’t.

I think you’re about to enter a phase where that will become almost infinite. And that is frightening. We have to have better discovery and better curation.  And frankly, I don’t think that Google and some of the other platforms have taken that seriously enough into account. 

Samir Husni:  Let me shift a little bit,  I used to look at the launch of the year at the Hot List of ADWEEK and sadly speaking there’s not many launches these days. The industry has changed to a bookazine industry.  Do you think this is a sign of the future that we are going to lose big launches Like Portfolio and Domino that ADWEEK used to celebrate?

If you think about what’s happening now with Buzzfeed, Vice, and some of those other businesses.  Which probably replaced some of those big splashy launches.  Media entities now might not just be a magazine. Obviously you wouldn’t just launch a magazine today.

You’d launch the whole span of it  a multi-platform product. We’re going to see more great brands. 

You’ve just given me idea, which is that instead of sort of the launch of the year being focused on a magazine, it’s really the publishing launch of the year. Because in the next year or two, there will be more people who try interesting things. I think they’re going to be narrower and I think there’ll be a little bit more niche. I don’t think you could launch a general interest business publication like Portfolio today. But I do think that you could do something a little narrower, and it could succeed. So it’d be interesting to see how people think of a print product today.

I talk about Monocle a lot and how Tyler (Brule) and his team believe in and lean  hard into the print side of things.  They have multiple print publications. So I do think that there’s room for that.

Samir Husni: Let me just end up by asking you two personal questions. One, if I come to visit you uninvited one evening to your home, what do I catch you doing? Watching TV, reading a book, cooking? 

Will Lee: Depending on what time it is,  reading with my two and a half year old son or building towers out of magnet tiles. After he goes to bed, I love to be in the kitchen trying things out. I do like that.

Samir Husni: My last question to you is what keeps you these days up at night?

Will Lee:  As a first time CEO thing that keeps me up as night is asking myself the question, are we moving fast enough with enough velocity and with enough impact.  Sort of instilling that urgency and embodying it. Showing the team and even our audiences that we are moving quickly we are changing quickly, we are evolving quickly, and doing it  sensibly and responsibly. That’s something I honestly think about in the middle of the night  more often than I’d like.

That’s kind of a personal one, but on a larger scale, the way that our media is now shaped from a financial standpoint and from a business standpoint, where so much of the, the media that is high quality, you have to pay for, and you have to pay a lot for, I think is a real problem. And I’m not saying this as a plug for NPR, but I think that, you know, having free and openly available sources of, of high quality information for the consumer is incredibly important.  That does concern me from almost from the viewpoint of the future of the democracy in the Republic.

Samir Husni: Thank you.