“One of the things I really was adamant about when we started the relaunch of Spin was just do it with quality. Even more quality than we had the first time around.” Bob Guccione, Jr., Editor in Chief, Spin magazine
Passionate and a die-hard believer in print and its role in society, Bob Guccione Jr., founder (in 1985) and editor in chief of the relaunched Spin magazine (2024) has a lot of good observations and advice for folks who are, or want to be, in the magazine field. He is shrewdly honest about the role of magazines, their place in the marketplace, and the reason some magazines stopped publishing.
Bob is not afraid to ruffle some feathers and friends when he squarely places the blame on the demise of many magazine on the publishers themselves, “Publishing was suicidal. It wasn’t homicidal. Nobody killed publishing, but publishers killed themselves,” he told me during our chat that brought back memories of him teaching a class with me and sharing lectures during the many conferences that I have hosted.
Without any further ado, please enjoy this pleasant conversation with Bob Guccione Jr., but first the soundbites:
On the role of magazines: “We’re not in the need business. I don’t know a single magazine in the history of the world that anybody needed, except maybe The Old Farmer’s Almanac, that might be the only one that could actually claim to be needed.”
On reuniting with his first love Spin: “It was, in some ways very strange. And in some ways like riding a bike.”
On his relationship with the current owners of Spin: “We molded a relationship. And it’s been a great relationship with Jimmy (Hutcheson, Spin’s CEO). I’ve been happy to stay here and help. Sometimes I don’t help, and sometimes I hit it out of the park.”
On the role of Spin: “Today, there’s far too many different ways to absorb media and get information, to the point that a lot of it is very bad information and fake information. But it’s not the way someone’s going to discover music.”
On the mission of Spin: “We wanted that great balance of music, good solid reporting, irreverent reporting, have fun with it, tweak a few noses, but also bring in something of the world around.”
On print and its future: “Never thought it was dead. It has certainly hurt itself critically. I think the fault lies almost 100% with the publishers. There are shifting times, but there are always shifting times.”
On the reason many titles stopped publishing: “Publishing was suicidal. It wasn’t homicidal. Nobody killed publishing, but publishers killed themselves.”
On the major problem with magazines today: “I think the economic model of ownership was a problem.”
On his advice to publishers: “It’s important for publishers to recognize they’ve got to make a competitive product and not just cut costs and try to compensate for a tougher market.”
On seeing many magazines return to print: “It’s great to see this resurgence in print. It’s fantastic. It’ll make it a little harder sometimes to get printing time, but that’s good. You’ll see paper mills come back. You’ll see printing presses come back.”
On the greatest invention of all times: “Oh, it’s the printing press, without a doubt. Because it was the first time humanity could actually mass communicate. It led to mass communication.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Bob Guccione Jr., founder and editor in chief of the relaunched Spin magazine:
Samir Husni: First, congratulations on the return of Spin to print.
Bob Guccione Jr.: Thank you.
Samir Husni: This is a step back to your first love from some 40 years ago. Can you tell me how does it feel to you personally, like going back to edit the magazine you launched 40 years ago?
Bob Guccione Jr.: That’s a great question. It was, in some ways very strange. And in some ways like riding a bike. I don’t ride a bike, but they say you pick up riding a bike, you never lose it.
In some ways, it was totally natural. I’ve been out of print for quite a while. The last time I was in print was in the bookazine era.
I’ve been doing digital for most of the last 10 years. I had to reacquire certain, I wouldn’t say skills, but techniques and different ways of doing things. Whereas you might be used to something effortlessly online, you suddenly find yourself restricted to the dimension of a page and the number of pages in a magazine again.
Actually, it was a fun experience. It was stimulating, and it was, somewhat discombobulating at first. But at the end of the day, it’s all the same thing. You produce a collection of stories that hopefully intrigue and stimulate. That instinct never went away.
I used the analogy of bikes, was more like sex, that doesn’t go away and you quickly get back to where you were. So it was a fascinating experience. It was weirder, actually, the first time I came to work with Spin as a consultant, still a consultant, because I was returning to a publication that I hadn’t thought of for 10 years or more, many more, 20 years almost.
So that was actually weirder, being back involved, but it wasn’t the same thing. You know, Spin, when I had it was my magazine. And it was one thing. Once it was somebody else’s magazine, it became another thing. I was helping another magazine the same way I helped other people who I consulted as well. They had a set of problems, and I had a set of suggestions. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t, some of them weren’t right at all.
We molded a relationship. And it’s been a great relationship with Jimmy (Hutcheson, Spin’s CEO). I’ve been happy to stay here and help.
Sometimes I don’t help, and sometimes I hit it out of the park.
Samir Husni: Tell me about Spin now and tell me about Spin then.
Bob Guccione Jr.: Well, that’s another great question. Because right at the outset, I said to Jimmy, it can be very similar to what Spin was.
And it can be excellent. I think it is excellent, actually. I’ll say that.
But it can’t be the same, because the times are so different.
Then, back in 1985, when I started Spin, magazines like Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Creem, and Circus were the ways that people found out about music. Some could import New Music Express, NME, and some of the other English magazines. Otherwise, you couldn’t.
MTV was nascent. It had happened by then. But go back a couple of years to the early 80s, there was no MTV even.
It was very important for a music fan, or a young person trying to absorb where they were going in this new world of adulthood, to read a magazine they trusted. They didn’t trust Time or Newsweek, because they knew that was for their parents and that they had agendas. It was corporate media. They didn’t trust that.
But they trusted the underground magazines and what I used to call slightly aboveground Rolling Stones and Spins. And that was the importance we had then.
It was a magnified importance. Today, there’s far too many different ways to absorb media and get information, to the point that a lot of it is very bad information and fake information. But it’s not the way someone’s going to discover music.
Except one of the things I did with Spin was I went back to the old format of like, that sounds interesting. Let’s put it in. And so, in fact, you can find out about things because they wouldn’t appear on any algorithm. They wouldn’t appear in the normal discourse. They’re not going to have the promotion behind it to make sure they’re in the media. Their social media is going to be narrow. We found things and wrote about people in a very eclectic way. That was always the spirit of the magazine. The other thing that was always the spirit of the magazine was the non-music coverage.
As you well know we always had strong non-music reporting. My view is that nobody in the world, nobody, not a single person, is obsessed with music 24 hours a day. There are other things they care about. And there are things they don’t know they care about, like forces around them that are influencing their lives that they haven’t identified.
We identify those. We wanted that great balance of music, good solid reporting, irreverent reporting, have fun with it, tweak a few noses, but also bring in something of the world around. As I said, one of those great forces that you don’t know them, can’t identify them, but they influence how you live.
And we’ll continue to do that. As a quarterly, I think it is a great economic opportunity, because you don’t have the expenses of producing a magazine monthly and hoping that everybody’s always there to buy it, or advertisers are always supporting it. So quarterly, it can be more, you know, introspective.
We can take our time with stories, we’re working on stories now that we started back in March. You can’t do that online. You can, but it’s rare.
We’re going to produce a magazine that’s a little more thoughtful, a little more deep, and hopefully, well, easily much better written than most of what’s online, because most of what’s online is drek.
So that’s the difference between the two times and that’s where I leave it.
Samir Husni: What type of lure does print has in this digital age? They brought Spin back to print, and so did Creem, Surfer, Powder, Field & Stream, and Saveur to name a few. What does this return to print mean? I call 2024 the year of the relaunches.
Bob Guccione Jr.: Again, it’s a fabulous question, and takes a moment to answer. I think the lure is multitudinal. There are many levels.
One is, and you and I are the apostles of print. I mean, when print was going down the tubes in 2008, 9 and 10, you and I were saying, it’s not over, it’s not over. You know, we said it together in one of your interviews, we said it in school, where I co-taught that class for a semester with you.
We never thought it was dead. It has certainly hurt itself critically. I think the fault lies almost 100% with the publishers. There are shifting times, but there are always shifting times. There was a time when television came in, magazines survived and prevailed. There was a time when video and home video and video cassettes and Laser discs were going to kill us, they didn’t.
Then cable television proliferation didn’t kill us, streaming didn’t kill us. None of these things killed publishing. Publishers killed publishing.
So the lure has always been holding a physical property and being able to engage with it in the way you want to rather than the way you’re forced to. When you’re reading online, you’re forced to sit a certain way because the computer or the device has to determine how you sit or lie. You have to appreciate it in this sort of monotonous way.
And it is what it is. It’s convenient, but it’s also convenient access, not necessarily convenient or enjoyable to read. With a magazine, you have the greatest flexibility of enjoying it your own way. I think there’s a different rhythm to reading a magazine, I guess what I’m saying. So there’s the physical appeal, but also it’s psychologically a pause in the rushed digital age. It’s like pulling off a car in traffic.
It’s like I can sit here in traffic or I just pull off and daydream, go for a walk, come back. I’m going to get there same time. You know, I’m going to let traffic go past, crawl past. I’m going to let that happen. So there’s a digital pause of the madness and the rush.
You can be reading the newspaper and you have a text and you have an email. So you stop the newspaper, answer the text, read the email, go back to the newspaper, another notification, a phone call. We never get time to rest. But with a magazine, you sort of stop everything. The world blurs out of the picture. The sound goes away. You just take your own time, your own rhythm.
The other thing is people write differently for magazines and they pay differently for magazines. They pay better. So they do a better job.
The reader gets a better product. I think there’s a great value in magazines. Now, the other thing I’ll say, the last thing I’ll say, is that everything you just named is a niche magazine.
It’s a niche interest. Now, Spin’s a little more wider niche, music and pop culture and life around you. But what you didn’t name, general interest magazines, though most of them are still around, like Time and Newsweek, but they’re the ones in trouble because all that information is stale at the time it’s printed.
I did an interview with Bill Maher in the first issue. Great interview, phenomenal interview. One of the things we were talking about was would Biden step aside? And the interview was concluded and went to press before he stepped aside.
So we didn’t know. And I said in the interview, we’re not going to know if he stepped aside in the time between ending the interview and publishing the magazine. I think both Bill and I thought he wouldn’t step aside, which would have been a big mistake. And I think it was great that he did step aside. But there is that difference. But it meant, in effect, had I not made that reference, we would have looked very stale. You know, certainly if you’re covering the news, you’re covering the Trump assassination. Well, everybody was on it 15 minutes after the attempt.
The event in print about it a week later, a month later is obviously stale. So it’s alternating the currents of your current time. You know, we live in a world we live in.
The magazine has to be cognizant of that and reflective of that. But it can bring its own values, which the internet can’t provide. The one of physical expansion almost sort of surrounds you when you read a magazine. You’re lost in your imagination. You’re left alone in your imagination, which is very, very hard to achieve online.
Samir Husni: Let’s look forward. In 2025, Spin will be 40 years old. What are the plans for the 40th anniversary? Are you going to look back? Are you going to look to the future? Or you’re going to stick to the present?
Bob Guccione Jr.: Well, isn’t that a million dollar question? All of it. To be honest, can’t not look back, 40 years and they’ve been really a tremendous part of history. It’s almost half a century.
Look at that time, what a span of time, in 1985, when we started 40 years took us back to the end of the Second World War and the whole of the evolution of Western civilization, particularly Western, the Western Hemisphere, particularly from 1945 to 1985, including and during which we landed on the moon. That’s the kind of span we’re looking at from 1985 to 2025. A very great historical coverage. So we will have some fun with it, most importantly.
We’ll look back, we’ll do some obvious articles, and we’ll look forward, which won’t be as obvious. But that’s the fun of it.
Imagine that online, it won’t quite work online, because it’s too linear. Everything about a magazine is you flip a page, you get bored halfway, read that later or never, maybe find something else, and it’s that physical aspect to which is a pleasure. And we’re in the pleasure business. A lot of publishers don’t think like that.
We’re not in the need business. I don’t know a single magazine in the history of the world that anybody needed, except maybe the Old Farmer’s Almanac, that might be the only one that could actually claim to be needed. We’re actually in the wants business. With the exception of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the rest of us are in the want business, i.e. the pleasure business. You give us money, we give you pleasure.
Samir Husni: You have been doing digital entities for more than 10 years, so please tell me, in your opinion, what is the biggest invention of those two: the internet or the printing press?
Bob Guccione Jr.: Oh, it’s the printing press, without a doubt. Because it was the first time humanity could actually mass communicate. It led to mass communication.
It wasn’t in the beginning, of course, mass. The internet is an extension of that. It’s a technological evolution of that. Without a doubt, the printing press was far more significant. People will wonder why I’m saying that. The technology for the internet is phenomenal. But the technology at this time with the Gutenberg press was more phenomenal. In those days, monks hand wrote and translated books. That was pretty much the height of communications in those days.
So the printing press, without a doubt.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you a few personal questions, is there any question I failed to ask or anything you would like to add?
Bob Guccione Jr.: I want to add to a comment earlier, which won’t endear me to friends in the business or colleagues, but publishing was suicidal. It wasn’t homicidal. Nobody killed publishing, but publishers killed themselves. Because of a number of factors. I’ll give you what I think are the main ones. One is the wrong people own most publishing:
Venture Capitalists. Now, it’s great that they invest, but they’re not the operators. The operators have a skill set that needs to be allowed to work, because that’s how they work.
Venture Capitalists buy things with operators who have proven themselves to be tremendously good. Then they start to slice up the resources and the infrastructure of what the skilled people were using to make it good. That becomes a conflict, that becomes a problem.
In 2008, at the outset of the recession, the largest publisher in the world was J.P. Morgan. That surprised people when they found that out. They had defaulted so many publications, they actually owned more than anybody else. I think the economic model of ownership was a problem.
But the greater problem, it is always the greater problem, is that people get scared. People get scared for their jobs, and they started playing it safe. They produced a product that was kind of amorphous, generic and not very interesting.
Then advertising, which always, like a magpie goes to the shiniest new object, went to the internet. A lot of advertisers pulled away from magazines, went to the internet. What did publishers do? Instead of producing a better product, instead of getting back into shape, like an old guy who’s got a little out of shape, so I better start going to the gym again.
No, they just reduced the product. They reduced the number of pages, reduced the weight of the paper, the quality of the paper, and the quality of the printing. They diminished the amount of journalism that went into it and how much they spent on it. Certainly didn’t take any provocative position because they were afraid of losing the few advertisers they retained. And instead of just saying, no, no, this is a great product.
It’s wonderful the internet’s there, and we’re going to publish on that as well. We’re going to become three-dimensional from two to three. We’re going to become extra dimensional. No, they were scared of it.
First of all, as you know, ignored it. Believed it would go away, hoped it would go away, and then complained it didn’t go away. So we’re to blame.
One of the things I really was adamant about when we started the relaunch of Spin was just do it with quality. Even more quality than we had the first time around. We had nice paper up until the time I sold it.
I don’t know what happened after that. But now we have great paper because you have to be a product. You have to physically be a worthwhile, attractive product.
We went the opposite direction. We didn’t look to cut costs. We actually incurred more costs to get a better quality product to the newsstand.
So that’s what I want to say. I just want to take the opportunity to say I think publishers tended to go in the wrong direction. I look at a lot of magazines on the newsstand now, and they’re still doing it wrong.
You pick up a copy of the gossip weeklies, and they’re 40 pages, and they’re thin as toilet paper. They print on toilet paper. You go, why would anyone pick this up? You’re not giving me any value here.
Plus, I get the same stuff online instantly. I can read the checkout magazine on my phone before I check out? So there are a number of problems. I think it’s important for publishers to recognize they’ve got to make a competitive product and not just cut costs and try to compensate for a tougher market.
But it’s great to see this resurgence in print. It’s fantastic. It’ll make it a little harder sometimes to get printing time, but that’s good.
You’ll see paper mills come back. You’ll see printing presses come back.
Samir Husni: That’s great. Now, let me ask some personal questions. If I come unannounced to visit you at home one evening, what do I catch Bob Guccione Jr. doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking, or drinking some fine red wine?
Bob Guccione Jr.: Well, now we’re talking. First of all, you’d be invited to dinner, which I’d be cooking, and we’d be drinking the wine while I cooked. You know, that’s kind of my relaxation is to cook and to drink a bottle of wine. Well, not all on my own, but to open a bottle of wine.
And the very simple pleasures, you know, read, watch TV with Liza. Liza and I together have been for 21 years. We have a quiet and simple life. We really just can be happy doing nothing. We can be happy going out for dinner. So if you do come unannounced, you better call me because I might be out. But yeah, I still read books. I love to read books.
Samir Husni: What do you like to read? Is it fiction, nonfiction, or everything?
Bob Guccione Jr.: I enjoy a bit of everything, of course. But I mainly read detective novels because it is such a great escape from the work life, which is so involved, partly travel, partly, music and Spin. I’m starting a science site. That’s getting me in the science world again.
Samir Husni: My final typical question is what keeps Bob up at night?
Bob Guccione Jr.: Ah, indigestion. What keeps me up? Blessedly, nothing. Nothing keeps me up. Maybe it’s age. Maybe I’ve got to a point in my life where I’m just smart enough to realize nothing should keep you up. The one thing that keeps us up sometimes is the dog. The dog is old and has problem. But other than that, really nothing. I mean, I’m very lucky.
I used to have insomnia, so everything kept me up and I slept very intermittently. But that’s because I lived in New York. When I moved out of New York, to Milford, Pennsylvania, honestly, it was about a month later, I realized I hadn’t had insomnia.
Samir Husni: Great. Congratulations again and all the best with the relaunch. Thank you for your time.
Mr. Magazine 