Mr. Magazine

Once in a blue moon you receive a magazine that you can’t put down until every page, every picture, every illustration is looked at, time after time, and it gives you the feeling of satisfaction, relief, and an emotional energy to continue enjoying life, the good life. 

Last month I received the first issue of the USA edition of the British magazine Like The Wind, and it was exactly what I wrote about in my first paragraph of this blog: beautiful, comforting, soothing, and all encompassing with every page I turned, and I did turn every single page from cover to cover. Mind you, I am not a runner…

I loved the magazine so much that I reached out to its co-founder Simon Freeman in the United Kingdom and requested an interview about this phenomenal magazine that just launched an American edition after launching a Japanese one two years ago, and are ready to launch a French and German editions later this year.

Simon was as passionate about the magazine, ink on paper, running and the human spirit that goes with it, and all things “Like The Wind,” as the magazine itself.

So please enjoy my interview with Simon and read all about the launch story of Like The Wind in the UK, Japan, and the USA. 

But first the soundbites:

On what is Like The Wind selling: “what we are selling is 20 minutes with a cup of coffee, reading something not on a screen. That’s actually what we’re selling, is just a moment of calm, sitting with a print magazine, just taking a moment to relax and enjoy yourself.”

On the goal of the magazine: “We want to continue to create that sense of calm around the experience of reading the magazine.”

On the uniqueness of the USA edition: “The US edition now uses US spelling. And some of the stories that are in the US edition are unique only to that North American edition.”

On expending into global markets: “It’s about trying to kind of create a magazine that is as high quality and as enjoyable a reading experience as possible for a local audience.”

On his love for the magazine format: “I just love the format of a magazine. I love the fact you read a story. It’s done. You put it down. You don’t have to remember where you are. You pick it up the next time you read another story. I love the long form journalism. I love the way they feel in my hand.”

On the decision to launch the magazine: “Very famously in my world, (my wife Julie) said, we should give it a go. How hard can it be? And that was honestly how it started.”

On choosing the name Like The Wind: “We need a magazine that is evocative, and sort of inspirational. And I just remember we were just sat thinking about it, and Julie said, Like The Wind.”

On why the word run is not in any article title: “We work hard to not include the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories. So when people go to the contents, we don’t have the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories.”

On the usage of social media to advertise: “It’s ironic and interesting. The world that we live in today, outside of social media, it’s hard to imagine how you can reach people with a new title. It’s difficult to know.”

On the status of magazines today: “They’re not the center of culture anymore. They’re very peripheral. And people don’t go looking for them.”

On their unique selling point: “We are selling a product that encourages people to spend half an hour a week or an hour a week off their screens.”

On the difference between ink on paper and digital screens: “The screen is so flat, whatever screen you’re on, whether it’s a laptop or a phone or whatever, it’s just this two-dimensional surface, right? There’s no texture. I love the idea of embossing the cover or foil blocking or like trying to put in rougher paper or smoother paper, because what you’re doing is you’re activating a whole another sense, which is the feel of the thing in your hands.”

On using different types of paper in the magazine: “We put different types of paper in because we can, because it’s something that print allows you to do that digital doesn’t.”

On AI when it comes to content: “I don’t believe that AI has the capacity to be truly creative. So, when it comes to the art, the imagery, the words in the magazine, the editing, the sub editing, I feel that that’s got to be a human, because they bring a creative sensibility that a machine, at least currently, can’t replicate.

I want to read something that’s come from somebody’s heart. I want something that has come from their soul. And I need to know, I need to feel that it’s come from that.”

On going for a run: “It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.”

On the importance of diversity in the magazine: “I think there is a continual need and drive to diversify the voices that are telling stories about running.”

On what keeps him up at night these days: “We are pushing our business to the limits and that is causing a lot of financial stress.”

And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Simon Freeman, Publisher and Editor in Chief, Like The Wind magazine:

Samir Husni: Congratulations first on the launch of the US edition of Like the Wind. I know that you’ve launched an edition in Japan and you’re getting ready to launch one in France and one in Germany, and you’ve been publishing the magazine in England for 12 years or so. Why this global expansion in print in a digital age?

Simon Freeman: Oh, that’s such a good question. It’s a two-part answer. The first part is that three years ago, my wife and I (Julie and I are the co-founders of Like The Wind), were approached by, by a book publisher to work on a book with them.

We said, yeah, absolutely. We love working on it. It was a great book.

It was good fun. What we didn’t understand is that with book publishing, the publisher will then sell the rights to different language versions of the book. We didn’t know that.

So there’s a German edition and a French edition. There’s an Italian edition of this book that we wrote, which is cool. Then, one day the publisher rang us and said, we are selling the rights to a Japanese publisher, but the Japanese publisher has asked whether he can be put in touch with you directly because he wants to talk to you about the magazine.

We were like, sure, sounds cool. So, we got on a call with this guy Mr. Kiyo Fujishiro. He said, I have this business where I translate English language running books into Japanese, which is fine, but I love the idea of a magazine because a magazine is a regular thing you do three, four times a year.

How many copies do you sell in Japan? he asked. We said, none, like 20 copies or something. It was like nothing. He said, could we talk about me buying the license to publish the magazine in Japanese? And in the end, the way things worked out, instead of paying us for the license, why don’t we go into a joint venture? So Kiyo basically takes the English language version, the PDF, and he picks the stories that he wants, he translates them.

Obviously, he’s got, when he started, 46 editions to go back through, none of which had been seen in Japan because we weren’t selling any copies. So, he just picks the stories that he wants, translates them into Japanese, and then he adds probably about 20-25% Japanese stories. That was how Japan started.

What the Japanese edition explained to us was that what we are selling is 20 minutes with a cup of coffee, reading something not on a screen. That’s what we’re selling, is just a moment of calm, sitting with a print magazine, just taking a moment to relax and enjoy yourself. So, the French and German editions that we’re launching this year are based on the same principle, which is, if you’re a native French-speaking person, reading a magazine in English is not as relaxing as reading the stories in French.

We want to continue to create that sense of calm around the experience of reading the magazine. The US edition is slightly different. Basically, it became apparent that printing all of the editions in the UK and then shipping to the US as our US audience was growing fast was, from a sustainability point of view, not great, and from a cost point of view, not great.

We reached a point where we were able to go to a printer in the US and say, well, can we afford to print the copies that we require for the US audience in the US? It will reduce our transport costs, it reduces the amount of time, it’s much better for the environment. So we’ve hit a number that’s allowed us to start working with a US printer. There is an element of the same idea, which is, because we’re doing two different PDFs, they don’t have to be the same.

The US edition now uses US spelling. And some of the stories that are in the US edition are unique only to that North American edition.And I’ll give you an example of why I think that’s important.

There’s a thing in US sport called NIL, Name Image Licensing. Outside of the US, no one knows what that is. It makes no sense at all.

So, if we’re writing a story about NIL, for everyone else in the world, we must explain what NIL is in the story. But the US audience, we don’t need to do that. So, it means that we can now slightly tailor the reading experience to the local audience.

And it’s the same the other way around, right? There might be, a concept that is commonly understood in France. But for the US audience, we need to just explain what it is a little bit because it’s foreign. It’s about trying to kind of create a magazine that is as high quality and as enjoyable a reading experience as possible for a local audience.

That’s why we’re doing it.

Samir Husni: What is the genesis of Like the Wind?

Simon Freeman:  When we launched the magazine 12 years ago, I was much more a runner than I am now.

The media options in the UK at the time were very, what I would call, functional. So, the magazines that you could buy were full of training tips and nutrition articles and stuff like that. I already had a coach.

I was trying to break two and a half hours for the marathon. I was running 80, 90 miles a week. So, I felt like I didn’t need the advice in terms of how to run.

But there were this whole bunch of magazines. Rouleur is a good example in cycling. There was another cycling magazine called The Ride Journal, which doesn’t exist anymore.

The Surfer’s Journal. And I was buying these magazines. And so my wife and I were running a route around the Mont Blanc called the TMB over three days.

One of the things we were talking about was Julie was saying to me, I see that you’re buying these surfing magazines and these cycling magazines, but you don’t cycle and you don’t surf. So why are you buying them? And I said, well, I just love the format of a magazine. I love the fact you read a story. It’s done. You put it down. You don’t have to remember where you are. You pick it up the next time you read another story. I love the long form journalism. I love the way they feel in my hand.

I was already at that point spending, goodness knows, 12, 13, 14 hours a day on a screen for work. So, I love the idea that when I wasn’t at work, I could just sit and read something in ink on paper. And Julie said to me, well, why does this magazine not exist in running? And I said, I don’t know.

Julie said, well, we should give it a go. Very famously in my world, she said, we should give it a go. How hard can it be? And that was honestly how it started.

We were doing that run around the Mont Blanc in the September, and we launched issue one the following February. We had no idea what we were doing. I remember Julie going on to Google and saying, how do you design a magazine? We quickly got support.

The team at Rouleur were amazing. They’re based in London. They invited us as soon as they saw what we were doing. They invited us down and said, how can we help? Is there any advice that you need? Other people helped quickly that we emailed them and said, we’re trying to launch this running magazine. How do we do it? So, it’s a nice community of people that are happy to support, especially if you’re making a magazine not in their sector. You know, I’m sure if we’ve been launching a cycling magazine, Rouleur might not have been quite as helpful.

Samir Husni:  How did you choose the name Like The Wind?

Simon Freeman: We came up with the name, and again, all credit to Julie, she was the person that came up with the name. The reason we came up with the name was that we didn’t want it to have the word run or running in it. Because all the other magazines were Men’s Running, Women’s Running, Runner’s World, Running Fitness.

We’re like, we need a magazine that is evocative, and sort of inspirational. And I just remember we were just sat thinking about it, and Julie said, Like the Wind. Interestingly, we do sometimes get people who will send us a message and they say, I’ve just discovered Run Like The Wind magazine.

It’s not Run Like The Wind, it’s just Like the Wind.  We work hard to not include the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories. So, when people go to the contents, we don’t have the word run or running in the titles of any of the stories.

Samir Husni: How was the reaction for the launch of the USA edition?

Simon Freeman: It’s been amazing. It’s been really, positive. We’re fortunate in that we’ve been selling the magazine in the US almost since issue one, so 12 and a half years ago.

We already had an audience. What’s been interesting is that launching a US specific edition has given us a good reason to talk about the magazine beyond there’s another edition coming out. We can explain why we’re doing it.

It feels as though we reached far beyond our existing audience of subscribers. It’s good. There’s also, which I think is true, an element of collecting.

You mentioned earlier that you had a collection of magazines with first editions. There’s lots of people who’ve discovered Like The Wind at issue 37. And you know that there’s an element in many of their minds that they’re like I want the full collection.

So, launching Like The Wind USA issue one has again given us this opportunity to say, you can start from issue one, you can build this collection with us over the next decade or whatever.

Samir Husni: I’ve noticed you’ve been using social media to advertise the magazine.

Simon Freeman: Yes, it’s ironic and interesting. The world that we live in today, outside of social media, it’s hard to imagine how you can reach people with a new title. It’s difficult to know.

Sometimes I think to myself, well, how did people advertise magazines before social media? I think what’s happened, and I love learning about magazines, I love all sources of information about magazines. I think people would discover magazines on newsstands, right? And that doesn’t really exist anymore, or not in any meaningful sense. So that source of reaching people doesn’t exist.

Magazines, they’re not the center of culture anymore. They’re very peripheral. And people don’t go looking for them.

So, it’s not like people, when I was younger, magazines meant so much to me that I would go and seek them out. I really want a magazine about whatever this topic that I’m interested in. That doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore.

So, unfortunately, well, not unfortunately, the reality is that what people do is they go online and they look for, they search for running stories. We need to make sure that when they look for running stories alongside YouTube videos and books and whatever else, Like The Wind magazine is featured.  We are selling a product that encourages people to spend half an hour a week or an hour a week off their screens. And we’re using those screens to advertise the product. What can you do?

Samir Husni: I noticed in the first issue, you use two different types of paper, the matte and the glossy. The reason behind that?

Simon Freeman: Well, again, there’s two reasons, really. One is because the photos fit beautifully on gloss paper. But I think the matte paper has a nice feel. So, it’s like, it’s nice to just have the photos really ping. It gives you that wow, they look sharp on gloss paper. It feels nice to hold a magazine that’s got lots of matte material in it.

Maybe, the other side of it, is because we can, because the screen is so flat, whatever screen you’re on, whether it’s a laptop or a phone or whatever, it’s just this two-dimensional surface, right? There’s no texture. I love the idea of embossing the cover or foil blocking or like trying to put in rougher paper or smoother paper, because what you’re doing is you’re activating a whole another sense, which is the feel of the thing in your hands, which the screen just removes all of that. We put different types of paper in because we can, because it’s something that print allows you to do that digital doesn’t.

Samir Husni: Speaking of digital, do you ever use AI?

Simon Freeman: We do. We are judicious in our use of it. When I’m doing an interview, I’ll sometimes use an AI tool to transcribe the audio file. There are certain things that we’re using it for in the kind of operational side, the backend, like managing subscriptions and things like that.

There are ways that we can use AI to ensure that we are using the data that we need to ship people’s copies in a way that is secure, but faster than us going through a spreadsheet.  AI is a phenomenal tool to do something where there are very clear rules and structures to follow. It does it fast.

So, if you say I need you to transcribe this piece of audio, there’s not a lot of art in that. You’re looking for as accurate a representation of that audio file as possible in words. And if you can do it in 60 seconds while you make a cup of tea, and then you come back and it’s ready, rather than spending four hours with it in your ears, trying to transcribe it.

That’s an efficiency. I don’t believe that AI has the capacity to be truly creative. So, when it comes to the art, the imagery, the words in the magazine, the editing, the sub editing, I feel that that’s got to be a human, because they bring a creative sensibility that a machine, at least currently, can’t replicate.

I want to read something that’s come from somebody’s heart. I want something that has come from their soul. And I need to know, I need to feel that it’s come from that.

The other thing, of course, is that what we are publishing stories about is an inherently analogue activity. You can’t AI going for a run. I went out with my brother-in-law this morning for a run along the lakeshore here in Switzerland, with the wind in our hair.

It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.

It makes sense then that as far as possible, the storytelling bit should be from humans. If you think about publishing in the broader sense, I think information and maybe news is more under threat because an AI agent can pull information together quickly, more efficiently, potentially, than a human writer. But if you’re publishing what we’re writing, what we’re publishing, which is not informational, it’s inspiration, it’s entertainment, it’s ideas and concepts. That’s got to be a person, in my opinion.

Samir Husni: If it’s not on the web, if it’s print only, AI cannot touch or steal it, or come close to it.

Simon Freeman: I totally agree. It’s part of the joy. There’s a joy and a frustration in things that are not ubiquitous. You can’t have it. I’m sorry. You have to literally buy a physical copy and wait for it to arrive.

It’s amazing, the feeling in your lungs when you finish and the fact that your legs are burning a little bit. It’s all very visceral and analogue. There’s no digital version of that.

We will always publish stories that are written by people, honestly. I think that’s entertainment. People don’t want to go to an art gallery to look at art that’s been created by a robot. People don’t want to go to a rock concert to listen to music that’s been created by these robots.

Art forms, writing, art, fine art, music, you want to know that there’s been a sweaty, fallible human being kind of behind it, because I think that’s why we indulge in it.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last questions, is there any question that I should ask you that I failed not to ask you?

Simon Freeman: I love asking that question. The question I would ask is, if I was asking myself this question is, how do we improve the storytelling that we’re doing in Like The Wind magazine? And to answer my own question, I think there is a continual need and drive to diversify the voices that are telling stories about running.

There’s this myth that running is this easily accessible, you just need a pair of shoes, and you can go for a run, and it’s not true. It’s really not true. I remember when we started, when I started gathering momentum, when we started the magazine, I was the editor originally, and it’s a complete joke because I didn’t know what I was doing, but I would be gathering stories, and you suddenly realize that if you are not an able-bodied, relatively wealthy white man, running is not universally accessible.

What we’re able to do with Like The Wind is to try and tell some of the stories of people for whom running is important, but it’s not ubiquitous. It’s not this easy thing. I remember there was a young man called Ahmed Arbery who was murdered whilst out on a run by some people who decided that he was running in the wrong place, and we had to respond to that, we had to do something about that. I was phoning friends of mine who are black and asking them about this sort of thing, and they were, the universality of their response, which is, it’s not safe for me to go running at night, or in this part of town, or whatever.

I was horrified, I mean, horrified. I was like, what are you talking about? Going out for a run? Surely, it’s just this universal human right. Or I remember talking to women, friends of mine, who would say, it’s annoying when the clocks change.

I remember saying to one of these women why? What’s the problem with the clocks changing? She said, well, I don’t feel safe running on my own after dark. I was like, that’s potentially half the human population. So, I think, the question I like being asked is, how do we make the magazine better? The answer is more diverse voices, more people who can share their experience of running.

I’ll tell you another quick story. We published 40 editions in 10 years, and the 41st edition, the first edition of our second decade, we decided that we would make it a women’s edition. So, we hired a woman called Amory Rowe, and she was the editor for that one edition. It was a fully female team, only female writers, only female illustrators, only female characters within the magazine.

We published this edition, and somebody wrote to us and said, I see that you’ve published this women’s only edition. Should I assume that there’ll be a men’s only edition in the future? And I was like, if we published only women’s stories for the next 500 editions, we would not even come close to rebalancing the lack of coverage that women’s sport gets in the media.

So, in our own tiny little way, I think that giving voice to, to be blunt, giving voice to not me is important. And it’s something that we’ve really focused on. It’s part of the editorial.

Samir Husni: My typical two last questions, if I come to visit you at your flat or your house one evening unannounced, what do I catch Simon doing? Reading a book, watching TV, having a glass of wine? How do you rewind the day?

Simon Freeman: I stopped drinking at the beginning of this year.

The best decision I ever made. I work too late. I’ll often at 9:30 or 10 o’clock, I’ll have to remind myself to switch off. I love reading books.

I’m currently reading Robert Caro’s autobiography of President Lyndon Johnson.  That’s probably how I relax towards the end of the day. Political history is exciting.

I love reading about political history or I’ve always got a magazine. There’s always a magazine on the go, whatever different topics. That’s hopefully what you’d catch me doing. We don’t own a TV, so it wouldn’t be watching TV.

Samir Husni: What keeps Simon up at night these days?

Simon Freeman: We are pushing our business to the limits and that is causing a lot of financial stress. And it’s intentional, but it does mean that I will often wake up at two o’clock in the morning and pay for the next print bill or the next salary run or whatever else. It’s hard, making sure that the magazine or the business is financially secure.

It’s the thing that keeps me awake at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you and all the best.