Mr. Magazine

“It’s a nice feeling, working together. We’re both very creative, and we bounce ideas off of each other really well. When one of us is stuck on something, the other one can really jump in to help that idea form and get it to the right place. It’s been a really nice partnership in that way.” Gia Miller

“We’re telling real stories and we’re putting in quality-level journalism into it. We’re fact checking everything. We’re finding as many experts as we can, so the story is being told correctly. And I think a big point that’s worth touching on is that we don’t do pay to play. Obviously, we have advertisers, and we’re happy to have them. But we don’t allow that to affect our editorial, and people really have noticed that.” Justin Negard

Journalism, quality journalism, passion, thoughtful passion, business, solid business, are the major cornerstones of Connect to Northern Westchester.  Cornerstones that are rapidly disappearing from the worlds of journalism, passion, and business.  Until you meet Gia Miller and Justin Negard, and you see clearly that quality journalism, thoughtful passion, and good solid business thinking are all manifested through the two of them and their magazine that they founded to serve the area of Northern Westchester, New York.

A good read and a better display of visual photography, typography, and illustrations that “connects” you to an area of our country which brings the term local to a national level. 

A job so very well done that I thought I should have a chat with Gia and Justin, mainly for selfish reasons, to show me that good quality journalism is not dead and that there are good story tellers who believe in the value of printed magazines and what they have to offer.

My conversation with Gia Miller, the co-founder, co-publisher and editor-in-chief,  and Justin Negard, co-founder, co-publisher and creative director was as delightful as the magazine itself.  So please enjoy this conversation with two entrepreneurs who still believe in the power of print in a digital age. 

But first for the soundbites:

On why print: (Gia Miller) The problem is when you try to connect digitally, your feed is really curated. You’re only getting news and information about people that you’ve chosen to get news and information about. 

On the early days: (Gia Miller) We originally started as a website towards the beginning of the pandemic. And it was literally just for our small town of Katonah. So, when we ended up deciding that we were going to print a magazine, we went back and forth with the name, and we chose to keep it as Katonah Connect, even though we were mailing to a larger audience than just Katonah, because that name had name recognition.

On their feeling today about the magazine: (Justin Negard) I think everything we’ve done has been kind of a surprise. The very first edition, we had that beautiful feeling that, hey, we put out our first magazine. And that hasn’t gone away yet. We’ve put out our second, our third, and now we’re over a dozen. And each time it’s special. It’s an amazing thing. But we don’t really notice it as we’re going along. We sort of step back, and we think about the fact that this started with a conversation at a coffee shop. And now we are covering so much of our region.

On the business model: (Gia Miller) From a business model perspective, we pay for the publication with advertising. I actually remember in journalism school learning how much money subscriptions suck from your business. So, we decided that we would do direct mail and just directly mail into homes and businesses in our area and support the publication via advertising.

On the most pleasant moment: (Gia Miller) I always say I’m living the dream I never knew I had.

On teamwork: (Justin Negard) I love calling the shots creatively. I’m very lucky that we work so well together because we each stay in our lane and we’re each very good at what we do…And we both have great taste, so it’s easy.

On keeping it local: (Gia Miller) You can find 25 stories online about how to put on your makeup or the latest fitness craze, but you can’t find 25 stories that are local, that are about the people in your community. I think the positivity is a part of it, and then, honestly, it’s the community piece. Knowing who your neighbors are, who the business owners are and what they’re up to. We take a lot of national stories, and we make them local. We only interview local experts. We bring it back to our community in whatever way we can.

On the status of journalism: (Justin Negard) We are at a point where journalism is a very loose word and it’s become weaponized and co-opted by the wrong people on both sides of the political spectrum or possibly even in other countries. My hope is that the younger generations are smarter to these things, and they know what they are reading and where it’s coming from, whereas maybe older generations don’t pay attention to that as much.

On their mission and vision: (Justin Negard) We’re not trying to influence anybody, but we want to at least establish quality journalism wherever our footprint is.

And now for the lightly edited conversation of Gia Miller & Justin Negard, founders of Connect to Northern Westchester magazine:

Samir Husni: Why did you decide to connect via a print magazine? 

Gia Miller: That’s a great question. It kind of just happened, honestly. I think the problem is when you try to connect digitally, your feed is really curated. You’re only getting news and information about people that you’ve chosen to get news and information about.  In order to really know who’s in your community, that’s what the media is for; that’s what newspapers and magazines exist for.

Justin Negard: There was a real void in our community. The numbers are showing also that local publications are actually thriving. So even though some magazines are switching to digital, for a lot of reasons, my opinion is that people don’t necessarily care about having an actual paper news feed. They just want to get that hard hitting quick news or whatever it may be, wherever they are. But when it comes down to a local level, people like having an actual, ‘this is our town, this is my business’ publication.

To Gia’s point, there was a void in our community that needed to be filled. 

Gia Miller: We previously had a really nice local magazine in our area. I used to write for them occasionally.  At the beginning of the pandemic, it was sold to a family who chose to recreate it into what they envisioned. And it lost that local feel. It lost that feeling of community, of knowing who your neighbors are.

Justin Negard: Also, we are fortunate we live not too far from Manhattan. We have a lot of very interesting and talented and artistic people in our neck of the woods. There were tons, and there’s still a ton of stories to tell. 

Samir Husni: What drives you to this trust in print, especially on the local level? 

Justin Negard: Well, there are two sides of it:  Our personal preference, which, I know, you can’t run a business around personal preference, but it does matter. So, I am a designer, and I was a journalism graduate. And Gia is an accomplished journalist herself. In both of our worlds, we appreciate paper. We love paper. When we’re putting this magazine together, one of the fun things was laying out all these magazines in front of us, different samples from our printer, and touching each page and figuring out which paper stock we prefer.

It’s a pleasure now to see it laid out in the way that it is. We’ve designed our spine so there would be a rainbow; these little details matter to us. But even on the business side, if you look at our model right now, the print is skyrocketing. We’re doing great. And that’s been the focus of our income.

Gia Miller: We get a lot of feedback because we’re local. We actually see our readers and talk to them just when we’re shopping or whatever. Everybody tells us how much they like print, regardless of their age–younger than us, older than us. They all want to touch and hold and feel something. Very oddly to me, we get tons of compliments on our paper, on the quality of our paper.

Justin Negard: Another thing we did, that leans into that, is since our very first issue, we decided to put artwork on the back cover. We don’t sell that real estate. This is for local artists, which we are blessed to have so many talented local artists in our community. This is probably our highest profile one, a man named Ed Giobbi. In the beginning, we were wondering if we’re going to have enough stories to fill our pages, and now we’re laughing, because I found out that three blocks down the street from where both of us live is a man named Ed Giobbi, who is a bit of a recluse, but he’s a master painter who’s in the MoMA, the Tate, the Chicago Art Institute, the Whitney, and many other places.

So, we featured his artwork, and we feature a variety of artists in our area. Because it’s a print publication, the artwork extends the shelf life of this magazine. Because when you’re done looking at our covers, you can flip it over and leave this on your table. Now you have some beautiful artwork as well, which people have appreciated. 

Gia Miller: Yeah, it works. We hear from people all the time. 

Justin Negard: I design all the covers. As such, we keep that very simple as well. We don’t put local celebrities and subheadings and all this to clutter up the page. We keep it very clean for that exact same reason. We want this to look beautiful on people’s tables for some time to come. So even if the issue is a year old, it still holds up. 

Samir Husni: Great.  Since you started the magazine in 2022, you moved from zero circulation to over 21,000. Tell me about the business model. Tell me about that growth.  How does it feel to see this growth going on? 

Gia Miller:  Honestly,  everything has been a pleasant surprise as we’ve gone along. We’ve grown because the demand is there, and we’ve been able to support it financially. Even our name change was a surprise.

We originally started as a website towards the beginning of the pandemic. And it was literally just for our small town of Katonah. So, when we ended up deciding that we were going to print a magazine, we went back and forth with the name, and we chose to keep it as Katonah Connect, even though we were mailing to a larger audience than just Katonah because that name had name recognition.

Our thought was that we’d get a good four or five years out of that name before we had to change it. And it came quickly. It was about a year and a half.

Justin Negard: Yeah, it was much quicker than we thought. So, everything we’ve done has been kind of a surprise.

We had that beautiful feeling when we put out our first issue, and that hasn’t gone away yet. We put out our second, our third, and now we’re over a dozen, and each time it’s special. We’ve been growing and we’ve been so busy, and we haven’t paid attention.

We pay attention to every little detail, but we don’t always necessarily step back and really reflect on where it is. So, to answer your question, it’s an amazing thing, but we don’t really notice it as we’re going along. We sort of step back, and we think this started with a conversation in a coffee shop, and now we are covering so much of our region.

Gia Miller: And from a business model perspective, we pay for the publication with advertising. I actually remember in journalism school learning how much money subscriptions suck from your business. So, we decided that we would do direct mail and just directly mail into homes and businesses in our area and support the publication via advertising. So that’s the business model we’ve chosen.

Samir Husni: How does it feel to actually own the magazine?

Gia Miller: I always say I’m living the dream I never knew I had.

Justin Negard: How does it feel for me personally? Most of my career has been as a designer and a photographer, and that, of course, branched out into the worlds of branding, website design, brochures. I mean, you name it. So many different problems you’d have to solve. And for me, this is the epitome of all my skill sets. Everything that I’ve learned to do over the last decade plus of my career as a designer, I do every single day now and a whole lot more.

I love calling the shots creatively. I’m very lucky that we work so well together because we each stay in our lane and we’re each very good at what we do.  I’ve said if I can continue making money and paying our bills doing this, it’s the absolute dream, 100 percent. We don’t have to really answer anybody but ourselves. And we both have great taste, so it’s easy.

Gia Miller: I’m trying to think of the best way to answer that question: how does it feel still? We very intentionally did not want investors. We didn’t want to have to report to someone who would tell us, “that’s not a good idea,” or “that’s a little risky.”

It’s a nice feeling that we have; we’re both very creative and we bounce ideas off of each other really well. When one of us is stuck on something, the other one can really jump in and help that idea form and get it to the right place. And it’s been a really nice partnership in that way.

And there have been a number of articles that we’ve published that I’m pretty positive if we had financial backing, we would have been told no. And they were very well received in our community. 

Justin Negard: Our very first issue, when it came out, we met with a wonderful person who was an editor at a previous magazine at some point.  She gave us some advice on the visual side. She said, this is lovely, but maybe have a local celebrity and have those subheadings and all that sort of thing. I mean, these are opinions that are perfectly well grounded. And there’s a lot of marketing and research behind making some of those decisions or turning down a certain article, whatever it may be.  We have been able to avoid that.

And I think our instincts have been good. If you have a local magazine, your inclination is to write about the local soccer game or to write about the local celebrity. We have a little bit of that, but we have leaned into more just interesting stories. They’re going to be interesting wherever you go, locally or nationally. And that’s what we’ve been able to do.

And if I can add one little detail to it, maybe because of the pandemic and various factors in our life, but humbly, Gia and I are probably far enough along in our careers and in our skills that we could work in Manhattan and work for an agency or work for a publication somewhere down there. But for circumstances in our life, we are local. And so, we have what I hope are national skills that we’ve brought to this local level. So that makes us more unique than other publications.

One of the things that I heard a lot is the reason there’s a rise in the city and local and regional magazines is that the need for that positive feeling, that you feel good as opposed to everything you’re bombarded with around you.

Samir Husni: Do you apply that to your magazine?

Justin Negard and Gia Miller (in unison):  Yes.

Gia Miller: But also, no, we’re not negative. We don’t feel the need to bash anybody. We come out every other month. We’re not hard news.  So that isn’t there. But I also think there’s a need for knowing what’s going on in your community and knowing local stories. On a national scale, magazines like Glamour, Cosmo and Marie Claire, they tell very similar stories. And you can also find 25 stories online about how to put on your makeup or the latest fitness craze or whatever.  But you can’t find 25 stories that are local, that are about the people in your community.

I think the positivity is a part of it, too. And, honestly, the community piece, knowing who your neighbors are, who the business owners are and what they’re up to. And we take a lot of national stories, and we make them local. We only interview local experts. We bring it back to our community in whatever way we can.

Justin Negard: I think the quality we bring to it as well. There are so many 24-hour news channels. And now, these days, without putting politics in the conversation, people are getting their medical opinions and their political opinions from, with all due respect to the Joe Rogans of the world, for example, or these 24-hour news channels that don’t always have the most credible journalists on the station. 

I think people are also hungry to read quality journalism. It doesn’t have to revolve around who’s running for president right now. There are other stories to tell. So, we certainly do put a positive spin on most of our stories, which is a consequence of the stories we’re telling.

We’re telling real stories and we’re putting quality level journalism into it. We’re fact checking everything. We’re finding as many experts as we can. So, the story is being told correctly. We have very strong opinions on a variety of things in our world today, but we keep that out as well.

And I think a big point that’s worth touching on is that we don’t do pay to play. Obviously, we have advertisers and we’re happy to have them, but we don’t allow that to affect our editorial. We did that in the beginning just for our own passion and our own our standards, our own morals . But we were also surprised that people really have noticed that in our area. And there are other publications in our region, and God bless them, but when you talk to people, they say, “yeah, that’s been paid for, and that’s also been paid for.” And they like the fact that we don’t do any of that. 

Samir Husni: Do you think, is it passion that’s going to drive the future of good journalism, the future of good magazines, as opposed to chain ownership or venture capitalists or people who have no idea what journalism is all about? 

Gia Miller: I hope so.  There are several chain publications in our area and the larger area around us who don’t know a lot about journalism, and it shows.  I think it is a skill set that you develop. You can study it in school or not, but you have to learn the skills to develop it. And I think from what we’ve seen, we’ve very quickly achieved respect in the community, and it’s because that’s our background.

Justin Negard: I think I would say yes.  There is definitely a difference. I think we are at a point where journalism is a very loose word and it’s become weaponized and co-opted by the wrong people on both sides of the political spectrum, or possibly even in other countries. My hope is that the younger generations are smarter to these things and they know what they are reading and where it’s coming from, whereas maybe older generations don’t pay attention to that as much. I hope, this is all big hope, that the younger generations will be smarter than that and this will eventually level out and they’ll realize what’s BS and what’s actually coming from a credible news source.

All we can do, though, is continue to sort of push back on that. There was another local publication that had been looking to sell and they did face sort of this onslaught of larger companies that were trying to push more of an agenda in the region. They’re trying to influence people on a more local level. We’re not trying to influence anybody, but we want to at least establish quality journalism wherever our footprint is.

Gia Miller: I want to know what you think about that question.

Samir Husni: You can tell that there is some good quality journalism in here. This is not like somebody got an article from a PR agency and then published it. And so, I congratulate you on that, because I’m one of those people who, before I retired, I told my students that journalism is dead. But I’m first-generation Presbyterian, so I believe in life after death. So, folks like you are bringing journalism, good quality journalism back. Because I learned in journalism school years ago that when a journalist gives his or her opinion, he or she is no longer a journalist. And we have nothing but opinion these days, and I wish it was good opinions or opinions based on facts.

Justin Negard: And I would tell anyone seeing this or reading this, whatever, it’s not just passion, I mean it definitely is passion for us. We’re doing this as a labor of love, but there are financial dividends. Neither of us are driving Rolls Royces today, but there’s a hunger for this. So, if there’s anyone on the fence thinking, “journalism is dead, I shouldn’t do it, I should do something else, I should just sell out and work for the big company that’s blah blah blah,”– nope, don’t do that.

There’s a lot of hunger for good quality journalism. People are ready to have a good organic meal.

Samir Husni: A more personal question, if I come visiting you one evening, unannounced, what would I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, listening to music?

Gia Miller: Working!

Justin Negard: One hundred percent, working. 

Gia Miller: And calling each other on the phone about this page or that story or whatever. 

Justin Negard: We have started doing almost like a day in the life of a publisher sort of thing, which is almost laughable because I think our typical day is not standard for most, even most publishers, although we have a lot of respect for the busy schedule of any publisher.

But we’ve branched out now as well. And we haven’t needed to, but we wanted to. So, we branched out into a lot of video work. We have a heavy digital footprint. We are very involved in social media. We even launched an app recently.

I mean, we have a lot of plates spinning at once. The magazine is still probably our main event, but videos have picked up tremendously.

So, every single day, if you look at our calendar, we have a chunk of time where we are reaching out to advertisers, where we are working on layouts, where we are writing stories, where we are going to local events, where we are filming videos. I mean, it’s nonstop, truly, truly nonstop to the extent, and I say this with a lot of humor, that people in our region recognize us now, which is kind of kind of flattering and weird.

Sometimes, we eat in other towns where our magazine doesn’t mail to because people recognize our faces. They know us from social media, from me running around with the camera everywhere we go. It’s a lot.

We also have interns, collaborators. So, we’re juggling a million things, and then we’re talking to someone like yourself.

Samir Husni: So, my typical last question is what keeps you up at night these days?

Gia Miller:  Trying to get everything done. I’m thankful we’re not a monthly because we would not be functioning humans if we were. 

But what keeps us up? You know, on my end, now we have a lot of writers who freelance for us. And so, it’s where is this story and when do I need to get that one in? People missing deadlines, that stuff keeps me up.

And advertising, which is the part of the business I hate the most, selling ads. That’s not my skill set. 

Justin Negard: I personally have so many things in front of me. What keeps me up is definitely working. Gia and I are texting each other until sometimes one, two, three in the morning, depending on what we’re working on. So literally, that’s what keeps us up.  Working on the magazine itself. But as soon as that’s done, I have videos to work on. We’re working on the app.  We’re running. There’s just so much to juggle. But it’s rewarding.

We’re proud of the results. And that’s something that I think is worth mentioning. It definitely feels like work. I’m not someone who says it doesn’t feel like it feels like work, but we’re so proud of it.

We’re building something. We’re not just working.

Samir Husni: Congratulations and a job well done. Keep up the good work.

Gia Miller: Thank you.