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