Archive for March, 2025

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Teneshia Carr: The Queen Rides On A “BLANC” Horse Into The World Of Magazines… The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With The Founder, Owner, & EIC of Blanc Magazine

March 30, 2025

Teneshia Carr was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth.  A daughter of a father who owned and operated two delis and a mother who was a roving nurse.  Her parents were her inspiration to be an entrepreneur and not seek a job with a paycheck at the end of the month.  She wanted to own the space she occupies. Ms. Carr learned that, “there is nothing else but working for yourself.”

And work for herself she did.  She launched Blanc magazine in 2011. Born from a sense of frustration when she started, “it was the typical angry story, just out of frustration.”  Blanc, which means white in the French language, was in her words, “The irony of a black woman from Philadelphia owning a magazine called Blanc is on purpose.”

To say that Teneshia has succeeded with Blanc as the magazine that, “is a creative platform that presents a diverse and underrepresented perspective of the fashion, art and music world,” will be a major understatement.

A talented editor, photographer and now co-founder of a content agency, Teneshia still have time to rewind at home journaling “mindless writings.”  The passionate magazine founder and I had a very pleasant, fun, and educational conversation via Zoom.

So without any further ado, here is my the lightly edited interview with Teneshia Carr, owner and editor in chief of Blanc magazine:

But first the soundbites:

On the reason she named the magazine Blanc: “I thought if I could figure out how to make a Trojan horse for people who look like me to  sneak into the side door of fashion that just wasn’t letting us in, was something that I wanted to do.”

On the secret of a good publishing model: “You need to figure out how to do something that’s relevant, do something that matters to your readers and to advertisers to allow them to keep supporting you.”

On why Blanc survived and thrived where others failed: “I think Blanc has stuck around because we work with a wide array of creatives, and those creatives go on to work with some of the biggest stars, the biggest talents, and the biggest magazines in the world.”

On sticking to print: “They say, do that digital, girl, but they are adamant at the legacy that comes with the advertising that they create lasting forever in a print publication.”

On Surviving as an independent magazine: “In order to survive as an independent or a niche magazine, you have to understand that circulation isn’t going to save you. Nothing is going to save you. You need to figure out how to do something that’s relevant, do something that matters to your readers and to advertisers to allow them to keep supporting you.”

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On the creation of BabyRobot agency: “There’s other ways that while for the past 15 years, I’ve built this community, I have to really figure out how to create experiences that, connect to them as individuals and connect to them as my audience. So that’s how you rule the world, diversifying. But leave your lighthouse untouched.”

On Blanc and its influence: “It’s not built to be necessarily the influence. It is the lighthouse to shine on the influencers themselves.”

On being an entrepreneur:  “I grew up with the entire idea of being an entrepreneur… I was taught that there is nothing else but working for yourself.”

On her journey those past 15 years: “The entire journey for me has been Rose Garden because it’s full of the beauty and full of the thorns.”

On Artificial Intelligence and its role: “It’s amazing. You didn’t think about a tool as something to fear. You thought about it as a tool to enhance the thing that you’re doing.”

On the impact of AI and other digital platforms: “We’re heading to the land of the falseness. That’s going to make Blanc and other niche magazines who are doing really cool things still interesting.”

On how she rewinds at the end of her day: “I do a lot of journaling, just mindless writing in the evening. And that really helps me relax from the day.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Teneshia Carr, owner and editor in chief of Blanc magazine:

Samir Husni: My first question to you is, 15 years ago, you embarked on a mission that manifested itself with Blanc magazine. Can you tell me what that mission is, and why did you choose an ink on paper magazine to manifest that mission?

Teneshia Carr: First of all, the irony of a black woman from Philadelphia owning a magazine called Blanc is on purpose. I thought if I could figure out how to make a Trojan horse for people who look like me to  sneak into the side door of fashion that just wasn’t letting us in, was something that I wanted to do.

I wanted to figure out how to tell stories with people that look like me, with creatives from around the world to share that one perspective, to share their different perspectives on what luxury is, what beauty is, what fashion is, what culture is. So, when I started, it was the typical angry story, just out of frustration. I wanted to be the next Anna Wintour.

I wanted to be the next, not just fashion editor, but the next great fashion storyteller. And I knew from the constant rejections that it just wasn’t going to happen until I figured out how to build my own space. And that’s what I did.

Samir Husni: And then 2020 happened.

Teneshia Carr: And then 2020 happened. There were quite a few Black-owned magazines that were popping up around that time.

They didn’t really have a luxury advertising, but they still had a really strong point of view. There was Fashion Fair, Crown Magazine, and New Knew was another one. It was just like a renaissance that was happening around publications, Black editors, Black designers, and Black magazine owners.

It started bubbling up around 2018, 2019, when all these little cool magazines started popping up. When I first started Blanc (2011), years before, there weren’t any Black-owned, Black female-owned, the advertisers just didn’t publish with us. Essence didn’t have luxury, fashion advertising.

When 2020 happened, the whole thing stopped a little. You would think that because of what was happening with the streets and the social revolution and all the Black calls on Instagram, that all of this money would start pouring our way, and that just wasn’t the case.

I think Blanc has stuck around because we work with a wide array of creatives, and those creatives go on to work with some of the biggest stars, the biggest talents, and the biggest magazines in the world.

We are, quite frankly, to pat my own back, just consistently good. We are consistently telling really good stories. So, 2020, to imagine,  I couldn’t get my issue from London.

I print in the UK. I couldn’t get my issue anywhere. So, I lost the print run. I couldn’t distribute it, and I had to fulfill my obligations to the advertisers. I had to fulfill what I needed to do for my advertisers. But everything just stopped.

The world stopped. It was really hard to pivot to something else, because we’re so old-school print. Digital’s fine and digital’s cool, but I don’t really care about that.  No advertisers, I care about it. But, like, print is the thing. It’s the thing.

It’s smelling the copy and and knowing the difference between a digital print and a real print and, feeling the paper and the weight and all of that. It still means something, and it still meant something, but I couldn’t, it was impossible for six months or eight months to do anything. I think the only reason why I survived is because of my advertising partners.

I don’t have very many, but the ones I have are really dedicated to the way I tell stories. They really are wanting to see us grow, but it’s hard because there are only so many partners that are willing, unfortunately, to support in a real way.

The pandemic stopped things, but then it restarted. We got a boost, and that boost quickly died out. We got a boost of advertising, and that quickly died out and we went back to our regular partners. I think we’ll keep going because every time I meet a client, they go on and on about how valuable what I do is, how valuable the magazine is still for them and their business, how important it is.

They always get on me about getting more digital now. They say, do that digital, girl, but they are adamant at the legacy that comes with the advertising that they create lasting forever in a print publication.

Samir Husni: Back in 2011 everybody was into digital and social media. Did somebody say, Ms. Carr, are you out of your mind? You’re doing an ink on paper magazine?

Teneshia Carr: Well, people still say that, and they keep saying it to me.

People were saying it, but the thing is because I don’t know how many other people could have started the thing that I did in a way that I did it without any investment, without having any contacts or any connections. I focused on having the creative network first, and then I figured out everything else. Like, I knew that I wanted to make a magazine.

I had no idea how the business of magazine was run. I don’t need to know that stuff. That stuff is fine.

I just need to know how to make a magazine. So, imagine me focusing on creating the work and then figuring out how to build a magazine business. I had to do those two things.

I could not figure out then how to build the concept of Blanc digitally. That just wasn’t my focus. I just wanted something eternal.

I wanted to create a perfect coffee table magazine that you can put on your coffee table, and whether it’s from 10 years ago or four years ago or from last season, it’s still relevant and still feels relevant. And that’s what I wanted to make. I didn’t want to make a beautiful website that no one cares about.

I wanted to make something that was forever.

Samir Husni: Excellent. So, tell me, as you are climbing every mountain, so to say, do you really want to rule the world as your issue 28?

Teneshia Carr: Yes.

Yes. So, my theme of the Rule The World issue, and the other issue themes are based on song titles.

“Rule The World” is a nod to Beyonce or “Pieces Of You,” which is one of my favorite issues. That’s a Jewel song. So the themes are always rooted in music, mainly sad British music.

In order to survive as an independent or a niche magazine, you have to understand that circulation isn’t going to save you. Nothing is going to save you. You need to figure out how to do something that’s relevant, do something that matters to your readers and to advertisers to allow them to keep supporting you.

And you have to diversify. I can’t just print Blanc because that’s just not enough space for the stories I want to tell and the things that I want to make. I had to do what everybody else is doing.

That is the reason why I felt like I had to build an agency. I built an agency called BabyRobot Studios, with my partner, Scott Omelianuk (former editor in chief of Inc. and This Old House magazines). I built it because that’s only one piece of a touchpoint to the community. How else can I connect? How else can I engage? How else can I, with my partners, with my advertising partners, how can we engage and connect authentically in other ways? But the magazine, that’s the lighthouse, baby.

You don’t touch that. It’s perfect.

But there’s other ways that while for the past 15 years, I’ve built this community, I have to really figure out how to create experiences that, connect to them as individuals and connect to them as my audience. So that’s how you rule the world, diversifying. But leave your lighthouse untouched.

Leave it pure, leave it beautiful. It’s going to last forever and the advertisers will love you. But figure out other ways to build a brand, touch your community, and engage in your community.

And that can be digital for you. I’m working on it. I’m going to build it. It’s going to be amazing. It could be social, but for me, it’s going to be real life experiences when I partner with my advertisers and connect with my audience. So that’s how I’m going to rule the world.

Samir Husni:  It has been said magazines were the original influencers. What has been the influence of Blanc?

Teneshia Carr: I think we’re influenced by the idea of finding the people who are creating culture genuinely.

Magazines were the original influencers. That’s absolutely correct. And then fashion designers and fashion editors were the other first influencers.

But for us, it’s the community. It’s the people who we research and find, those next big artists, and those next big musicians. Like, Blanc is the other part of it, which is, it’s a clean slate.

It has nothing to do with the editors. It has nothing to do with my team. It’s about the contributors page, which changes every single issue.

We work with hundreds of new teams, every single issue on purpose, because that is who matters, the contributors, not necessarily the masthead. It’s about figuring out how to find those people who are on the precipice of becoming, and allowing their light to shine as influencers of culture. That’s what Blanc is built on.

It’s not built to be necessarily the influence. It is the lighthouse to shine on the influencers themselves.

Samir Husni: You’re so passionate about the magazine. Does this mean that your last 15 years have been a trip in a rose garden?

Teneshia Carr:  I grew up with the entire idea of being an entrepreneur. My mother was a nurse, and she was essentially a freelance nurse who went around, she had certain clients, and she moved from client to client.

My father, without a high school diploma, he started two cheesesteak stores in Philadelphia. One was called Carr’s Deli, and one was called Sandwich Masters. The point is that I was taught that there is nothing else but working for yourself.

There is no such thing as going to some job and getting some paycheck, and living life. That was never a part of my DNA. Whatever I was going to do in this world, I was going to sit inside whatever that thing is.

I was going to own the thing that I sit inside. There have been years of struggle and years of drinking champagne, and that’s the journey of being an entrepreneur. Every successful entrepreneur can tell you a dozen moments that they have been unsuccessful and they have failed.

For me, the entire journey has been worth it because I can’t do anything else. Now, at this point, can I maybe go and work for someone else? Maybe, but I could never do that before. It just wasn’t even in my DNA to think that way.

The entire journey for me has been Rose Garden because it’s full of the beauty and full of the thorns.

Samir Husni: Dealing with all the creative world, from music, to art, to fashion, do you have any fear from AI?

Teneshia Carr: No. I think I’m aging myself, I remember when Photoshop didn’t exist and you didn’t fear Photoshop. You were like, oh my God, I can get rid of all these pimples off this girl’s face.

It’s amazing. You didn’t think about a tool as something to fear. You thought about it as a tool to enhance the thing that you’re doing.

Now, if you aren’t talented and you use this tool in this way, I think that’s no different than people who used to over-process their photos in the eighties and nineties. And you used to say, oh my God,  look that’s so heavily Photoshopped.

In Blanc, most of our photos are shot in film still, by the way.

Most people don’t know that, but we encourage so many of our photographers to shoot on film. They don’t charge us the same rates. We tell them this is the theme, go explore.

It’s like testing ground to be experimental, to be different. And most of them say oh wow, a lot of people don’t let us use film. And I’m like, dude, go use film, go do it.

It’s a bit more expensive, but the print quality like this is (holding in her hands issue 28 of Blanc), this is shot in film. The difference you can tell in the whole story, you could tell them the stories that we shoot on film.

So I understand that people are afraid, but there are a lot of AI artists doing a lot of really cool things, there are a lot of photographers, a lot of creatives that don’t use anything that are doing some real cool things too. I mean, it’s okay.

All of it’s okay.

Samir Husni: I’m seeing so much like fake art, fake pictures…

Teneshia Carr: When they pass it as a real art, that’s the thing that’s scary, but I just think there isn’t anything we can do about that.

Like the moment that we started accepting images that were, literally wastes were reduced by seven inches, that people look completely different from retouching. When we were starting to accept that in advertising and in print as facts, we were already coming here anyway. We were already coming to the land of the fakeness anyway.

As if it just got here and now everybody’s scared, but we’ve been moving here. If you look at some images again from the nineties and the early two thousands that were so over processed that the people were unrecognizable. That’s where we were heading.

We’re heading to the land of the falseness. That’s going to make Blanc and other niche magazines who are doing really cool things still interesting. It’s going to make us interesting in a couple of years because people get exhausted with not knowing if something that they’re seeing is real or not.

And they know that when they pick up Blanc, they see the film edges. They know that that was shot on film and that was just printed and that’s it. There’s nothing else.

So I think it’s going to be more important to have those kind of bastions of purity, like print, like people who still shoot film, people who still accept film for print, because I know how rare that is.

It’s going to be all the more important to keep figuring out how to publish this stuff, these creatives, they need this platform, they need publications that are still going to be accepting this kind of work.

Samir Husni: If somebody comes to you and says, Ms. Carr, I want to publish a magazine today, ink on paper magazine, do you tell them you’re out of your mind or you give them a different advice?

Teneshia Carr:  I would say you are 50 years too late. If you’re still hearing that and crazy enough to keep going, then you just might have the juice to come out with a couple issues.

I would say it takes a certain type of person to look down the barrel in the face of this impossible thing and say, yeah, I still want to do that. That person can’t be persuaded to do anything else because I’m one of those people. You couldn’t tell me 15 years ago to not do a magazine.

You couldn’t tell me today to not do a magazine. I would do it.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my personal question, is there anything you would like to add, a question you would like me to ask I didn’t ask you?

Teneshia Carr: No, I think that was pretty good. I think it was pretty fun.

Samir Husni: So my first personal question, I could not but notice the spider tattoo on your hand. What’s the significance of the spider tattoo?

Teneshia Carr: So this is Anansi, Anansi the spider. He’s a trickster spider.

He has seven sons. My husband has a deep affinity for spiders. And so instead of a wedding band, I got this Anansi.

And this is me, who is Djibouti the turtle. Also a trickster turtle. This is the trickster turtle and this trickster spider.

They’re based on folklore. This is the African folklore.

They’re little tricksters who trick the other animals in the forest into doing what they want.

Samir Husni: If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch Teneshia doing to rewind from day reading a book, watching TV, cooking?

Teneshia Carr: I do a lot of journaling in the evening. For a long time, I didn’t unwind at all. I didn’t know how to relax, or I was always thinking about work or always checking emails, the worst thing in the world that has happened to us is the fact that we have constant access to our phones and people have constant access to us.

I turn off all the notifications on my phone so it doesn’t even light up because I would be checking it all the time. I do a lot of journaling, just mindless writing in the evening. And that really helps me relax from the day.

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

Teneshia Carr: I think trying to juggle between two businesses, building the agency, BabyRobot Studios and the magazine together. They’re separate, right? They’re sisters, but they have their separate purposes. They’re totally different: one is an agency and one is media.

It keeps me up at night. Realizing that I have to put a lot of all the things that I’ve learned over the past 15 years into my business.  I’m having to learn all over again about a new business that I didn’t anticipate. So it just means that I have to get in a frame of mind. It’s a new challenge that I didn’t expect to run.

It’s just content, right? I make this content for print. I can make this content for white label and give it to the same client and charge an agency rate. It’s this totally different business, totally different self. It’s a totally different set of clients.

It’s totally different. And you just don’t anticipate it until you actually are going to set up an agency. It’s going to be totally fine.

So that’s what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

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A Centennial Platform aka Life Magazine March 26, 1925… A Mr. Magazine™ Musing

March 25, 2025

I am holding in my hands a copy of Life magazine from March 26, 1925. Yes, you read that right, a copy of a magazine published 100 years ago.  The magazine feels, looks, and reads like many magazines published today.  A nice cover, good content, plenty of illustrations, and a promise for the future, “While there is Life There’s Hope.”  And hope is what I see and feel every time I pick up a copy of a magazine from a century or two ago.

Print is permanent.  A magazine, once printed, is permanent.  You can’t change a thing, not even a comma.  There is no backspace or delete button.  What you see is what you get: yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  You can own it and you can proudly say it is mine.  That sense of ownership satisfies the human need in all of us to own things, lots of things (Just look at your house or apartment and see how many things you have, even those you do not need).

Flipping through the pages of this issue of Life, I am transformed to a simpler, calmer world where,  I can “select colors and upholstery,” for my “custom Cadillac,” or enjoy my Wrigley’s chewing gum “after every meal.”

I am also reading the prize winner’s answer to the question, “Is Democracy a Success?”  H.W. Davis won the $50 prize for the following answer: “ Democracy is a rip-roaring success.  If you don’t believe so, say out loud that it isn’t – and run for your life.  Democracy pats the greatest number of people on the back and makes the most promises. Of course it seldom delivers. But what of that? We live and are made happy by promise, not performance.

And happiness is success, for all that anybody has been able to prove to the contrary. Ergo, democracy is a success.

There! The pup has his tail in his teeth.”

So, here you have it.  I am reading and flipping the pages of a magazine from 100 years ago, exactly like I read and flip the pages of a magazine from March 26, 2025.  I wonder if I can say the same thing about any of my digital devices? Heck, I can’t even use my camcorder from 20 years ago, yet I can look at my printed pictures from 50 years ago.

Long live print and long live permeance.  Print will be here long after I am gone, the same it was here long before I was born. 

One final note, there is nothing permanent about digital, even a PDF can be changed and altered. You can’t do that to a magazine. It is permanent.

Enough of that, I have some reading to do…the first issue of Art Lovers magazine from January 1925…To be continued.

PS:  If you want to journey through thousands of magazines from yesteryears, check The Samir Husni’s Magazine Collection at my Alma Mater The University of Missouri-Columbia here.

Posted in A Mr. Magazine™ Musing, From the Vault, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

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The Lost Art of Magazine Illustrations & The Dangers of AI Art.  The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Brian Clarke Also Known as Les Toil.

March 21, 2025

When Brian Clarke, who uses the pseudonym name Les Toil, decided to major in art at the beginning of the 90s, he did not know he is majoring in a lost art.  His love for art and his talents in illustrations were enough to provide him with a decent income to provide a good living.

However that decent income started to dry up and go south as the 90s progressed.  Photography became cheaper to use and digital art started to be on the rise.  Then artificial intelligence (AI) appeared on the scene, and like a thief in the night, art and illustrations became a lost art.

So how can a magazine illustrator make a living in this digital age, and how are hand-created ink on paper illustrations and paintings differ from those created by AI?  These questions and more were the center piece of my conversation with an artist who spends his evenings, “doing warmup drawings, just keeping my hand busy, doing sketches from photographs…”

Brian Clarke is not only fun to chat with but also a passionate artist of the art of illustrations and paintings.  The “proliferation of AI art,” is what keeps him up at night, but he and his global network of art friends are searching for ways to stop AI from stealing their creative work.

I hope you will enjoy this Mr. Magazine™ interview with Brian Clarke, better known as Les Toil, as much as I enjoyed conducting this interview.

But first the soundbites:

On the origin of the pseudonym name Les Toil: “I got that name by looking at an old issue of National Lampoon, an issue called National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook Parody… and I saw the name Les Toil, which means less work, and I thought that’s a great name, because the style that I’m doing now, pen and ink, is a lot less effort, a lot less toil than an elaborate oil painting.”

On the value of ink on paper art: “You can pick up a magazine anytime. You can grab that magazine and go straight to that art, and Samir, it’s also like when albums went from LPs, went from big albums to little cassettes. As an illustrator, that broke my heart.”

On art and AI: “AI is actually replacing artists. I’m not happy about that. The way that we’re battling, us artists are battling AI art is by putting up restrictions for these AI applications or companies to start harvesting our art, to stop stealing our art.”

On the value of illustrations in today’s marketplace: “I think that importance has diminished a bit unfortunately. Even with AI art, as far as editorial journalism, I’m not really sure if illustration plays a big part as it did in the past.”

On original pieces of art: “I think for the simple fact that if you have a printed piece of art, or if you have your original art, I think just the fact that you have it, the original art in your hand, that kind of makes it art.”

On the reasons art and illustrations have declined: “Because, to be honest, art is not as valued as it once was. The process of photography is a lot easier to attain than it was before.”

On his favorite art magazine: “It’s called Illustration Magazine. Each issue, the editors highlight about three or four classic illustrators from the past, illustrators from all countries.”

On the benefits of art to him: “So there’d be all these different assignments, just hundreds of assignments of subjects that I wasn’t familiar with…I go to the library… I read up on it. And so that was a benefit. I got a good education through doing magazine art.”

On whether art and illustrations are a lost art: “Unfortunately, it is. It is.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Brian Clarke, better known as Les Toil:

Samir Husni: So, tell me, Brian, my first question is, why the pseudonym name Les Toil?

Brian Clarke:  Samir, the name Les Toil came about in the early 1990s, and that is because I was working under my real name, Brian Clarke, ever since I graduated from art school. I went to California College of Arts and Crafts for two years, and then I went to the Academy of Art in San Francisco, which is where I graduated in 1991.

Right after I graduated from art school, art directors, clients, stopped using illustrators for things like magazines and whatever, the type of work that I was getting after art school. I was working for any type of industry that hired illustrators. Again, that included periodicals, it included the film industry, it included the gaming industry, it included advertising art, just any industry that hired illustrators.

I was fortunate enough after art school to get work. So, for a good three or four year period, I was doing fine, and then the whole world of illustration went south, and art directors started to use photographers, they started to use clip art, which is previously done artwork that can be recycled over and over again. So, I wasn’t getting much work after three years of a thriving career as an illustrator in the early 90s, and so a friend of mine, an illustrator friend of mine, started to do rock and roll posters.

He started to do these little mini posters for music shows around the Bay Area. We were young, and we were going to all these different rock and roll shows. He started to do these posters, and he had a friend that was printing these posters in his office, and they were beautiful color posters. Back in the early 90s, having your art printed in color, beautiful color, was fantastic, because all we had were those crappy color Xerox machines. So I started to do some of these rock and roll posters that were being posted all over San Francisco and the Bay Area, and I wanted to have a different name for myself, because back in the 60s, there were all these rock and roll posters for rock bands that were happening, the burgeoning rock and roll scene in the mid-60s, and those artists had cool names, so I wanted to have a cool name for this new style of art that I was doing, and I was also getting into my artwork being colored on the computer.

So for my three-year career as an illustrator, since art school, I was doing these elaborate oil paintings, because all the people that I admired as illustrators when I was going to art school, they all worked in traditional paint, oil, acrylic, gouache, so that’s what I was doing. But then when I started to do the rock and roll art, I switched to an easier style, which was pen and ink, pencil, drawing it in pencil, and then inking the pencil lines, so it kind of looked like comic book art, basically line art, and then I would scan it on a computer and color it with Photoshop, which my friend taught me.

I got an Apple computer, and I started to learn to color my pen and ink art on Photoshop, and so I changed my name to Les Toil, because I thought that was a cool name, and Samir, I got that name by looking at an old issue of National Lampoon, an issue called National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook Parody, and in that issue, they had all these class of 1957 photographs of all the students that were graduating, and they had all these goofy names, like Lindsay Doyle, Jason Rainbows, just all these hilarious names, and I saw the name Les Toil, which means less work, and I thought that’s a great name, because the style that I’m doing now, pen and ink, is a lot less effort, a lot less toil than an elaborate oil painting, so I started to sign those rock and roll posters, Les Toil, with basically a stamp.  I wasn’t even signing them, I just put a stamp saying Les Toil. I started to make a name for myself doing this rock and roll art. I started doing rock and roll CD covers, album covers, posters, and I was being interviewed in magazines for the rock and roll art that I was doing under the name Les Toil, so I just kept that name from like 1993 up until now, and nobody knows who the hell Brian Clarke is, but that’s where that name comes from. Sorry for the long story.

Samir Husni: When you look at the art that you create, where’s the value of the ink on paper compared to the digital sphere that we live in, especially that you graduated at the beginning of the digital revolution?

Brian Clarke:  I say there’s a value for your art in a printed magazine because you’re not restricted to looking at it on a screen. You don’t have to be at a particular place looking at a particular image to enjoy it. You don’t have to look at a small screen to enjoy that art.

You can pick up a magazine anytime. You can grab that magazine and go straight to that art, and Samir, it’s also like when albums went from LPs, went from big albums to little cassettes. As an illustrator, that broke my heart.

I was a kid when it happened, but you had that big beautiful artwork to look at as you were listening to the music, and I think the same applies to magazines. You have that beautiful illustration to look at that gives you reference to the article that you’re reading or the interview that you’re reading. It gives you reference if you’re reading a fiction story, a short story in a magazine.

You can constantly look at that, and you’re not restricted to having to come into your studio or  to look at a computer.

Samir Husni: What role does illustrations play in today’s marketplace?

Brian Clarke:  I think that importance has diminished a bit unfortunately. Even with AI art, as far as editorial journalism, I’m not really sure if illustration plays a big part as it did in the past.

People are more than happy with using photographs, even if it’s a fiction story. People seem to be just as happy with a photograph of a man and a woman sitting on a park bench for a short love story. But what the benefits of illustrations in a printed platform is that they’re exposing the reader to art.

Periodicals quite often are the average citizen’s primary exposure to popular culture. When I was going to art school, I discovered so much about art based upon the illustrations that were being printed in magazines throughout the years. I was learning about so many different things including cultures of different countries. You’re not getting that now if you’re not seeing art, original hand-created art in periodicals.

Samir Husni:  I’ve seen so much fake art generated by AI on Facebook and other social media platforms. How can you protect the authentic art from the madness of fake AI-generated art?

Brain Clarke:  Well, Samir, as you can imagine, I’m very much in social media.

I expose my art through social media, and all of my art friends are just up in arms about AI. We’re very unhappy about that. And people that use AI  give the excuse that AI art is only a tool to help real artists, but I don’t believe that’s true because I’m seeing finished pieces of art that were completely created by artificial intelligence.

So AI is actually replacing artists. I’m not happy about that. The way that we’re battling, us artists are battling AI art is by putting up restrictions for these AI applications or companies to start harvesting our art, to stop stealing our art.

There’s now applications that will put stamps or watermarks on our hand-created art in which an AI platform or company can’t steal it. And that’s the only way artificial intelligence art is created is by stealing real artists’ work and then manipulating it. So that’s the only thing we can do to battle the proliferation of AI art now, is to prevent them from stealing our art.

Samir Husni: So tell me, because I think you and I share this love for print. If I have a piece of art in my hands, let’s say the Mona Lisa, if I own the Mona Lisa, or if I see it on my computer screen, which one, does that ownership gives me a different feeling, a different sense of ownership, of showmanship?

Brian Clarke: I think for the simple fact that if you have a printed piece of art, or if you have your original art, I think just the fact that you have it, the original art in your hand, that kind of makes it art. That kind of makes it so you can now frame it and hang it on your wall.

Again, you can’t do that with AI art. When AI art is displayed in art galleries, which I’m starting to see, unfortunately, now, it’s just prints, low resolution prints for that matter.

So, in my opinion,  just to hold it, and to be able to display it, and be able to make large, whatever, reprints of original art, I think that’s the benefit. It’s created by a human being with human spirit.

Samir Husni: Why do you think, a hundred years ago, we used to have a lot of art magazines. Why do you think we don’t have as many art magazines, as they used to be a century ago?

Brian Clarke: Because, to be honest, art is not as valued as it once was. Because the process of photography is a lot easier to attain than it was before.

We can pull out our phones and take a photograph. In the past, in the 1920s, the 30s, the 40s,  illustration was the official way to embellish a story, to embellish anything, to convey something, because photography just wasn’t all that easy back then. I read your interview with Marianne Howatson on your blog and I completely agree with what she said. You held up an art magazine just now, and I believe, niche type magazines, periodicals, will always thrive. I pay good money for a number of art-related magazines, such as Illustration Magazine and Artist’s Magazine.

These are beautiful, glossy magazines that come out once every six months. They have just stunning prints of old illustrations by great masters of art. I think if I were to start my own magazine, it will be with the type of art that’s always inspired me.

So in that sense, a niche publication, I do believe would thrive. If you believe there’s an audience for what you love, then I think that type of printed material will keep going on.

Samir Husni: What’s your favorite art magazine, if you can?

Brian Clarke: It’s called Illustration Magazine. Each issue, the editors highlight about three or four classic illustrators from the past, illustrators from all countries. The editors get their hands on photographs and scans of some of these classic illustrations that were printed in Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Newsweek, Time, all those magazines from the 30s, 40s, 50s.

They have beautiful scans of these slides of these pieces. And that’s why I like Illustrator magazine specifically.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I failed to ask you and you would like me to ask?

Brian Clarke: I’d like to tell you why I had such a fantastic time as an editorial magazine illustrator. And the reason I had such a good time, and it was about a good six years that I was earning a living doing magazine illustrations. The reason why I loved it so much is because almost every assignment was a new exposure to some subject.

I remember getting an assignment to do an illustration for a story on King Henry VIII.  I went into the library and I did all my research on King Henry VIII. I gathered all that material, how they were dressed, the structures, the architecture back then. I created an illustration based upon what I studied about that period. Then there’ll be some other assignment that has to do with whatever science fiction, life on Mars.

I’d go to the library and I’d study up on that and I’d see photographs and I’d look at other illustrators interpretation of Mars. So there’d be all these different assignments, just hundreds of assignments of subjects that I wasn’t familiar with. I read up on it.

And so that was a benefit. I got a good education through doing magazine art.

Samir Husni: Let me ask you my typical last two questions. If I come unannounced to your home one day, what do I catch you doing? Painting, drawing, a glass of wine, cooking?

Brian Clarke: You would catch me doing warmup drawings, just keeping my hand busy, doing sketches from photographs. Or if my fiancé is here, I sketch her sitting right over there in front of my table.

I’m always sketching if I don’t have an assignment to do. So just honing my craft with my pencils and my paintbrushes is pretty much what you’ll catch me doing. Or I’ll be looking at an old movie or a new movie after my work day is over.

And that’s pretty much it.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Brian Clarke: What keeps me up at night is the proliferation of AI art. Pretty much that.

And also because the economy is not doing so well now, what keeps me up at night is worrying about where my next assignment is going to come from. And right now I’ve been paying my bills and staying busy by doing portraits of people and portraits of their pets. And classic pin-up art portraits of women.

And a lot of husbands and boyfriends will contact me and say, you know, my girlfriend wants to look like a 1950s glamour queen, calendar queen. I’ll do it like a classic pin-up portrait of a person’s wife or whoever wants to hire me to do that.

So that’s how I stay busy.

Samir Husni: So can we say then art and illustration are a lost art?  

Brian Clarke: Unfortunately, it is. It is.

But me and my art friends across the globe, we’re trying our best to keep it alive.

Samir Husni: I wish you all the best.  Thank you.

Posted in Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

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Marianne Howatson: Swimming Against The Current And Doing Very Well… The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With The CEO & Publication Director Of C&G Media Group.

March 15, 2025

Don’t you dare tell Marianne Howatson that the magazine advertising model is dead.  The CEO and Publication Director of the C&G Media Group disagrees completely with you. Her magazines are doing well, very well indeed, thankfully to the advertising driven magazine publishing model. Her mission, “to deliver the finest design media to the residents of America’s most prestigious communities.”

Ms. Howatson, the former publisher of Self and Travel & Leisure magazines, jumped into the fury of magazine ownership when she bought the Collages and Gardens titles in 2009.  Yes, you read that correctly 2009:  It was a depressing year for magazines and the economy as a whole.  But she took a big chance on those titles, and her gamble paid off and it continues to do so.

In fact she added to the three titles, Hamptons Cottages and Gardens, Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, & New York Cottages and Gardens, her newest title Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens that the former owner of the magazines ceased its publication in 2008.  The first issue is a beauty to behold and is loaded with what you expect to see similar to the rest of the magazines in the family of Cottages and Gardens.

Ms Howatson is very optimistic about the future of the new title and the rest of the publications that she owns. Her only worry is, “Are we going to keep doing as well as we’re doing?” she told me when I asked her what keeps her up at night these days.

She is a firm believer in magazines and their future, as long you have a niche audience that is not reached by any other medium or platform, a community spirit, and you are involved in all the major events in the area.

So, without any further ado, here is my lightly edited conversation with Marianne Howatson, CEO and publication Director of C&G Media Group. 

But first the soundbites:

On the reason she bought the magazines: “I thought to myself, if the day comes in the United States that we don’t have wealthy people building beautiful houses, we probably won’t even have a planet.”

On if her gamble paid off: “Yes, yes.”

On why Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens now: “When I came on in 2009, hasn’t a week gone by without someone saying, when are you going back to Palm Beach? And it’s only taken us 16 years.”

On the future of print in a digital age: “I think that the future of print in the digital age is very niche groups of people.”

On her favorite magazine in her company: “And so each time we launched a new magazine, it’s like children, you just love them all.”

On her advice for someone starting a new magazine: “I would ask them to make sure that they have a niche audience that very few other people have, and be prepared to just live in the marketplace, work with your readers, work with the advertisers.”

On the magazine publishing advertising driven model: “I think that advertising revenue will be here to stay. It’s very difficult for magazines to only make money on their circulation.”

On what she does at home in the evenings: “We publish 30 editions a year, and that’s more than any other group, it’s an enormous amount of editorial. So I’m doing 30 columns a year, editing, it just keeps going on. But I absolutely love it.”

And now for my lightly edited conversation with Marianne Howatson, CEO and publication director of C&G Media Group:

Samir Husni: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me. My first question to you is an easy one. Back in 2009, when everybody was folding magazines and the country was going into a recession, you bought the Cottages and Gardens publications. What were you thinking?

Marianne Howatson: Several things. One is Connecticut Cottages and Gardens was one of my favorite magazines, and I was in New York City all week working in publishing, and I’d come up to Connecticut on the weekend and I would love the magazine. Then I heard it was for sale. At that point that we were in a major recession.

I thought to myself, if the day comes in the United States that we don’t have wealthy people building beautiful houses, we probably won’t even have a planet. I also thought the designers and these people want to look at big, glossy pages so that their work is shown, the photographers love it. So, those were the reasons.

Samir Husni: Did your gamble pay off?

Marianne Howatson: Yes, yes. I closed it in October 2009. And within the next few months, we started going up, because obviously the company had been impacted by the recession at that point until I bought it, and then we started to climb out.

Samir Husni: It seems that you continue this drive to bring luxury publications to the most luxurious communities. I mean, that’s one of your goals.

Marianne Howatson: Yes.

Samir Husni: So, tell me about the recent launch of the Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens.

Marianne Howatson: Actually, Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens was published between 2004 and 2008 with the old company and the old owner. They had folded that because of the recession, and Palm Beach was very badly hit during that recession.

So, they had stopped publishing it. And when I came on in 2009, hasn’t a week gone by without someone saying, when are you going back to Palm Beach? And it’s only taken us 16 years. But for the last few years, a lot of our clients and our advertisers and designers have come down to Florida, and they’re saying, why don’t you come with us? Come with us.

So we eventually decided that last year we were going to do it.

Samir Husni: I know you’re a luxury publications publisher and CEO. Do you think this is the future of print in this digital age, luxury?

Marianne Howatson: I think that the future of print in the digital age is very niche groups of people.

It may not just be wealthy home design. There could be others. And I think that having a really niche audience, which can’t be reached by anyone else, would be very good for the magazine industry.

Samir Husni: Do you think your magazine media journey has been a walk in a rose garden?

Marianne Howatson: No, I think that I’m used to say that my days were filled with a mixture of horror and elation. And I’ve been trying to change that ratio to have less horror and more elation as I’ve moved on.

Samir Husni: That’s good. Can recount for me what was the biggest stumbling block since you acquired the magazines and how did you overcome it?

Marianne Howatson: Not sure that we had a stumbling block. I think that we’ve been really very fortunate. And one of the things that I think we did was that we isolated very early on.

When I first came on, I saw in research that 95% of our readers worked with design professionals, as architects, designers, builders. And our research showed that 40% of our readers were design professionals. When we recognized that and zeroed in on that, I think it made a big difference because we’re one of the few magazines that has a mixture like that, so that we have lots of architects and designers who advertise with us, as well as, of course, wonderful products.

Samir Husni: Do you have a favorite among the four magazines now?

Marianne Howatson: I love them all. Well, I still love Connecticut as well. But, you know, the Hamptons was the first magazine.

I remember when it was launched in 2002, it was really very well received. It was spectacular. It was very different in the Hamptons.

And so each time we launched a new magazine, it’s like children, you just love them all.

Samir Husni: Well, let me ask you,  your magazines are still advertising driven. Yes. And we hear a lot about that the advertising driven model is dead. How come you’re surviving?

Marianne Howatson: Well, I don’t think the advertising driven model is dead, because, well, A, it’s a major revenue stream. And we did not fall into the challenges of having subscriptions.

Most magazines are not able to make money on their subscriptions. And that would have been a drag on the company. We have a very select way of reaching our readers.

So I think that advertising revenue will be here to stay. It’s very difficult for magazines to only make money on their circulation.

Samir Husni: If you look like at the new launch, the first issue of the Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens, how do you compare this relaunch experience after the magazine ceased publication in 2008? What was your message?

Marianne Howatson: The message was that we’re coming back. And a lot of people in the market remembered us.

We told everyone we’re following that same pattern we decided for our magazines. They have the same format, the same size, and the same type of photography, etc. We told everyone we’re following that same pattern. And because their knowledge of Hamptons, Connecticut and New York, they responded to it.

Samir Husni: I hear a lot from people that magazines in Florida can flourish, but magazines in California will not. Is that the reason all your magazines are on the East Coast?

Marianne Howatson: I haven’t heard that. Florida, it’s very concentrated. It’s really exciting. I think California has a lot of space.

It’s a different market. Here, we have an exodus of people coming down here.  Also the real estate group Related Ross has 24 buildings going up in West Palm Beach, right now over the next few years. So that is an awful lot of units for people to live in.

And they’re going to need to have them decorated. Does they need the magazines? Yes.

Samir Husni: With all the experience under your belt, if somebody comes to you and said, I want to publish a new magazine, what advice do you give them?

Marianne Howatson: I would ask them to make sure that they have a niche audience that very few other people have, and be prepared to just live in the marketplace, work with your readers, work with the advertisers. We have very much of a community spirit, and we are involved in all the major events and the areas that we’re in.

We support the charities, we’ve launched quite a few of them. So I would say that don’t go into it if you’re going to be an absentee manager. You really need to have that passion, and that’s what your community will respond to.

Samir Husni: Good advice. In addition to your magazines, you publish a lot of special publications, can tell me a little bit more about that.

Marianne Howatson: Yes, we have the New York Design Guide, the Connecticut Design Guide, and the Hamptons Design Guide, and because of this relationship between design professionals and our readers, we felt that there was so much information that they wanted, so we created these design guides, and they’re smaller than our big magazines. They’re made of paper that would last all year, and the idea is anyone who lives in these towns, if they want to find an architect, or they want to look for some wallpaper, it should be in that design guide.

So it’s a very different publication.

Samir Husni: Excellent, and before I ask you my typical last two personal questions, is there any question I failed to ask you you’d like me to ask, and or you’d like to add?

Marianne Howatson: No, I think you did terrifically.

Samir Husni: So if I come uninvited one evening to your house, what do I catch Marianne doing? Cooking, watching TV, having a glass of wine?

Marianne Howatson: Sad to say, I would probably be reading the dummy of one of our issues.

We publish 30 editions a year, and that’s more than any other group, it’s an enormous amount of editorial. So I’m doing 30 columns a year, editing, it just keeps going on. But I absolutely love it.

You probably find me doing that or just relaxing in the house. And if I’m outside, I’m looking at shops and looking at antique shops and design shops.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Marianne Howatson: Worrying about, are we going to keep doing as well as we’re doing? Exactly the question you asked me.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

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Mountain Gazette: Magazine Making At Its Best.  The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Mike Rogge, Owner & Editor

March 8, 2025

I have a confession to make.  When my mailman delivered issue 201 of Mountain  Gazette to me at 3:00 pm, I did not put it down until 9:00 pm that evening.  Six hours of magazine heaven.  Total bliss and experience unlike any other.

I was determined to interview the experience maker behind Mountain Gazette: Mike Rogge.  He is the owner and editor of the magazine and his wife Meghan Forbes Rogge is the vice president of Mountain Gazette. 

The year was 2020 when Mike bought Mountain Gazette and decided to relaunch it after an eight year hiatus.  As his wife likes to say, “when others were learning how to make sourdough starters and bread during the pandemic, we were learning how to make a magazine again.”  And making a magazine they did with a tagline for the ages, “When in Doubt, Go Higher.”

Mike and Meghan Rogge
Mike Rogge, owner and editor, with his wife Meghan Forbes Rogge, vice president, Mountain Gazette

An oversized magazine measuring a little bit less than 11 X 17 gives you the feeling that you, the reader, is a giant holding a billboard between your hands.  Marvelous stories, beautiful pictures, and a great design sets Mountain Gazette apart from the competition, if there is any to be found.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Rogge, the owner and editor of Mountain Gazette, and found him to be the perfect imperfect experience maker.  So please feel free to be mesmerized with this Mr. Magazine™ interview, but first the soundbites:

On the drive behind the relaunch of Mountain Gazette: “I just thought if we made something that was big and beautiful, it would work.”

On the reason he bought the magazine: “I’m a pretty community-oriented person and I really care about what we put out into the world. So I felt like outdoor culture, the outdoor community deserved a print title like this.”

On his business model: “Our business model is simple, we have subscribers, we make the magazine for our readers and nobody else.”

On his advertisers: “We always put ads in the front and in the back of the magazine. Never in the middle, ever. We’ll never do that.”

On Mountain Gazette’s audience: “We have a highly engaged, sophisticated audience that’s becoming rarer and rarer to reach on the Internet. So that’s the way we work with our partners.”

On the team producing the magazine: “Our journalists are vetted. They’re award winning. They’re what I would call exceptional people and creators.”

On the role AI plays in magazine making:  “Our magazine is made by people. And I think that as good as AI is, AI has never been hurt. AI has never been in love. It can fake that. AI has never been given a cancer diagnosis. AI has never been told that they’re cancer free. AI has never watched their child be born. And above all,  I believe in the human experience because it’s not clean. It’s messy. And messy looks good in our pages.”

On his journey with Mountain Gazette: “My wife describes me as a duck. I’m cool on the surface and underneath I’m paddling like crazy.”

On which role he enjoys most from all his roles: “So far, being editor has felt the most natural position for me to have.”

On the mission of the magazine: “We look at the world through an outdoor lens. We have this strong belief at the magazine that going outdoors anywhere in the world…  has the ability to change your life.”

On what keeps him up at night: “That is such a timely question to me. I’m concerned about our ability to print in Canada, totally dependent on these tariffs.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Mike Rogge, owner and editor, Mountain Gazette magazine:

Samir Husni:  Mike, while others were killing magazines in 2020, you bought Mountain Gazette and you were  the forerunner of relaunching magazines as we are seeing this year and last year. What gives?

What gave you the idea to buy a magazine that has been dead for almost eight years and to bring it back to life in print and all the surroundings of the print that you’ve done?

Mike Rogge: Well, I have worked for magazines for a long time.

I worked for a newspaper when I was 19 and I’ve worked for blogs. I think one of the things you learn when you work for a lot of media companies is know what to do and what not to do. There’s good practices and bad practices and I thought what if we started a media company and we tried to do things the right way, knowing we would make mistakes along the way and learn from them and we’ve been pretty adamant about learning from our mistakes. I just thought if we made something that was big and beautiful, it would work.

Samir Husni: Besides being a journalist, a filmmaker, now you are also an owner and editor, what’s the drive that makes you create such a beautiful, upscale, large publication in ink on paper in this digital age?

Mike Rogge: I’m a pretty community-oriented person and I really care about what we put out into the world. So I felt like outdoor culture, the outdoor community deserved a print title like this. And I think one thing is respecting creators, respecting writers, photographers, artists, having respect for them, having respect for our readers was paramount to us being able to create something special.

So my drive is, I try to make the next issue better than the last one. This is our 10th issue that we’re putting out and it’s getting harder to do that, but we are having a good time trying to warm up ourselves up here.

Samir Husni: You wrote that the old magazine business model is dead and you are introducing a new business model. Can you expand a little bit on that?

Mike Rogge: I think the model of going out and saying to advertisers, this is how many readers we have and printing an exorbitant amount of magazines just to say that you did print an exorbitant amount of magazines and not sell them at all. Our business model is simple, we have subscribers, we make the magazine for our readers and nobody else. You can’t buy it on the newsstand.

We rarely sell single copy issues. We are doing our best just to keep this like a closed ecosystem where our readers pay us a fee per year to get two issues. In return, we protect that content from the magazine and make sure that it’s exclusive to them.

They only get it. We don’t republish online or anything like that. And that’s that.

Samir Husni: But you’re still accepting advertising? And how do you treat the advertisers in this community of Mountain Gazette?

Mike Rogge: The first thing that our subscribers and our ad partners know is that we don’t do advertorials. And I think that’s a benefit to both. Our readers are never questioning, is this an ad or is this a story? If it’s in the magazine and it’s not clearly an ad, it’s a story.

We always put ads in the front and in the back of the magazine. Never in the middle, ever. We’ll never do that.

What I think is interesting is we have a highly engaged, sophisticated audience that’s becoming rarer and rarer to reach on the Internet. So that’s the way we work with our partners. We tell them we don’t write about gear. We don’t write about jackets. We don’t rank ski resorts. So you have an opportunity to be in our magazine and tell our readers what’s great about your ski area or your jackets or your ski boots or whatnot.

They’ve found it to be really beneficial to date. We hear a lot from our ad partners. It’s the only place that they ever get compliments on their ads. They get people on the street that I saw the Solomon ad or the Fly Low ad in the last issue of Mountain Gazette. It looks really great. I think that’s because of our large format. The magazine really lends itself to great photography.

Samir Husni: You mentioned that most of what’s on the Internet and social media is trash, quote, unquote. How do you define the role of print in this digital age?

Mike Rogge: I think we have to understand that we’ve got a copy editor, a managing editor, myself, we have fact checkers. Our journalists are vetted. They’re award winning. They’re what I would call exceptional people and creators. So I think if anything, like our content, it’s curated and it’s vetted and you can’t say that about most things on the Internet.

We’re not in this to look for a fight. It’s not to say that we’re just going to let people steamroll us. But like, we do some reporting. We do some trip stuff. We do some first descent, cool stuff. We do aspirational stuff. We do inspirational stuff. We have humor. And I think that’s more reflective of how the real world actually is.

If you go on the Internet, you would think the world is falling apart every single day, every single minute. And certainly the world is not in a great place right now. But I think we can all agree that the world’s also not on fire right now, either.

The print magazine is based in reality, and that’s where we want to keep it.

Screenshot

Samir Husni: Mike, especially when it comes to photography,  and you have gorgeous photography in the magazine. But now with AI, we are seeing so much fake pictures on the Internet. I can create even fake pictures saying, Samir is on Mount Everest and I’m here in Oxford, Mississippi. Do you have any fear from AI or is it a friend or foe?

Mike Rogge: I love it. I love AI.

I think it’s great.  I went to college for English literature and writing. So when I have business questions, you know, I can ask AI, I want you to pretend you’re an MBA, and this is a business problem I have.

It’s just kind of bouncing ideas off it. I think it’s great for that. There’s a lot of promise for medical use.

But our magazine is made by people. And I think that as good as AI is, AI has never been hurt. AI has never been in love. It can fake that. AI has never been given a cancer diagnosis. AI has never been told that they’re cancer free. AI has never watched their child be born. And above all,  I believe in the human experience because it’s not clean. It’s messy.

And messy looks good in our pages. Here’s what I know. Samir on top of Everest, that would be really, really cool. I know people that have climbed Everest. And I can tell you that what makes their Everest journey important is not getting to the top, but how they got to the top, the challenges they face in their lives. And that, to me, is part of the human experience.

I don’t know that a robot will ever be, certainly can try to fake it, right? I do say this often, though. It makes me think of the scene in the movie Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon and the late Robin Williams, are sitting on a bench. And he goes, sure, you can tell me everything about the Sistine Chapel, when it was built,  when it was painted, everything.

But you can’t tell me what it feels like to be there. You can’t tell me what it smells like to be there with the woman you love. And it’s like this trip you dreamed of.

I do think that nuance is often overlooked. And on a final note on AI, don’t you think it’s so interesting that the first thing they asked AI to do, these creators, quote unquote, these people that have no artistic ability, was to try to mimic being an artist. That makes me kind of sad.

I don’t know how to tell Sam Altman this, but like, your painting is good enough, buddy. If it came from your heart, it’s good enough.

Samir Husni: Good. Tell me, has your journey with Mountain Gazette been a walk in a rose garden?

Mike Rogge: No. No. No. My wife describes me as a duck. I’m cool on the surface and underneath I’m paddling like crazy.

One thing that has been challenging is the notion that I might have all the answers because of our success. And the truth is, I have the answers for our title when we face problems or challenges because I’m deeply involved. This is what I do. This is my work. This is my life. In some senses, for better or worse, it’s part of my identity as being the editor of Mountain Gazette.

Obviously, there’s been way more good times than bad. Currently we’re printing our magazine in Canada and we’re dealing with a tariff issue and that’s a challenge. But I’m inspired by some of the athletes who do climb Everest and fail. They don’t make it to the top. And what they do the next year is they return. That’s kind of our thing, we may get punched, but we’re going to get back up.

The last five years have offered me some opportunities that I could have never dreamed of. And mostly that’s working with contributors.

Samir Husni: You wear too many hats with Mountain Gazette. Which one do you prefer? Is it the owner, the editor, the publisher?

Mike Rogge: I like a little bit of all of them. So far, being editor has felt the most natural position for me to have.

I don’t necessarily prefer being the trash guy who takes out the trash at our office, but that’s one of my hats too. But I like being the editor of Mountain Gazette. That’s by far my favorite.

I guess my favorite part of the publishing side has been trying to get to know some of the men and women and people who actually physically make our magazine. They’re craftspeople. They essentially work in a factory and they take a lot of pride in their work.

And I’m inspired by that.

Samir Husni: Is there anything you would like to add before I ask my final two personal questions?

Mike Rogge: We relaunched Mountain Gazette in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, and my wife likes to say that when others were learning how to make sourdough starters and bread during the pandemic, we were learning how to make a magazine again. So that what we did. When I bought the magazine, my original ambition for it was to try to get to a thousand subscribers.

I felt like that would be a good four or five year goal. We hit that in six months. We say this that this magazine is not for everyone, but obviously anyone can subscribe to it.

We don’t limit anyone in wanting to look at it. But we’ve certainly found people that accuse us of being too liberal or too conservative. And we don’t see it as a political act.

We see it as an artistic expression. I suppose you could view the entire world through a political lens. It’s not how we look at it.

We look at the world through an outdoor lens. We have this strong belief at the magazine that going outdoors anywhere in the world, whether it’s Missouri or Manhattan or Mount Everest or wherever, it could change your life. It has the ability to change your life.

Those are the stories that we seek. In our next issue, we have first descent of a mountain in Pakistan that no one’s ever heard of. But truly, like I think maybe 300 people in the history of the world have ever even been in its presence.

Well, and the following story is about fly fishing in the 1980s on the New Jersey coastline. I find that those stories equally tell the story of the outdoor experience. And these experiences are  our mission, they allow us to have a lot of different voices in our magazine, a lot of different perspectives.

I don’t expect everyone to like every single article at the Mountain Gazette, but I can tell people that every single piece at the Mountain Gazette comes from somebody’s heart. No one is weighing up their Mountain Gazette story. They’re putting everything they have into it.

Samir Husni: So tell me Mike, if I come unannounced visiting you one evening at home, what do I catch you doing? Having a glass of wine, cooking, eating dinner?

Mike Rogge: Depending on what time, you will find me playing with our two sons that are six and two. We’ve got two dogs. We live a pretty quiet life here in Tahoe.

My wife and I tend to go out and see some outdoor films. North Lake Tahoe is sort of like Avengers Tower. If you’re into outdoor recreation, we have several first descent, first to do this in the outdoor recreational world.

We run into them in the grocery store. I’ve always joked, it’s like being a non-superhero and living in Avengers Tower and Iron Man to pass the cream, the coffee. We live a pretty quiet life.

We’re a family of four with two dogs, and we’re just really enjoying our kids being young. We go to a few fundraisers here and there, catch a movie. But we spend a lot of time outdoors.

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

Mike Rogge: That is such a timely question to me. I’m concerned about our ability to print in Canada, totally dependent on these tariffs. And what upsets me is that our printing partner, Hemlock, has nothing to do with it.

The fact is a 25% tax on our print bill. We’re a sheet-fed magazine, a large format, sheet-fed. It’s 160 pages, but we’re probably using, on a standard magazine size, close to 300 pages of paper per issue.

We chose to do it that way because we wanted to offer our readers a high-quality product, and we felt like magazine stories deserved to be put in a high-quality format. I worry about it in part because, again, this is a non-political statement. It’s just fact.

The idea around these tariffs changes sometimes hourly, daily, weekly. News happens on the weekends. So I’m a little concerned about that.

I want to make sure that we can keep printing, high-quality products, whether it’s in Canada or we have to move to the U.S.

And what keeps me up at night? I worry about AI infringing on our creators’ rights, only because, we have a standard licensing agreement, and it really puts the creator front and center. And, we have this reputation. There’s a reason why we’re able to work with creators like, Harry Bliss and the comedian Steve Martin in every issue for the last two years, because we have a reputation.

I just worry about people taking advantage of that or taking advantage of our creators in an effort to try to earn a quick payday. We keep our head above water. We’re profitable, but I feel like in the magazine industry, you have to constantly be preparing for, not just rainy days, but snowy days and typhoons and everything.

It’s a medium that a lot of people have forgotten about. We obviously haven’t. And my hope is through these tariffs and everything, that some of the magazines that have arrived alongside us or after us, can also survive, because, saving for a rainy day is expensive.

Samir Husni: Thank you Mike and all the best.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

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“All in One Insights”: From Data Collectors To Data Connectors.  The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Paul Sammon, President, and Allison Duncan, Chief Operating Officer.

March 2, 2025

To say Paul Sammon and Allison Duncan know research will be a major understatement.  They live research and love it.  Paul and Allison bring more than 50 years of working for major magazine research companies and magazine media, the likes of DJG Marketing, MRI, and Advanstar.

The two of them are as passionate as the clients they are working for:  passionate publishers in the small to midsize magazines.  Paul and Allison refer to themselves as “Data Connectors.”  They are not only data collectors; they know how to analyze customers’ answers and they know how to connect those answers to the relevant and necessary needs of their clients.

All in One Insights is not afraid of AI and what it can do.  The two of them are not worried about dipping their toes in AI because they know for sure that “The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is define compelling points of difference.”  And delivering those points of difference is one major asset that they can provide their clients.

If you are in need for help in your magazine media research, on all the fronts of magazine making, you need to read this interview with the president and chief operating officer of the new firm All in One Insights.

And now for the lightly edited interview with Paul Sammon, president, and Allison Duncan, Chief Operating Officer, All in One Insights, but first the soundbites:

On the mission of All in One Insights: “Delivering (research) with high quality and with all the pieces of the puzzle … research, sales, marketing, editorial, consumer marketing, and making sure that it’s something they can feel good about across the whole brand footprint.”

On the clients of All in One Insights: “Passion-based publishers, where we used to call them simply vertical interests, but they can be very small.”

On what All in One Insights deliver its clients: “Making sure we give them ways to understand themselves better, whether that be editorial differences, newer readers preferring different content than longstanding readers.”

On their promise to clients: “Making sure that they understand the role we’re looking to play, again, to that data connector, not just collector, is making sure they come away with an insight across all their platforms.”

On the goal of forming All in One Insights: “Our goal in forming All in One Insights is to be the external resource, but to give them a very internal feel.”

On whether AI plays a role in All in One Insights:  “I think right now that’s not quite a part of our story yet. For All in One, it’s also a matter of we’re just still connecting with our clients on a very intimate level.”

On what AI can’t deliver: “The key element there is the one thing we’re not seeing AI really very capable of doing is developing the texture and the personality side.”

More on what AI can’t deliver: “The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is define compelling points of difference.”

On their belief in print: “People are just so caught up in the reading the big headline of print is dead and it’s not. There’s a story that’s happening with it. It’s just a matter of, it’s a new print.”

On whether the research is done for the sake of marketing or journalism: . One of the things that’s changed a great deal in the past five for sure, is 90% of our survey work now incorporates the editorial team in the conversation where virtually everyone we did years ago was extremely driven by an advertising outcome.”

On what they consider their number one job: “Our first and foremost job is to listen to somebody, listen to their struggles.”

On what keeps Paul up at night: “Trying to find the unique question we can pose to clients that closes the gap for them.”

On what keeps Allison up at night: “I’ll make the joke of it. It’s plane fares. You keep seeing planes tossing and turning and I have no fear of flying. And I’m like, ooh, really?”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Paul Sammon, president, and Allison Duncan, Chief Operating Officer, All in One Insights:

Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch for All-in-One Insights.

Paul Sammon:  I think the key thing that when we started crafting this, it was a matter of really being there for our clients, for what they needed, not about us, not about what we could do per se in terms of our capabilities, but just fulfilling the needs they had.

The big benefit we see that we’re presenting ourselves as “Data Connectors”, not just simply data collectors. Realistically, they can all have research from many options, and we want to be the one that’s delivering it with high quality and with all the pieces of the puzzle … research, sales, marketing, editorial, consumer marketing, and making sure that it’s something they can feel good about across the whole brand footprint.

Samir Husni:  When you talk about clients, who are your clients? Define client for me.

Paul Sammon: Sure. Most of their backbone meshes well with our experience as well, is many of them are, in the vein of small, medium, independent publishers, predominantly. I would say, for lack of a better category, passion-based publishers, where we used to call them simply vertical interests, but they can be very small.

Something so full of passion, really makes our hearts sing to get the chance to work with it. I think the one other area that’s become very plain to us is the membership association publishing sector. It’s such a different model, but there is so much engagement inherent in those broader relationships that they’re needing that assistance for the insights they can get for a lot of different reasons, membership retention, acquisition, editorial.

In traditional terms, they actually rely less on the advertising side that would be more the traditional reason you do a media research study.

Samir Husni: So, if I come to you as a small publisher that have, let’s say, a city magazine, let’s say The Boca Raton Observer or Memphis, what can you tell me you can provide me to help me sustain and increase my reach?

Paul Sammon: I think the key elements are making sure we give them ways to understand themselves better, whether that be editorial differences, newer readers preferring different content than longstanding readers.

It’s particularly germane in the city regional space where you’ll have the always desperate desire to bring on new readers, but they may actually come to you for very different reasons. We’ve seen that very clearly in work we’ve done. The other side of it is making sure that they understand the role we’re looking to play, again, to that data connector, not just collector, is making sure they come away with an insight across all their platforms.

There are such graphic differences in the way that those, when we measure them, ask the same question, we will see different answers across those platforms. A newsletter reader who engages with other elements, so that’s one, it’s providing them with a lens across the full brand platform. It goes back to something I think you’ve interviewed her a number of times, you’ve been dear friends with her for a long, long time, is Bonnie Kintzer at the Digest.

Obviously, I’m an alum of it. I spent nine years there. She and I became friends, but one of the things she really put forth was making sure what you did was to deliver content wherever the reader wanted to consume it – not simply where the publisher did.

She used the word agnostic to just say success wasn’t measured by a digital platform driving someone to a print subscription, that the essence of what you were doing was just providing them the means to consume you, however they felt most comfortable. The good news for us is on a research site, we see that when there are more than one channel engaged, it absolutely makes an enormous difference. There’s more love of the brand, there’s more engagement with the brand, simple strong things like travelers traveling more, fishermen fishing more.

Allison Duncan: It’s a way to amplify the magazine media platform they start with. I think part of what we set out to do this is so many of these, as you were describing, the small to medium-sized publishers, are not able to go to the big research companies. They won’t look at them at this point simply because unless you have mid to high five figures, they’re not interested in those projects.

We saw the struggle, especially being where Paul came from. We saw that inability to connect with them, but they still need data and solutions. Our goal in forming All in One Insights is to be the external resource, but to give them a very internal feel. We want to be their external internal resource is how we sometimes put it to them. We want them to be able to feel like they can reach out to us if they have a particular question. If they have a potential advertiser and they just need something quick in the field, that’s going to be five questions just to get an RFP out the door.

We want to build that relationship with them. Of course, we want to do their bigger study for them, but we also want that feeling that they can come to us on a smaller ad hoc basis too. We had that discussion just yesterday where a seasonal circumstance, clients looking to do the full reader study, all important elements for the ad sales team, for the editorial team, membership as well, but one of the things they noted that they have a particular high point in the very early part of the year where the activity around this particular point of interest is very high, but they didn’t want to wait that long to do the research work.

It was very comfortable for us to volunteer to be there to be able to execute something that’s considerably smaller, tighter, but right within that window of time that would matter most for them. Again, that kind of flexibility is baked into the way we want to do what we’re doing.

Samir Husni: Do you see AI as the data collector and you as the data connector?

Allison Duncan: It’s interesting. Certainly something that we’ve been dipping our toes into in the sense of reaching out, understanding what some of this AI looks like in the sense of you now have panels that are basically built upon it. I think eventually it’s going to take over more. Most of our clients at this point have their own built-in respondents.

So for an affordability standpoint at this point, we’re not having clients having to reach out yet to learn about who can be their potential new target audience. We haven’t had to really do that in a little while. We’ve done that previously with other clients.

We haven’t seen that come up lately. So right now we haven’t really had to go that route, but we’ve definitely been through a couple of pitches from some of the panel companies with the AI predictability panels. And I think eventually we’re going to end up looking towards it and using it.

Paul Sammon: I think right now that’s not quite a part of our story yet. For All in One, it’s also a matter of we’re just still connecting with our clients on a very intimate level. It’s a circumstance where the conversation, what they’ll divulge to us about a challenge for example a city & regional entity told us about a conversation they’re having with a celebration that’s happening and the nature of such event.

His charge to us, as much as we’re still talking about doing a full reader study, was how can I take advantage of the fact this celebration’s occurring? It is very logical we should be a part of it. How might we become a part of it? And I think that there’s opportunity in some of the bigger learning to understand. There’s 47 different events that’ll happen around it. Maybe query AI to see which ones fit best.

Allison touched on a neat point, one of the blessings of working with indie magazine media platforms is that they do own their own sample base. Their subscriber file is something remarkably unique in the world of market research. Traditionally, you’re having to reach out to some external entity to learn.

Similarly, though, we’ve got clients who are looking to grow. And I think we’ll be looking at AI to kind of help us expand. What’s the best definition of that? If we’re looking at concentric circles and the core being as tight and good as it is, the next one they understand.

But what are those other rings? Where might we be able to expand reasonably? These tend to be clients with modest budgets to do these things. So it’s really having someone like ourselves help guide their hand and understand what’s reasonable and what’s not.

Samir Husni: If I can use AI, do I need research?

Paul Sammon:  The key element there is the one thing we’re not seeing AI really very capable of doing is developing the texture and the personality side. I think it will always be useful in the realm of a hard data points. Do you do this? What are the demography elements in that? I think the key thing is that when an ad sales conversation is going well and there’s research underneath it, it helped inform better storytelling.

That’s yet the place we’re seeing AI contribute much because it’s not the emotional side of the conversation. There’s not a lot of texture to that. AI will reach to that common denominator and it can be done in an accurate manner.

The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is define compelling points of difference. An element there that really stands out, I had the experience back prior to be working with five golf magazines at the same time. They are generally the same gender, age, income, and education.

There’s very little difference. I formally worked at an automotive enthusiast title, very much the same thing. The advertiser would always ask you, well, why should I be with you instead of them? And it was really helping bring out a texture, a story, some compelling point of difference that was about an attitude.

That’s not quite yet what we’re seeing coming out of an AI conversation. It doesn’t mean it won’t be down the road. If you ask those provocative questions to a wine enthusiast magazine as to when did you first fall in love with wine? We’re really not going to get any kind of good answer out of an AI circumstance with that. I think AI will come into our lives potentially down the road when we start the idea of possibly building products to possibly bring to clients eventually.

Allison Duncan: But we’re still at the building stage. We’re still trying to, we’re getting our feet wet. And right now our main focus and goal is to really just get in the trenches with our clients and to really get an understanding because it’s such a changing landscape and it’s an exciting landscape.

People are just so caught up in the reading the big headline of print is dead and it’s not. There’s a story that’s happening with it. It’s just a matter of, it’s a new print.

It’s an evolving print, but it’s truly strong. And there’s a youthfulness happening with it too that needs to be celebrated.

Samir Husni: So Allison, with this new print is marketing more important than journalism or journalism more important than marketing? How do you balance between the two? Are we seeing more marketing than journalism taking place?

Allison Duncan:  I think you have them intertwined.

In a certain way, I think you have marketing that’s looking like journalism and journalism that’s looking like marketing. That’s half of influencing is the pseudo, both of them at times, there’s a pseudo intellectualism at times that happens. And sometimes it’s a little bit of both.

There’s a provocativeness to it that makes you think, and isn’t that essentially journalism at times? And yet it drives you to look at something, buy something, do something, and that’s marketing. So I think it’s an interesting time for that. And there’s an evolution.

The younger consumers, who takes in this stuff, definitely needs something different than per se, the three of us sitting on this call.

Paul Sammon: Having grown up where I did work at Reader’s Digest, there was a literal separation of church and state. And the nature of that was never violated.

But as time passed, you could see the beginnings of a cooperative relationship and an understanding where if you valued the quality of the journalism coming into the process, you would find things like native advertising occurring with some quality attached to it, as opposed to just shilling for something. I think also too that is marketing, Alison really nailed it, was the inextricably interwoven nature is that if marketing programs are generally going to be better when they’re more well-informed, and that’s largely our role with the research, but most important is you’re going to express that outbound. And that just leads to more buyer confidence.

They see relevance in the discussion. They trust what you’re saying. I think in it all, no matter what you do, if you violate that trust, you’ve lost.

So as they’re all respectfully understanding what each other are contributing to the process, I think it’s a healthy thing. If it goes too far off in any one direction, probably not so much.

Samir Husni: So if I hire you as a client, do you help me with your research to enhance my journalism and my marketing?

Paul Sammon: Absolutely. One of the things that’s changed a great deal in the past eight years, or past five for sure, is 90% of our survey work now incorporates the editorial team in the conversation where virtually everyone we did years ago was extremely driven by an advertising outcome. Typically back then, we were looking, let’s say[PS1] , if you were fishing, we wanted to know how often, what you spent and what type you do. Functionally though now, it’s helping Editorial teams as well, delivering insights on content preferences by their various channels.  Ad sales teams still get what they need – and we’re able to deliver more insights across more of the organization.

It absolutely is part of virtually every piece of work we do now. And little techniques that we’re learning along the way, which seem like simple questions about just how long have you been a reader of this magazine? That drives an amazing level of understanding that if you just didn’t ask that question, you would never know, but simply a newer reader, we were dealing with a city regional magazine that came to suddenly understand it wasn’t about “age”. It was more about “term” … have you been a reader for less than five years, simply had them looking for more entertainment, similar to kind of the elements online that would give you guidance to where to go eat, where to stay, where to visit, where to have fun.

Whereas that well, long-term reader looked for completely different things. So it was interesting to do that. Odd part for us was you’re having this discussion with the publisher, the advertising, the editorial, and all of a sudden the consumer marketing people became involved because how long have you been a reader, inform their discussions about recruitment of new readers, retentions of existing ones.

They’re trying to make more out of the investment they’re making with us. So, you respond by trying to do more for the element that they’re looking for the most.

Samir Husni: Excellent.  Before I ask you my typical last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you,  anything you would like me to ask, or anything you’d like to add?

Paul Sammon: I think we touched on the most important parts. The key piece for us is that Allison touched on it earlier is that we have a genuine passion for the space we occupy.

It is literally fun working with publishers. We’ve joined on with ACP, the Association of Community Publishers, the CRMA, and are sponsors of Niche Media. All of their stories are incredibly unique and different and that excites us.

Obviously, having spent elements of my career at some of the largest media brands there are, love them dearly, learned a lot, but we both really have a lot of passion for small/medium sized publishers. Those people also don’t tend to have the staffs that we represent. We’re the help they can hire to be all these years of experience, having seen all these various discussions.

Watch them wrestle with things as simple as, I’m looking at digital subscriptions, but nobody seems to be terribly excited about it. What’s the difference? Are they different people? What do I need to do to simply mechanically boost open rates so that more people take it on? I think we get the chance to be enmeshed in so much more, very broadly, very deeply though. That’s a big part of it.

Allison Duncan:  One of the greatest things we get to do is, one of the things is just getting to sit, listen. That’s our first job. Our first and foremost job is to listen to somebody, listen to their struggles.

They’re struggling and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that and listening to what they’re looking for, what they’re needing. The best thing that we can do, given the years of experience we have, which is quite a few rotations around the sun, a few more than we like to admit sometimes, but to then bring in what we know.

That doesn’t mean that you force your nature upon the client, but our goal is to become that trusted advisor to them and to bring that experience and to give them even more than they even expected. Our job is to give us the Christmas list and they’re not always going to get everything on that Christmas list because we only have a certain amount of time with a respondent. Our goal is to get the most out of that respondent in the best way because that’s such a special interaction and we never take it for granted.

A respondent is a truly special thing to us and we never want to alienate anybody. We’re always very mindful of that relationship that that person has with the entity and we never want to cross a boundary. But one of the things I love is learning more from them than anybody ever expected to see, getting more data than certainly the client thought was possible, and answering more questions than they even had.

And that was kind of one of the exciting things. I know it’s something that Paul missed for his years when he stepped away from DJG was he wasn’t then able to take that data and do things with it. He’s such a storyteller and now he gets to go back to storytelling.

Samir Husni: Well, let me ask you now my two personal questions that if you read my blog, you will know what they are. Allison, if I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, having a glass of wine, cooking, watching TV?

Allison Duncan: Cooking dinner, because I love to cook. And generally there’s a ball game on. Right now it’s kind of spending time working on building a business.

Paul Sammon: I would probably also say there’s probably a ball game on. Today is a happy day in my life. The Yankees begin to play their first spring training game.  So this is my official first day of spring. And given that I also umpire baseball, basically the orbit of my life is pretty much 1st of March till around Halloween. It’s a lot of fun!

Allison and I find ourself in our day kind of doing all the work of the day. And then we find the last hour or so of it kind of reflecting on what are we going to look at tomorrow about the business. But we’re having fun with it.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night for these days?

Paul Sammon: Trying to find the unique question we can pose to clients that closes the gap for them. We’re having a lot of great conversations. It’s about how do I help them understand that now’s the time to act? And what can we be doing right now to help you? There’s a lot. One thing we do sense in the market right now is there’s a little hesitation in things and just trying to help. Their needs are real. Those are urgent. And we just want to try and help that conversation along to good outcomes for them.

Allison Duncan: I’ll make the joke of it. It’s plane fares. You keep seeing planes tossing and turning and I have no fear of flying. And I’m like, ooh, really? Keeps me up at night. You know what? Honestly, the day is done. I’m kind of tired and I sleep. Good. And I don’t, I’m happy with that. That and occasionally your dog who decides he’s needing to occupy your side of the bed.

Samir Husni:  Thank you both.

 

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