Archive for the ‘Innovation in print’ Category

Day + Night: Creativity & Print Innovation Inside A Small Cassette Case – The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Josef Reyes, Publisher/Editor/Designer…

July 8, 2019

“A friend of mine recently judged the ASME’s (American Society of Magazine Editors) earlier this year and she had this interesting line, which was, nice paper no longer cuts it. You have to go beyond that to really make something special. And I think that’s where print still has a lot of power; you can make it a more distinct experience in the way that digital can’t really replicate. And that’s why I’m making print magazines in this day and age.” Josef Reyes…

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story…

Created to rest inside a small cassette case, Day + Night is a new magazine that highlights New York City through 14 songs that are important to the 14 contributors whose content lives within the small pages of this highly innovative title. Josef Reyes is the mastermind behind this great new publication and says giving voice to the diversity of NYC and showcasing how special the City is, was the driving force behind this first issue.

A designer by trade, Josef brings the nostalgia of the ‘70s and ‘80s to the forefront with his incredible design, throwing back to the days of the mixed tape and the uniqueness and meaning behind each song recorded on those cassettes.

I spoke with Josef recently and we talked about Day + Night and the headspace it takes you to by simply holding it in your hands. The dimensionality and subsequent quality of the content within combines to make this one of the most unique magazines Mr. Magazine™ has ever owned.

When you open the transparent case, and the publication slips out, it reveals two “sides,” Side A and Side B, giving you the Day and Night. Each story told (7 on Side A and 7 on Side B) showcases a particular song that has meaning to the writer and highlights something New York City. It’s an amazing concept and a literal hats off to the City. And who knows what might be next? A different metropolis? Or maybe even your hometown.

Either way, Mr. Magazine™ hopes you enjoy this very delightful interview with Josef Reyes as he talks about this great new title.

But first the sound-bites:

On the idea behind Day + Night: I first had the idea to do this back in 2015 actually and it was directly inspired by another magazine that I saw which was from Singapore and called Rubbish. And the thing about that magazine is they think of different formats for each issue. And that first issue I saw was all about plant life in Singapore and they packaged it inside a flower press. It really impressed me. That being said, this was not the first time I had seen a magazine do something like that, but I thought it was well-produced and well-conceived. And it really inspired me to think about what else could be done in unorthodox formats.

On whether the magazine will always be about New York City or will it evolve to other cities: While I did say that I always wanted to make a New York City magazine; in fact, initially this was going to be different cities, with more about cities in general. But in the process of trying to hone down the idea, I felt that it would feel more special if it was about one city. And since I live in New York City, that made perfect sense. But I did structure it in a way that there is a flexibility to expand it to other cities. Look at the cover, there’s a line that reads in New York City, so I could switch that out to other cities. But I think for now I want to focus it on New York City. I feel that there’s something special about being very specific. At the same time, I’m keeping it open.

On being publisher, editor and designer and which of those three hats he thrives under: I am a designer by profession, so that’s certainly my starting point. As a designer though, what I am most drawn to is the fact that we have the skills to give people a voice. I also see publishing in some ways as an inevitable arm of being a designer. But certainly, first and foremost I am a designer and I am very proud of this product.

On what he is trying to accomplish or to say by creating a tangible print object in this digital age, one with such a limited edition: The limited is really more of a consequence of the available funds. (Laughs) We need more of that. As far as the reality of it, I think in this day and age what print still has power over is in terms of its specific dimensionality and materiality. If you use it right you can really use it to amplify the message that you’re sending out. As far as the reason why I feel like this format works, and I really believe that it’s more than a gimmick, even though it may seem like that, but because of its small size and because it’s in a cassette case, if you are familiar with that format then it will automatically bring you back into that headspace of making mixed tapes.

On whether he feels that publishers have misused digital by just throwing print magazines onto the screen and who needs to rethink the design, print or digital: Obviously, they’re very different mediums. I don’t think we’ve figured out a way to make that sort of multi-style designing effective yet, because here’s the problem, you design something for print and when you do, if you do it right – for example, if you art drag a photograph you try to make it work within the page size, the spread size, all that stuff. But then when you transport it to digital, all that doesn’t matter anymore. (Laughs) But the problem is there are different needs, especially now. I feel like we need something more vertical, things like that. As far as who needs to rethink design, print or digital, I guess the answer is both. But the problem is I don’t think it’s been resolved as to how they can make something special for both cases.

On how often he will publish Day + Night and where can people get a copy of the magazine: Right now this is coming out of my own pocket, so it’s limited by that. Ideally, I would love to publish another one by the second half of this year. I think realistically would have to be a yearly thing. I’m committed to doing three issues in this means. But basically I want to spend that time building up some sort of reputation, and hopefully by issue four we can scale up. So right now it’s primarily available at some stores in New York City. I don’t have a distributor. And I kind of like it right now because I feel like that makes it special. There’s something to us only being available in certain places.

On the cover price: It’s $10. And definitely not what it costs to produce. (Laughs)

On whether Day + Night trumps an earlier quote he made about fax cover designs being his favorite project ever from what he has done over the years: (Laughs) Yes, for sure. This definitely trumps it. What I was saying in that quote was what I like about draft design is that the things you make are things that people use on a daily basis. It’s not an expensive chair or things like that. And I think this is too. If we grow enough to keep the price point at that range, it still makes it accessible to a lot of people. There’s something very democratic about draft design that I like.

On anything he’d like to add: The name Day + Night is very generic, which I kind of like I guess. (Laughs) It fits in with the whole design of it, which is referencing blank tape packaging. In some ways I wanted it to feel as generic as possible. And that would allow the stories to really take on their own personalities. My hope is that readers get a real sense of what New York City feels like and that they get it through as diverse a range of perspectives as possible. I think that’s one of the things that make magazines great. They allow for different voices to coexist together. And the best magazines are able to do that in such a way that it’s still one unified voice.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home: I consume a lot of magazines for sure, I really love the industry. And I really love the business. That being said, it does make me sad the state of the way things are.

On the biggest misconception he thinks people have about him: It may be inevitable that people would say this; going back to Day + Night, one pet peeve of mine is when the extent of feedback that I get from people is they think it looks good. (Laughs) And it’s understandable because it is a very visual product and they know that’s what I do, but I would say that in this project that 80 percent of the effort was in the editing. It wasn’t actually the visual part. The visual part was more of a classic one, instead of the editing part. Again, it’s understandable that people would only comment on the visual aspect of it, but I do wish that they would also respond to the editorial aspect of it. It’s not just a visual project, it’s more than that. We’re trying to give people a voice.

On what keeps him up at night: The industry, for sure. There are definitely a lot of new magazines opening up, but from the point of view of a career, it’s just getting shakier and shakier. I guess that’s why I’m doing this project. In some ways I’m trying to take control of that track, and not be beholden to what’s happening in the industry. That certainly keeps me up at night. It doesn’t look good as far as the major players are concerned. That being said, there is still some very inspiring stuff being made and that’s what keeps me going too.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Josef Reyes, Publisher/Editor/Designer, Day + Night.

Samir Husni: What’s the idea behind Day + Night? And how many old people like me will know that this looks like a cassette tape? (Laughs)

Josef Reyes: (Laughs too) I first had the idea to do this back in 2015 actually and it was directly inspired by another magazine that I saw which was from Singapore and called Rubbish. And the thing about that magazine is they think of different formats for each issue. And that first issue I saw was all about plant life in Singapore and they packaged it inside a flower press. It really impressed me. That being said, this was not the first time I had seen a magazine do something like that, but I thought it was well-produced and well-conceived. And it really inspired me to think about what else could be done in unorthodox formats.

Around the same time, 2015, I started hearing about cassettes making a comeback, which kind of baffled me because it’s not a great format, really. (Laughs) But at the same time, it really intrigued me because I grew up with cassettes and had some nostalgic feelings about it. But I also loved the form factor of it; I loved the small size. I don’t recall how I started thinking in those terms, but I started thinking about what if there was a book inside a cassette case and tried to retrace how I arrived at that. Certainly, the whole process of thinking about alternate formats probably got me there.

So actually it was the format that came first, not any sort of concept. I sort of worked backward from there, just thinking about what sort of editorial concept would demand such a form. When I think about cassettes, the first thing I think about are mixed tapes. Mixed tapes are basically communication tools, especially the ones made for specific people. There is a reason why you select the songs that you do; you’re trying to say something. And over the years I’ve heard all of these analogies about how a magazine is like a mixed tape; you’re assembling these stories into a flow. And that makes it literal. So, I started thinking in terms of what if a magazine was a mixed tape, but without thinking about how when you make a mixed tape you have specific reasons why you select them.

And the other idea that was circulating in my mind was that I’ve always wanted to make a New York City magazine. And I love the city magazine format, but I wanted to see what other format types there were, other than the usual listings. The thing about a city like New York is that it has such a distinct sense of place, because in a city like this you can get so many different experiences out of it, but nonetheless it’s still one, single entity.

And coming back to the mixed tape idea, I started thinking about how when you hear a certain song it brings you back to a very specific headspace. When you her a certain song, you’re instantly back to a certain moment. Then I began to think of asking people to think of a certain song that brings back a strong memory that is set in New York City and then just write about that in 350 words. So we asked 14 people, and that’s 14 songs, which is about the length of an album or a mixed tape. And that’s how this worked out.

There is one last element, which was thinking further about the cassette as a format. The Side A/Side B thing is of course such a central element of that. Back when I came up with this idea in 2015, I couldn’t figure out how that would be executed. Back then I thought it would be more semantic; it could be like Side A is about maybe happy memories, or Side B is about sad memories, or about love and hate, so on and so forth. But the problem was I felt that I was limiting construct, so I continued just thinking about it.

Finally last summer I had this breakthrough where day and night was the perfect split for that because on the one hand it’s very specific, but also really broad. And I feel like this could keep going with this structure. So that’s it in a nutshell, the whole evolution of the idea.

Samir Husni: There used to be a magazine in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s called Day and Night. It was an oversized magazine about entertainment and celebrities. As you explain the concept for this Day + Night, is it always going to be about New York City or are you going to explore other cities as well? How is the future of the magazine going to evolve?

Josef Reyes: Good question. While I did say that I always wanted to make a New York City magazine; in fact, initially this was going to be different cities, with more about cities in general. But in the process of trying to hone down the idea, I felt that it would feel more special if it was about one city. And since I live in New York City, that made perfect sense. But I did structure it in a way that there is a flexibility to expand it to other cities. Look at the cover, there’s a line that reads in New York City, so I could switch that out to other cities. But I think for now I want to focus it on New York City. I feel that there’s something special about being very specific. At the same time, I’m keeping it open.

Samir Husni: You are the publisher, editor and designer. Which of those three hats do you thrive under?

Josef Reyes: I am a designer by profession, so that’s certainly my starting point. As a designer though, what I am most drawn to is the fact that we have the skills to give people a voice. I also see publishing in some ways as an inevitable arm of being a designer. But certainly, first and foremost I am a designer and I am very proud of this product.

There is a lot of effort being put into how we select people for this. For example, in this issue and hopefully throughout the life of this, we put a lot of effort in getting a very diverse and broad range of contributors. And we hope to keep going with that. But yes, the object nature of it is definitely my first priority.

Samir Husni: What are you trying to accomplish or to say by creating a tangible print object in this digital age, one with such a limited edition? Are you saying that there’s still room for print, but it has to be limited in this digital age? What’s your message to the world of journalism, print and digital?

Josef Reyes: The limited is really more of a consequence of the available funds. (Laughs) We need more of that. As far as the reality of it, I think in this day and age what print still has power over is in terms of its specific dimensionality and materiality. If you use it right you can really use it to amplify the message that you’re sending out. As far as the reason why I feel like this format works, and I really believe that it’s more than a gimmick, even though it may seem like that, but because of its small size and because it’s in a cassette case, if you are familiar with that format then it will automatically bring you back into that headspace of making mixed tapes.

For example, I met Jeremy Leslie (magCulture) here in New York last May at a popup shop. I came over and showed him the magazine and when he was looking through it, anyone could see in his eyes that he was instantly back in the ‘80s making mixed tapes. (Laughs) And that’s exactly the effect that I want to have happen, to instantly transport you back to that.

Now that being said, if you are someone who is not at all familiar with this format; in fact, just recently I gave someone in their twenties a copy of this, and he couldn’t figure out how to open the cassette case. (Laughs) He didn’t know what it was. But I think that’s also fine. There is something very different about it and very novel. I feel like that becomes a distinguishing point.

A friend of mine recently judged the ASME’s earlier this year and she had this interesting line, which was, nice paper no longer cuts it. You have to go beyond that to really make something special. And I think that’s where print still has a lot of power; you can make it a more distinct experience in the way that digital can’t really replicate. And that’s why I’m making print magazines in this day and age.

Samir Husni: As a designer, do you feel that print must be designed in a different way? There is a lot of copying from print onto digital screens. Do you feel that publishers have misused digital by just throwing print magazines onto the screen? Who needs to rethink design, is it the print design or the digital?

Josef Reyes: Obviously, they’re very different mediums. I don’t think we’ve figured out a way to make that sort of multi-style designing effective yet, because here’s the problem, you design something for print and when you do, if you do it right – for example, if you art drag a photograph you try to make it work within the page size, the spread size, all that stuff. But then when you transport it to digital, all that doesn’t matter anymore. (Laughs) But the problem is there are different needs, especially now. I feel like we need something more vertical, things like that.

I’m seeing this problem where if you design it for print, it kind of limits what you can do digitally and vice versa. But then when you do try to design it for everything, then you kind of lose the impact in each case. So as far as rethinking it, right now a lot of print designers are having to take to digital more and more. There are a lot more magazines closing now and focusing on digital properties. But I am finding that a lot of print designers are still thinking in terms of pixel-perfect types of design. And vice versa I guess.

Many of the magazines that I see coming out now, I feel like they don’t capitalize enough on how print has very specific dimensions and materiality. A lot of new magazines that I see now, they’re agnostic as far as what the medium is. And that’s sort of been lacking too.

As far as who needs to rethink design, print or digital, I guess the answer is both. But the problem is I don’t think it’s been resolved as to how they can make something special for both cases.

Samir Husni: How often will you publish Day + Night and where can people get a copy of the magazine?

Josef Reyes: Right now this is coming out of my own pocket, so it’s limited by that. Ideally, I would love to publish another one by the second half of this year. I think realistically would have to be a yearly thing. I’m committed to doing three issues in this means. But basically I want to spend that time building up some sort of reputation, and hopefully by issue four we can scale up. So right now it’s primarily available at some stores in New York City. I don’t have a distributor. And I kind of like it right now because I feel like that makes it special. There’s something to us only being available in certain places.

Now that being said, what I’ve found after releasing this issue is I’ve been getting a lot of requests from everywhere really, overseas and in this country, so I think definitely by issue two we need to look into having a proper infrastructure for selling this online. But right now for this issue it is primarily sold at New York City magazine stores. And again, that’s really a consequence of small scale. We’re in a phase where we’re trying to see what the demand is and how we can grow based off of that.

Samir Husni: What’s the cover price?

Josef Reyes: It’s $10. And definitely not what it costs to produce. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: From everything you’ve done so far, and you’ve done a lot, you were quoted that your favorite project is not in your portfolio, it’s not a magazine, it’s not on the bookshelves; it was fax cover sheets you designed. Does Day + Night trump that now?

Josef Reyes: (Laughs) Yes, for sure. This definitely trumps it. What I was saying in that quote was what I like about draft design is that the things you make are things that people use on a daily basis. It’s not an expensive chair or things like that. And I think this is too. If we grow enough to keep the price point at that range, it still makes it accessible to a lot of people. There’s something very democratic about draft design that I like.

Samir Husni: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Josef Reyes: I thanked Adam Moss in this first issue because I worked at New York magazine for two and a half years and it was definitely a huge influence in terms of just general magazine making. And actually at around the time I was finishing up the issue was when the news broke that Adam was retiring, so in some ways I just wanted to dedicate the first issue to him.

The name Day + Night is very generic, which I kind of like I guess. (Laughs) It fits in with the whole design of it, which is referencing blank tape packaging. In some ways I wanted it to feel as generic as possible. And that would allow the stories to really take on their own personalities. My hope is that readers get a real sense of what New York City feels like and that they get it through as diverse a range of perspectives as possible. I think that’s one of the things that make magazines great. They allow for different voices to coexist together. And the best magazines are able to do that in such a way that it’s still one unified voice.

As I mentioned earlier, this issue we really put a lot of effort into making sure that we had as broad a range of people as possible. I think more and more in this day and age it just becomes more important to give everyone a fair and balanced platform. I hope that when people read this magazine they come away feeling that, first of all, they get a real sense of how diverse the City is and how all of that makes it one special place.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; or something else? How do you unwind?

Josef Reyes: I consume a lot of magazines for sure, I really love the industry. And I really love the business. That being said, it does make me sad the state of the way things are.

Samir Husni: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about you?

Josef Reyes: It may be inevitable that people would say this; going back to Day + Night, one pet peeve of mine is when the extent of feedback that I get from people is they think it looks good. (Laughs) And it’s understandable because it is a very visual product and they know that’s what I do, but I would say that in this project that 80 percent of the effort was in the editing. It wasn’t actually the visual part. The visual part was more of a classic one, instead of the editing part. Again, it’s understandable that people would only comment on the visual aspect of it, but I do wish that they would also respond to the editorial aspect of it. It’s not just a visual project, it’s more than that. We’re trying to give people a voice.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Josef Reyes: The industry, for sure. There are definitely a lot of new magazines opening up, but from the point of view of a career, it’s just getting shakier and shakier. I guess that’s why I’m doing this project. In some ways I’m trying to take control of that track, and not be beholden to what’s happening in the industry. That certainly keeps me up at night. It doesn’t look good as far as the major players are concerned. That being said, there is still some very inspiring stuff being made and that’s what keeps me going too.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

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

77 New Titles Launched In The First Six Months Of 2019… The Mr. Magazine™ Launch Monitor

July 1, 2019

Continuing the normal trend of one year up – one year down, the first six months of 2019 show a slight decrease in new magazine titles. We have 77 new magazines for the first half of 2019 versus 105 titles for the first half of 2018. So, the year has begun with a deficit of 28 titles in comparison to last year. However, negativity does not belong on our radar when it comes to print, just the facts. And the slight decrease in the numbers reflects only those facts, no predictions. Because of course if Mr. Magazine™ is looking into his crystal ball, the future of print looks bright indeed. Always has, always will.

And while the numbers may be a bit short in comparison to last year, the creativity and innovation certainly wasn’t lacking. June 2019 gave us a new title that could fit into a cassette player, that is, if it wasn’t ink on paper. Day + Night is an intriguing look at the city of New York in the daytime on “Side A” and then flip the cassette-sized magazine over and on “Side B” you can visit New York at night. The minds of magazine makers are amazing! Welcome Day + Night!

PRINT IS DEAD. LONG LIVE PRINT.

This statement is on the RQ website. This new Philly-born title is one part magazine, one part collaborative art project, and one part social experiment. Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Heather Shayne Blakeslee says that this new magazine offers you insightful and provocative essays, profiles of local makers and artists, cultural criticism, fiction, poetry, and carefully-curated recommendations for getting the most out of life in Philadelphia—including a cocktail or dinner recipe here and there—all in a beautifully designed and printed magazine you can hold in your hands and settle down with on a Sunday afternoon, or argue over at Thursday night happy hour. And Mr. Magazine™ is thrilled to welcome RQ to the fold.

So, as we gear up for another long, hot summer, get ready for a Jumping July as the new titles are already lining up at the newsstands. But until then, please enjoy our beautiful June covers.

And as always, Mr. Magazine™ will see you at the newsstands…

******And please remember, if Mr. Magazine™ can’t physically hold, touch and purchase the magazine, it does not enter the monthly counts. And counts now include only the titles with a regular frequency that are either new, first-seen on Mr. Magazine’s™ radar, or arriving to the national newsstands for the first time.

Posted in Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches | 1 Comment »

Sweet Jane Magazine: Empowering Women Through Cannabis & Removing The Stigma Of Its Use – The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Katy Ibsen, Publisher & Editor…

June 25, 2019

“I’m an optimist no matter what. I think people are overwhelmed with the constant connectivity that we have today. So even from a basic city, regional magazine in a community of 80,000 to a national print magazine about cannabis and women, it’s an experience that allows you to step away from technology. What’s old is new again sometimes, and I believe we’re seeing a resurgence of print in many ways because people feel like it’s a different experience that they’re not getting elsewhere.” Katy Ibsen…

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story…

In today’s magazine marketplace there is a wide variety of titles focusing on the still controversial world of the cannabis industry. From cooking with it to the best way to grow it, the highly-touted green herb has made a wide footprint in the printed space. But Sweet Jane, a new magazine that is all about cannabis, yet zeroes in on women and mothers in particular, strives to remove the stigma that is still attached to smoking, eating, or using the plant in general, making it clear that health and wellbeing is the focal point for the title.

Katy Ibsen is the publisher and editor of the magazine and the driving force behind the title’s mission. Katy believes that cannabis can and should be used by women and mothers for their physical and emotional wellbeing. Sharing the benefits of the plant is what Katy says is the vital message of Sweet Jane.

I spoke with Katy recently and she talked about the fact that our society seems to have no problem with mothers drinking wine for relaxation, yet smoking a joint would automatically make that same mother a bad parent in many social sets. The stigma attached to cannabis is very real and Katy says that Sweet Jane strives to bring greater understanding and acceptance of the plant to people across the country.

It was a very eye-opening conversation and deeply honest, and Mr. Magazine™ thoroughly enjoyed it. And I hope that you do as well. And now the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Katy Ibsen, publisher and editor, Sweet Jane magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On the concept of Sweet Jane: Sweet Jane is a publication that empowers women through cannabis. As legalization, both medical and adult use, continues to occur across the country and individuals begin to experiment, I really felt like there was a lack of education, and a need for any sort of product, whether that be a magazine or a website, in my opinion, that really helps people feel comfortable approaching cannabis and to not feel stigmatized, and to have somewhere they could ask the right questions, even if they felt taboo. So, we wanted to create a magazine that helped people answer those questions and learn more at their own pace and in their own comfortable space.

On why she felt that she needed a print publication in this digital age: Well for one I love print; my background is in print publishing. I worked with city, regionals and tourism publications for most of my career. I think once you start publishing print, it’s hard to ever walk away from it. But the cannabis industry is kind of unique, where a lot of my research into how companies are able to approach their consumers showed that the online aspect was becoming more and more difficult. Cannabis is still a Schedule 1 drug in the Federal Government’s eyes, so because of that platforms like Facebook and Google, Instagram and Twitter have limitations of drug-related content. For example, the National Cannabis Industry Association had indicated that they even struggled publishing certain lobbying events because it’s related to cannabis and marijuana.

On why she thinks cannabis magazines that elevate women are now becoming so prominent: I think that what we’re seeing is females happen to be one of the larger market segments who are consuming cannabis. Some have even gone as far to say that soccer moms are the largest demographic right behind baby boomers. So, right away we know that if a publication is going to be particularly successful, it’s probably going to want to appeal to women. And I think in a non-direct way people are not as comfortable accepting that a woman or a mother would consume cannabis for either recreational purposes or for anxiety or depression, pain or inflammation. There still seems to be a struggle accepting that. And I have many friends across the country who have indicated that and wanted to see something that helps them feel more comfortable talking about it.

On the genesis of the name, Sweet Jane: Originally it was a song by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, which they covered in the ‘70s. And it’s been in my rotation for a while. I wish that I could tell you that there was a little bit more inspiration behind it, but it really came from the song. And the song’s lyrics actually play a part because as parents and as women we’re trying to make ends meet. The Jane hook is obviously “Mary Jane,” but the Sweet Jane came from the song and its lyrics. But in my opinion the name provided a softness for it to be a feminine magazine. We are talking to women and to mothers.

On what “high” she hopes Sweet Jane will have reached in a year: I think greater acceptance of female and parent use of cannabis. We’re seeing more and more of the conversation about the debate of what’s more appropriate, a mother drinking a lot of wine and thinking that’s okay, that it’s very much a “Mommy Juice” or “Mommy Wine” culture and it is more accepted in our society. But if you see a mother smoke a joint, she’s a bad mom, potentially risking the wellbeing of her child. And that all stems from ignorance.

On what she believes the future of print is: I’m an optimist no matter what. I think people are overwhelmed with the constant connectivity that we have today. So, even from a basic city, regional magazine in a community of 80,000 to a national print magazine about cannabis and women, it’s an experience that allows you to step away from technology. What’s old is new again sometimes, and I believe we’re seeing a resurgence of print in many ways because people feel like it’s a different experience that they’re not getting elsewhere.

On how she decided on $5.99 for a cover price: It goes back to what you asked earlier: what do we want to achieve in five years. And that’s greater acceptance of the female and mother use of cannabis for their own wellbeing. So if I price my magazine at a price point where maybe a middle or lower income mother can’t afford it, then I’m not really achieving that mission. The access to it is greater if I have a manageable cover price that a woman can say, I can buy this magazine because all of this information is relevant to me and I can keep this magazine and reference it many times for a small price of $5.99, which is still a significant price for a lot of people. So, we wanted to make sure that it was as accessible as possible.

On what her plans are for the frequency: I’ve always felt that a four times per year frequency is good. Again, for justification of the reasons, the connectivity, people making time for a print product; all of that. I think publishing more than that can be costly and maybe not necessary. Currently we’re twice a year for 2019/2020. We’re hoping to increase our frequency to four times a year in 2021. We’re underwritten by advertising and our newsstand and cover price sales. We’ve built a very lean business model financially to continue the project through 2020 in hopes that we will increase our advertising enough to move to four times per year.

On anything she’d like to add: The other thing that I think is just really fascinating about the cannabis industry is that it has more opportunities for women. And states that don’t have any form of legalization yet aren’t seeing that, but I think just in general, a lot of the innovation that comes with cannabis is advancing a lot of industries, not just print publications. As we continue to see these magazines pop up and we’re very proud to be one of them, across the board greater acceptance of cannabis might actually become a reality. Putting our necks out there, Kitchen Toke, MJ, and many others that are also in the legacy of High Tines, my hope is that we are a small step toward greater acceptance and greater legalization. And I’m using my journalism background to do that.

On the biggest misconception people have about her: I lost my publishing job two years ago to take a sabbatical and spend time with my husband and start a family. And I knew at some point I would start a new project. Honestly, I don’t think that I would be pursuing a print publication if it weren’t in cannabis because of the opportunity that the print platform provides for the industry and for its consumers. And I think trying to explain that to people was challenging at times.

On what someone would find her doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at her home: To be completely clear, I live in a prohibition state, so I don’t have legal access to cannabis. So while I have experienced cannabis in my life and I currently use CBD for wellness, you wouldn’t catch me smoking a joint because I legally cannot. But you would catch me either running with my daughter or enjoying a glass wine, because I still do that with my husband. And listening to some music, watching her play and grow. My daughter will be one soon. We laugh that I had a baby in a year and I had a magazine in a year. (Laughs) I only had one birth, but it feels like two. So, when I get the chance to just sit down and catch my breath, I take full advantage of that with my family.

On what keeps her up at night: I’m building a business and Sweet Jane is the largest piece of that pie. But I still service a lot of publishing clients; I do a lot of contract editing and publishing consulting and so, if anything, what keeps me up at night is how to get it all done. I am the primary child-caregiver in my house, so I balance everything that I do while raising my daughter. And it’s hard at times and things fall through the cracks, but I think what’s keeping me up at night is what’s the next priority and how do we accomplish that.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Katy Ibsen, publisher and editor, Sweet Jane magazine.

Samir Husni: Tell me about the concept of Sweet Jane.

Katy Ibsen: Sweet Jane is a publication that empowers women through cannabis. As legalization, both medical and adult use, continues to occur across the country and individuals begin to experiment, I really felt like there was a lack of education, and a need for any sort of product, whether that be a magazine or a website, in my opinion, that really helps people feel comfortable approaching cannabis and to not feel stigmatized, and to have somewhere they could ask the right questions, even if they felt taboo. So, we wanted to create a magazine that helped people answer those questions and learn more at their own pace and in their own comfortable space.

Cannabis comes with a lot of taboo stuff. And because of that I think we find that people aren’t comfortable talking about it; they’re not comfortable searching certain terms or asking other people about it, especially if they happen to live in a prohibition state. And by creating a magazine, a print magazine, that was a way that we could help people get that information and consume it however they wanted to.

Samir Husni: Why did you feel that you needed a printed edition in this digital age?

Katy Ibsen: Well for one I love print; my background is in print publishing. I worked with city, regionals and tourism publications for most of my career. I think once you start publishing print, it’s hard to ever walk away from it. But the cannabis industry is kind of unique, where a lot of my research into how companies are able to approach their consumers showed that the online aspect was becoming more and more difficult. Cannabis is still a Schedule 1 drug in the Federal Government’s eyes, so because of that platforms like Facebook and Google, Instagram and Twitter have limitations of drug-related content. For example, the National Cannabis Industry Association had indicated that they even struggled publishing certain lobbying events because it’s related to cannabis and marijuana.

But because of that there’s actually a little bit of a print resurgence in the cannabis industry because they are limited in digital ways to reach consumers. It kind of created a good opportunity to actually use print.

Samir Husni: Suddenly, it went from one magazine, such as High Times, to a host of magazines about cannabis. At last count, I was up to 22 different titles. Why do you think cannabis magazines that elevate women are now becoming so prominent? We have had MJ Lifestyle, which elevates the feminine voice in cannabis and its culture; we have had Broccoli: Kitchen Toke; is that a unique selling feature of the magazine, aiming at cannabis and women? Or what’s the difference between cannabis and “people” and cannabis and “women?”

Katy Ibsen: That’s a great question and all of those publications that you named are phenomenal and founded by women. I think that what we’re seeing is females happen to be one of the larger market segments who are consuming cannabis. Some have even gone as far to say that soccer moms are the largest demographic right behind baby boomers. So, right away we know that if a publication is going to be particularly successful, it’s probably going to want to appeal to women.

And I think in a non-direct way people are not as comfortable accepting that a woman or a mother would consume cannabis for either recreational purposes or for anxiety or depression, pain or inflammation. There still seems to be a struggle accepting that. And I have many friends across the country who have indicated that and wanted to see something that helps them feel more comfortable talking about it.

Broccoli, Kitchen Toke, MJ Lifestyle are all perfect examples of advancing that conversation, but Sweet Jane’s differentiation is that we are focusing on the parenting/mother aspect of it, as well as the educational aspect. So, while we certainly profile women who are doing unique things, or things that are happening in the industry, we’re also trying to provide a healthy dose of really basic education that has been vetted and is from professionals who can help new cannabis users learn how to incorporate cannabis into their lives should they choose to.

And I think that’s something that really gets overlooked, especially as the legalization continues to happen and is even happening in the Midwest. Illinois just went recreational, Missouri has Amendment 2, which is the implementation of their medical program, Oklahoma went medical a year ago. And so you have a lot of Midwesterners, and especially, we’ll just say suburban housewives, who are curious, but don’t know what to do to start to incorporate it or even research or understand it. And as those states start legalization, their staffs and individuals that are working in dispensaries will also have a learning curve about how they talk to consumers about cannabis.

We’re hoping to be a support and an intersect there to help women feel comfortable going into that dispensary in the Midwest or wherever the next legal state is going to be and asking the right questions to make sure they get the right product to have the best cannabis experience for whatever they’re wanting to use it for.

Samir Husni: And when you said the magazine provides a “healthy dose,” there’s no pun intended, right? (Laughs)

Katy Ibsen: (Laughs too) No pun intended. It seems basic, but some women would probably prefer to use a vape pen or an edible, but those are two very different experiences. And so we want to help them understand what those experiences are before they just blindly try it and have a really poor experience and decide that cannabis isn’t right for them or that plant medicine isn’t something that they believe will help them.

Samir Husni: Tell me about the genesis of the name, Sweet Jane.

Katy Ibsen: Originally it was a song by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, which they covered in the ‘70s. And it’s been in my rotation for a while. I wish that I could tell you that there was a little bit more inspiration behind it, but it really came from the song. And the song’s lyrics actually play a part because as parents and as women we’re trying to make ends meet. The Jane hook is obviously “Mary Jane,” but the Sweet Jane came from the song and its lyrics. But in my opinion the name provided a softness for it to be a feminine magazine. We are talking to women and to mothers.

But anybody who knows Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground is attracted to the name. We have had many compliments on it from middle-aged men. (Laughs) So, saying it’s specific to just women maybe isn’t the case, it’s specific to a couple different spaces. It works because ultimately, while we’re appealing to women, a lot of the content that we’re incorporating is gender neutral. Everybody needs to know the difference between flowers, concentrates, vaporizers and edibles. It’s not necessarily specific to women, albeit women may have a different reaction than men. But the information is basic in its form for all genders.

Samir Husni: If I ask you to put your futuristic hat on for a moment and you and I are having this conversation a year from now, what would you hope to tell me Sweet Jane has accomplished in that year? What “high” will Sweet Jane have reached a year from now?

Katy Ibsen: I think greater acceptance of female and parent use of cannabis. We’re seeing more and more of the conversation about the debate of what’s more appropriate, a mother drinking a lot of wine and thinking that’s okay, that it’s very much a “Mommy Juice” or “Mommy Wine” culture and it is more accepted in our society. But if you see a mother smoke a joint, she’s a bad mom, potentially risking the wellbeing of her child. And that all stems from ignorance.

If we at Sweet Jane, in the company of Kitchen Toke, Broccoli and MJ Lifestyle can show that cannabis is actually a very safe alternative, it’s a healthy alternative with less consequences than drinking. And I think the research is coming out more and more to prove that. So if we can help achieve conversations and greater acceptance then I think we’re on a path to success five years from now.

Samir Husni: You mentioned earlier that because of the subject matter you feel there is a resurgence for print with cannabis-related topics, but what do you think the future of print is?

Katy Ibsen: I’m an optimist no matter what. I think people are overwhelmed with the constant connectivity that we have today. So even from a basic city, regional magazine in a community of 80,000 to a national print magazine about cannabis and women, it’s an experience that allows you to step away from technology. What’s old is new again sometimes, and I believe we’re seeing a resurgence of print in many ways because people feel like it’s a different experience that they’re not getting elsewhere.

And there are examples of other individuals, entrepreneurs or publishers seeing a need for somebody to want to be involved in this niche and be engaged with it in this form versus a digital form. And with supporters like Barnes & Noble who are taking a risk on these publications and giving them an outlet to be consumed, there’s potential for it to keep growing. If we put content in our publication that people can’t find anywhere else then there’s a reason for people to seek out our print product. So, I think there’s a future.

Samir Husni: When I look at the cover price of all of your competitors, you’re at $5.99 and they’re at $18 and $20 an issue. How did you reach the decision to charge $5.99 per issue?

Katy Ibsen: Well, it goes back to what you asked earlier: what do we want to achieve in five years. And that’s greater acceptance of the female and mother use of cannabis for their own wellbeing. So if I price my magazine at a price point where maybe a middle or lower income mother can’t afford it, then I’m not really achieving that mission. The access to it is greater if I have a manageable cover price that a woman can say, I can buy this magazine because all of this information is relevant to me and I can keep this magazine and reference it many times for a small price of $5.99, which is still a significant price for a lot of people. So, we wanted to make sure that it was as accessible as possible.

Samir Husni: Your next issue is coming out in November. Are you starting as a quarterly or plans to move to six times per year? What are your plans for the frequency?

Katy Ibsen: I’ve always felt that a four times per year frequency is good. Again, for justification of the reasons, the connectivity, people making time for a print product; all of that. I think publishing more than that can be costly and maybe not necessary. Currently we’re twice a year for 2019/2020. We’re hoping to increase our frequency to four times a year in 2021. We’re underwritten by advertising and our newsstand and cover price sales. We’ve built a very lean business model financially to continue the project through 2020 in hopes that we will increase our advertising enough to move to four times per year.

Samir Husni: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Katy Ibsen: The other thing that I think is just really fascinating about the cannabis industry is that it has more opportunities for women. And states that don’t have any form of legalization yet aren’t seeing that, but I think just in general, a lot of the innovation that comes with cannabis is advancing a lot of industries, not just print publications. As we continue to see these magazines pop up and we’re very proud to be one of them, across the board greater acceptance of cannabis might actually become a reality. Putting our necks out there, Kitchen Toke, MJ, and many others that are also in the legacy of High Tines, my hope is that we are a small step toward greater acceptance and greater legalization. And I’m using my journalism background to do that.

Samir Husni: When you told people you were doing this, that you were launching this magazine, what was the biggest misconception they had about you?

Katy Ibsen: That’s a great question. I lost my publishing job two years ago to take a sabbatical and spend time with my husband and start a family. And I knew at some point I would start a new project. Honestly, I don’t think that I would be pursuing a print publication if it weren’t in cannabis because of the opportunity that the print platform provides for the industry and for its consumers. And I think trying to explain that to people was challenging at times.

And not necessarily because of their ignorance, but because they would look at me like, why would you do a print magazine? Aren’t those dying? (Laughs) Then they’d say, what are you going to write about with cannabis? There’s not a whole lot to it, but they’d come to find that there’s a great deal to it. And if we don’t educate the ignorance continues. Or if we don’t use our voice to help with criminal justice reform, then legalization continues to create a lot of social injustices.

So, we had, and my family had, an opportunity to shift that conversation. And I think we’re seeing it happen more and more and now people see it. Those who have loved the magazine since it’s been out have given us great feedback and they’ve been extremely complimentary.

My graphic designer and I laughed a little bit that we were some craft between The New Yorker and Real Simple, because we felt that the magazine was wordy, but it was a lot of useful, do-it-yourself information for cannabis. And people want to use cannabis. And the biggest compliment that people keeping saying is how beautiful the magazine is. (Laughs) We’re happy we achieved that, but our mission was ultimately that they walk away with more power based on the knowledge they learned from it. It’s a good bonus that they think it’s beautiful as well.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Smoking a joint; having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; or something else? How do you unwind?

Katy Ibsen: To be completely clear, I live in a prohibition state, so I don’t have legal access to cannabis. So while I have experienced cannabis in my life and I currently use CBD for wellness, you wouldn’t catch me smoking a joint because I legally cannot. But you would catch me either running with my daughter or enjoying a glass wine, because I still do that with my husband. And listening to some music, watching her play and grow. My daughter will be one soon. We laugh that I had a baby in a year and I had a magazine in a year. (Laughs) I only had one birth, but it feels like two. So, when I get the chance to just sit down and catch my breath, I take full advantage of that with my family.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Katy Ibsen: (Laughs) I’m building a business and Sweet Jane is the largest piece of that pie. But I still service a lot of publishing clients; I do a lot of contract editing and publishing consulting and so, if anything, what keeps me up at night is how to get it all done. I am the primary child-caregiver in my house, so I balance everything that I do while raising my daughter. And it’s hard at times and things fall through the cracks, but I think what’s keeping me up at night is what’s the next priority and how do we accomplish that.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

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

Norman Cousins On The Future Of Print & The Role Of Magazines, Circa 1972… A Mr. Magazine™ Blast From The Past…

June 22, 2019

“Print will continue to be a primary force in the life of the mind”…Norman Cousins

Happy birthday Mr. Cousins.

Norman Cousins was born June 24, 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey and he died in 1990. He was a longtime editor of the Saturday Review, global peacemaker, receiver of hundreds of awards including the UN Peace Medal and nearly 50 honorary doctorate degrees.

In 1972, Cousins resigned from Saturday Review and founded World Magazine, which called itself “a review of ideas, the arts and the human condition.”

In this Blast From the Past, read about the future of print and the role of magazines circa 1972. Once again, there is nothing new under the sun. The wisdom of 1972 still rings true today. Please enjoy this excerpt from literary giant, Norman Cousins, introducing his new magazine. And Mr. Magazine™ would love to hear your comments…

World 7/4/72

A REVIEW OF IDEAS, THE ARTS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Volume 1, Number 1.

This first issue of World Magazine is dedicated to the future of print, and to our colleagues on other magazines, newspapers, and books. We are confident that print will not only endure but will continue to be a primary force in the life of the mind. Nothing yet invented meets the intellectual needs of the human brain so fully as print. The ability of the mind to convert little markings on paper into meaning is one of the ways civilization receives its basic energy.

What is most important about a new magazine is not how it came to be but what it seeks to become. World seeks to become a magazine on the human situation. In philosophy, editorial content, and direction, it seeks to become a journal of creative world thought and activity.

The compression of the whole of humanity into a single geographic arena is the single event of the contemporary era. The central question of that arena is whether the world will become a community or a wasteland, a single habitat or a single battlefield. More and more, the choice for the world’s people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.

Perhaps the starkest discovery of our time is that our planet is not indestructible and that its ability to sustain life is not limitless. For the first time in history, therefore, the physical condition of the planet Earth forces itself upon human intelligence. And the management of the earth for the human good now becomes not just a philosophical abstraction but an operational necessity.

For many centuries, people have known that life on this planet is possible only because millions upon millions of factors are in precise and delicate balance. Never before have those vital balances been in jeopardy. Life is now imperiled not because of any failure of the cosmic design but because of human intervention.

All at once a new and larger kind of wisdom is needed to keep humankind from becoming inimical to its own survival. Wisdom that can deal with basic causes of breakdowns between the national aggregations. Wisdom that can halt the poisoning of the natural environment and that can monitor the world’s airshed and waters. Wisdom that can establish a balance between resources and needs. Wisdom that can apply technology to the upgrading of the whole f human society. And, finally, wisdom that can help men regain their essential trust in one another, and restore their sensitivities to life. It is folly to expect that genuine creativity-whether in the individual or society-can exist in the absence of highly developed sensitivities.

World Magazine, therefore, is devoted to ideas and the arts. One may make a distinction between the two, but one cannot separate the two. Both are part of the same creative process. Survival is impossible without ideas, but the arts give sense and excitement to survival.

The ultimate adventure on earth is the adventure of ideas. Word Magazine would like to be part of that adventure. The times favor new ideas. Old dogmas and ideologies are losing their power to inspire or terrify. They are no longer prime sources of intellectual energy and have become instead traditional enduring symbols, objects of generalized attachments and loyalties. Compartmentalized man is giving away to World Man. The banner commanding the greatest attention has human unity stamped upon it…

…It is apparent not just from the authorship of the various columns and departments but from the names on the masthead that most of the editors and contributors share a common editorial background. Yet it is equally clear that they come together now in a new and different context. World Magazine is proud of its origins and especially of whatever measure of continuity it may be able to give to a certain tradition in publishing. We are excited by the prospect of publishing a magazine with a world purpose.

The editors do not regard this issue as a definitive expression of their ideas about World. For a new magazine is not born fully formed. It has to evolve over a period of time. It is shaped in creative interaction with readers. Its most useful mistakes are made in the open. Our hope is that those mistakes will not be beyond fruitful correction, and that they will not obscure our main aim, which is to publish a magazine that people will read and respect. NC

Editor’s Note: You may have noticed lately that I am not as active on the blog as usual. Two reasons for that, first, the summer break and second, working on two books, the first on how to launch a magazine and the second on the magazines of the 1950s.

Posted in From the Vault, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

Don D. Guttenplan, Editor of The Nation to Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni: “Print Does Things That You Can’t Do Online” – The Mr. Magazine™ Interview…

June 19, 2019

“I feel that there is a reflectivity; there’s a chance to persuade; there’s a chance to sit with an idea that print gives you that you don’t get anywhere else. But I have to say that I assigned myself the task, and because I’ve been a reporter for 40 years, the way I think about things is to write about them and report them, so I’m in the middle of, I haven’t finished writing a story about the future of print. My tentative findings though is that print is durable and it’s going to be around for a long time.” Don Guttenplan (On what he feels the role of the print edition of The Nation plays today)….

As the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, The Nation covers progressive political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. Just recently the magazine named journalist and author Don D. Guttenplan as its editor. Don has a long and robust history with The Nation, having been its London correspondent, not to mention writing the publication’s biography up to the present: “The Nation. A Biography” (The First 150 years). So I think it’s safe to say the man knows a thing or two about his work environment.

I spoke with Don recently and we talked about this legacy publication that according to him has always been a beacon and a voice for progressive ideas. So, bringing his deep sense of The Nation’s history and its democratic politics with him as he moves into his New York office and the magazine’s editor’s chair, Don is ready to go to work.

And his first self-assigned task has been to think about print, the relation of print, and what The Nation is doing in print, because he has often felt that the magazine hadn’t really fully thought that through. Don feels there is a reflectivity with print, a chance to persuade; a chance to sit with an idea that print gives you that you don’t get anywhere else. Needless to say, Mr. Magazine™ would wholeheartedly agree.

Reaching true audience potential with The Nation’s print component, while enjoying a vibrant and alive web presence are two things that are on Don’s radar, as well as consistently bringing a sensibility and an awareness of the role that The Nation plays in the world of political journalism that nobody else plays.

So, I hope that you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Don D. Guttenplan, editor of The Nation as he talks about his passion for politics and shares his wealth of knowledge on the subject.

But first the sound bites:

On his relationship with Memphis, Tenn.: My relationship with Memphis is that my parents lived there when I was in high school, so I went to high school there. My father was an itinerant social worker, so he traveled around a lot. When I lived in Memphis I couldn’t wait to leave. I skipped years and scrambled to escape early and went to New York, which was the center of the universe to me then. But I realized fairly soon, first of all that I had been lucky and I had really gotten an excellent education from my public high school in Memphis, Tenn.

On his reaction when he was offered the job of editor of The Nation: I wasn’t expecting him (Trump) to win the election. I was as surprised and devastated as probably anybody else. But I woke up the next morning in my hotel room, because by the time they called the election it was two-something in the morning and I was too tired to feel safe driving down to New York City, so I just checked into a hotel, and I got up and I wrote an editorial which became The Nation’s lead editorial the next day. And the last line of it was: “Welcome to the Fight.” So, I suppose that’s how I felt. That’s what went through my mind when Katrina asked would I take over The Nation. If I’m welcoming other people to the fight, this is really not something that I can duck. To have this platform at this time in our country’s history and to have a platform with the lineage and the leverage of The Nation is both an incredible opportunity and also a heavy responsibility, which does weigh on me and which I take seriously.

On what role he thinks the print edition of The Nation plays with all of the different platforms it exists upon now: That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? When Katrina offered me the job and it became clear that I was going to accept it and we were going to find a way to make this happen, because I was in England at the time, the first task that I set myself was to think about print, the relation of print, and what The Nation is doing in print, because I’d often felt and said that we hadn’t really fully thought that through. We’d entered all of these other platforms and we’re enthusiastic on them and have a great website and we have millions of unique readers, so the magazine’s reach and voice is extensive and that’s terrific, but there were some people who felt that print was over and I definitely didn’t feel that. And not just because I love print. My daughter loves print so much that works as a typesetter, so we’re a print-focused family in many ways.

On what he will bring to The Nation’s extensive legacy: I’m glad you mentioned the extensive legacy because, of course, one of the things that I bring to The Nation and I think one of the reasons that Katrina asked me to do this is because I have a deeper sense of The Nation’s history perhaps than anyone since I wrote it. I wrote the book The Nation: A Biography in 2015 for the magazine’s 150th. So I’m quite aware of both the failings and the achievements of my 15 successors in this chair as editor. And I’m quite aware of what The Nation has been over time. And one of the things that has been over time is a voice for progressive ideas, for ideas that move toward a vision of justice, to try and bend the arc of the universe toward justice, whether it was 40 acres and a mule for freed slaves, literacy training for freed slaves, or whether it was workers’ rights. And one of the earlier editors of The Nation was one of the founders of the NAACP. So The Nation has been a voice for progress for a long time. And I think having an awareness of that is important.

On how important he feels journalism is to the future of our country: I don’t think you can have a democracy without a functioning press. I think it’s absolutely crucial and we are actually blessed in America with a really good press, particularly with what were our legacy print publications, such as The New York Times, for example. It’s funny because I worked at the Village Voice for three years and when I worked there, The New York Times was our enemy. Every day we would roll our eyes at some horrible sell-out, commercial, terrible headline or a failure to understand the true politics behind some event. And it’s not that I disavow any of that, but on the other hand I feel we are so lucky in America to have a good daily journal that is a good source of daily news, daily journalism, where the reporters go deep and you can often, not always, but often, you can believe what they print.

On which of his many journalistic skills: writing, editing, reporting, is dearest to his heart: I think they all shape each other. “American Radical,” which is my biography of I. F. Stone , The Nation’s long-time Washington correspondent, and then founder of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, that was a 20 year book. (Laughs) I had been living with that for a long time. And that probably left a pretty deep mark on me. But I took a break in the middle to write “The Holocaust on Trial,” which really wasn’t a book that I wanted to write. I’m Jewish and I’m aware of the Holocaust. My father’s best friend was a Holocaust survivor, but it wasn’t something that I had been immersed in.

On the biggest challenge he could face and how he plans to overcome it: Editorially, I think the challenge is in fact the challenge that any editor faces, which is selection. There is so much happening and there is so much going on and it’s a signal to noise question. How do you filter out what matters? How do you decide? We’re not the Huffington Post or The Intercept. We don’t have an enormous staff or vast, multimillionaire backing. We have an incredibly hardworking, not tiny, it’s not a skeleton staff, we have a very good staff and we have a very large universe of writers who are delighted to write for us. But still we can’t chase everything. We certainly don’t have room in print for everything that we’d like to say, which is one of the reasons why it’s wonderful that we have a website. And it’s so active and so full of interest. But it’s still the question of figuring out what to pay attention to; picking your fights; picking your issues, and focus.

On anything he’d like to add: One of the experiences you have editing a magazine that everybody knows about but not everybody reads, (Laughs) is you’re meeting people who say they used to read The Nation or they used to subscribe to The Nation. And my message to those people is take another a look. We have a new editor; we have new energy; we have I think a really important understanding of our responsibility and we are going to work very hard to live up to that responsibility. I say that not as a sense of duty, but I feel like our responsibility is not just to parse out what’s happening politically and provide cogent and trenchant analysis, which I think we do every week, but also to give people sources of delight and encouragement and energy.

On the biggest misconception he thinks people have about him: I don’t think people have any conception about me because I don’t think that I’m that well-known. I’ve left a very long record, people can look at what I’ve written on all sorts of things. It’s all out there. My views are no secret. I suppose to the extent that there is a conception about me and that it’s a misconception, which I’m not sure either of which is true, I suppose that it’s I’m an entirely political creature. I am passionate about politics, and particularly about “small d- democracy,” but I care a lot about other things too. I care about music and food and all those things. And poetry and the natural world. So, I would say that if there is a misconception of me it’s that I only care about politics.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home: That’s a good question because I only moved to New York recently and I still haven’t moved into my apartment. So, you’d catch me cooking for the friends who are putting me up. (Laughs again) If you were to catch me relaxing in the evening, I suppose you’d catch me talking to friends or maybe reading. I read lots of novels. Every night before I go to bed I usually read some of a novel. The problem is if it’s one I can’t put down, it ends up keeping me up too late, so I find I do my literary reading at the end of the day because most of those demand a kind of stillness and thought that I can still muster, but they also don’t keep me awake.

On what keeps him up at night: It’s nice of you to call me Dr. Don and it’s true that I have a Ph.D., but nobody calls me that. What keeps me up at night is my three children. They’re grown up, the youngest is 20. He’s a Jazz musician; my daughter lives in New York and she works in publishing, in small press publishing; and my oldest son is in The Netherlands and he’s a scientist. What keeps me up at night are their trials and tribulations, which like any parent, I think about. I suppose I could say the world we’re leaving to them. I don’t actually think in such grandiose terms really, most of the time. What keeps me up at night is the personal, rather than the political.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Don D. Guttenplan, editor, The Nation.

Samir Husni: I see from your bio that you went to Memphis Public Schools.

Don D. Guttenplan: Yes, I did.

Samir Husni: So, what’s the relationship with Memphis?

Don D. Guttenplan: My relationship with Memphis is that my parents lived there when I was in high school, so I went to high school there. My father was an itinerant social worker, so he traveled around a lot. When I lived in Memphis I couldn’t wait to leave. I skipped years and scrambled to escape early and went to New York, which was the center of the universe to me then.

But I realized fairly soon, first of all that I had been lucky and I had really gotten an excellent education from my public high school in Memphis, Tenn. I remember one of my professors at Columbia asking me – I had asked a question about “The Iliad” – and everybody at Columbia where I went to college had to read “The Iliad,” and I had already read it in high school, and she asked me where I did that, where did I go to high school. I told her in Memphis, Tenn. So, people have a lot of stereotypes about the South. One of my college professors used to tease me – he seemed surprised that I came to class wearing shoes. (Laughs)

But I realized that Memphis particularly was a good place to be from, mainly because of the incredibly rich musical culture, which still influences me as a source of delight. “The Waterboy” is playing London and I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, and their keyboard player played a song called “My Soul Is In Memphis, But My Ass Is In Nashville, Tenn.” (Laughs) Memphis is a little bit like that for me. I don’t go back very often; my family moved when I went to college. I went back for my 20^th high school reunion and I’m going soon for my 45^th. I think I may have been a couple of other times in the intervening years.

I used to say that the Delta was the landscape of my dreams because I often used to dream that I was somewhere in a very flat, very hot landscape with a big river. So, it an effect on me.

Samir Husni: You’re now the new incoming editor of one of the country’s oldest magazines, The Nation.

Don D. Guttenplan: America’s oldest weekly, as we say.

Samir Husni: So tell me, when you were offered the job of editor of America’s oldest weekly, what was your first reaction?

Don D. Guttenplan: Well, it was a conversation that we’d been having for a long time. My predecessor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, was editor for 25 years and she is now the editorial director and remains as publisher. And 25 years is a long time, and I think she was looking for someone to hand off to, that’s her side of it. And my side of it is, on November 9 or 10^th, 2016, whatever the day was after the election, I had spent election night in upstate New York watching Zephyr Teachout lose her congressional race, basically. And I remember saying to the office that I was going to Zephyr’s headquarters because she’s probably not going to win, but if she does win it’ll be really interesting because I think she’s a significant thinker and activist and somebody who if her voice came into Congress it would be amazing. And I added, besides if she loses I have plenty of time to get down to Times Square to see Trump’s concession speech. (Laughs)

Although, I will say that I was one of the few journalists early on to say that we needed to take the possibility of Trump’s winning seriously. And if you look it up, in September 2015 at the very first Republican debate, that was the debate where they had the kid’s table and the grownup’s table because they had so many candidates, that was held in Cleveland, I wrote that there was nobody on that stage who could beat Trump, because that’s what I thought. That was also the debate where the moderator said that if there was someone who didn’t promise to support the eventual Republican nominee, hold up your hand. And Trump held up his hand. And I thought surely they would find a way to exclude him from the primaries. But I underestimated the venality of the Republican Party. (Laughs) As a candidate, he was potentially much more skillful than anyone else I saw that evening.

But anyway, I wasn’t expecting him to win the election. I was as surprised and devastated as probably anybody else. But I woke up the next morning in my hotel room, because by the time they called the election it was two-something in the morning and I was too tired to feel safe driving down to New York City, so I just checked into a hotel, and I got up and I wrote an editorial which became The Nation’s lead editorial the next day. And the last line of it was: “Welcome to the Fight.”

So, I suppose that’s how I felt. That’s what went through my mind when Katrina asked would I take over The Nation. If I’m welcoming other people to the fight, this is really not something that I can duck. To have this platform at this time in our country’s history and to have a platform with the lineage and the leverage of The Nation is both an incredible opportunity and also a heavy responsibility, which does weigh on me and which I take seriously.

Samir Husni: As you look forward, weeklies in print have struggled. What role do you think the print edition of The Nation plays with all of the different platforms it now exists upon?

Don D. Guttenplan: (Laughs) That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? When Katrina offered me the job and it became clear that I was going to accept it and we were going to find a way to make this happen, because I was in England at the time, the first task that I set myself was to think about print, the relation of print, and what The Nation is doing in print, because I’d often felt and said that we hadn’t really fully thought that through.

We’d entered all of these other platforms and we’re enthusiastic on them and have a great website and we have millions of unique readers, so the magazine’s reach and voice is extensive and that’s terrific, but there were some people who felt that print was over and I definitely didn’t feel that. And not just because I love print. My daughter loves print so much that works as a typesetter, so we’re a print-focused family in many ways.

But I also feel that there is a reflectivity; there’s a chance to persuade; there’s a chance to sit with an idea that print gives you that you don’t get anywhere else. But I have to say that I assigned myself the task, and because I’ve been a reporter for 40 years, the way I think about things is to write about them and report them, so I’m in the middle of, I haven’t finished writing a story about the future of print. My tentative findings though is that print is durable and it’s going to be around for a long time. And it does things that you can’t do online. And not just that you can’t read it in the bathroom.

It’s a much better place for intellectual debate; it’s a much better place to try and persuade someone; it’s a much better place to hear somebody’s voice. On the other hand, it’s a much worse place to break news. It’s a much worse place to be right-up-to-the-minute. I will confess to having an addiction to reading a newspaper in the morning with my coffee. I was paying a lot of money to The Guardian, when I was in London, to have it delivered every morning and I would be terribly upset on the few mornings that the delivery service would fail and it wouldn’t be there because I really like spreading out a newspaper and reading it while I’m having my coffee. But that’s a generational thing and I don’t actually know whether that will persist.

I don’t know whether younger people will want to get their news from dead trees that leave ink stains on their hands. I do and I love it and I love everything about it. I love the headlines, the feel of the paper, the smell of the ink, all of that. But that may not be the future of print. In fact, the first person that I knew I wanted to interview was Katharine Viner, who is the editor of The Guardian and an old friend, and who has thought about journalism, print, and the Web more deeply than anybody else I know. And she had lots of interesting things to say about that, which you’ll have to read my piece when I finish it to find out. (Laughs)

But in terms of magazines, I hadn’t seen your slogan until recently, if it’s not in print, it’s not a magazine, I am with you on that.

Samir Husni: What’s your vision for The Nation is this new century? Everyone says that we live in a digital age and no one can argue with that, but what will you bring to The Nation’s extensive legacy?

Don. D. Guttenplan: I’m glad you mentioned the extensive legacy because, of course, one of the things that I bring to The Nation and I think one of the reasons that Katrina asked me to do this is because I have a deeper sense of The Nation’s history perhaps than anyone since I wrote it. I wrote the book The Nation: A Biography in 2015 for the magazine’s 150^th. So I’m quite aware of both the failings and the achievements of my 15 successors in this chair as editor. And I’m quite aware of what The Nation has been over time.

And one of the things that has been over time is a voice for progressive ideas, for ideas that move toward a vision of justice, to try and bend the arc of the universe toward justice, whether it was 40 acres and a mule for freed slaves, literacy training for freed slaves, or whether it was workers’ rights. And one of the earlier editors of The Nation was one of the founders of the NAACP. So The Nation has been a voice for progress for a long time. And I think having an awareness of that is important.

I don’t really mean to dis another publication, but I remember there was a period where The New Republic was abandoning print and they were calling themselves a multimedia platform, because they were bought by this guy that was a former Facebook founder. And I thought, that’s not what you do with a legacy like that. You don’t just write it off, so I’m not going to write off our legacy.

But I think what I bring to the job aside from its sense of history are two things. One is sensibility and that sensibility is an awareness that the role that The Nation plays that nobody else plays, and nobody else has played since The New Republic started its leaning toward the right under Marty Peretz, which was a long time ago, is we are the place where liberals and radicals argue with each other and where they meet and contest ideas.

We are the place that exposes liberals to radical ideas and we are the place that exposes radicals to a, maybe a sort of tempering, of their passions that define liberal thought or the awareness of complexity that maybe liberals would say keeps them from being radicals. We are the space where those Venn diagrams overlap. And I think that’s a really important function on both sides. There is no progress without radicals, and on the other hand in democracy, which I am deeply committed to, you don’t make change without convincing the majority. And the majority by definition are never going to be radicals. It’s that process; it’s that, to use the outdated but to me essential term, it’s that dialectic that defines one of The Nation’s most important rules. So, I think I bring an awareness of and a sympathy for both sides of that dialectic that is going to be useful.

And the other thing is that although I’m an election junkie and it says so on my Twitter profile (Laughs), and I’ve been involved in politics for a long time and I’ve been involved in journalism and daily journalism from New York Newsday to the International Herald Tribune, those are not the limits of what interests me. I shipped 82 orders of books from London to my office here, to mostly put on the shelves in my office. And a lot of them were poetry.

The idea that magazine editors have a vision, some of them do and maybe that’s a good thing, but I’m not sure that I have a vision. I have a sensibility and I have some things that I want to do. I feel like we have a lot of work to do, both at this magazine and in this country. And I’m going to put my shoulder to that work, but in doing so, I want our readers to have a lot more pleasure from the experience reading The Nation. And for it to be a source of regular surprise and delight to them. That’s something that is easy for us to neglect in the kind of grim slog of exposing Trump’s daily depredations, which is a very important part of what we do.

But I don’t want that to be the limit of what we do. And I think that’s both a sensibility question and also maybe a political question. I’m very fond of quoting, and it made a big impression on me, the founder of Breitbart’s dictum, that politics is downstream of culture. I think that’s really true. One of the things that has happened in America is that the right has understood that. And understood it in a much deeper way than we have on the left.

At The Nation, we’ve always had an incredibly stimulating, engaging and penetrating back of the book, which in some ways has also been traditionally independent of the front of the book, but I want to break that wall down a little bit and have more room for culture up front as well as in the back.

Samir Husni: Talking about culture, journalism and democracy, in today’s society is journalism still necessary for the survival of democracy or are we seeing true journalism fading away and giving place to fake news and alternative facts? How important is journalism to the future of this country?

Don. D. Guttenplan: I don’t think you can have a democracy without a functioning press. I think it’s absolutely crucial and we are actually blessed in America with a really good press, particularly with what were our legacy print publications, such as The New York Times, for example. It’s funny because I worked at the Village Voice for three years and when I worked there, The New York Times was our enemy. Every day we would roll our eyes at some horrible sell-out, commercial, terrible headline or a failure to understand the true politics behind some event.

And it’s not that I disavow any of that, but on the other hand I feel we are so lucky in America to have a good daily journal that is a good source of daily news, daily journalism, where the reporters go deep and you can often, not always, but often, you can believe what they print. (Laughs) I spent 20 years living in Europe, where all you have except for maybe the Financial Times is a partisan press. And you have to filter everything through the ideological filter of the paper.

I understand that centrism and objectivity are all ideological filters of their own, and I understand that there are things that you exclude by them that are maybe essential to the conversation and that The Nation needs to restore and to lift that into the spotlight, but still there is an awful lot that is reported and that you can know if you want to just by reading the papers in America. And I think that’s a great thing.

But I also think that it’s tricky, because part of Trump’s strategy is to attack the press and to devalue the press and to basically convince his listeners that they’re all crooked, they’re all as bad as each other. That Fox News is not an outlier, but is what all journalism is, it’s just that on Fox maybe it’s more obvious from one side. And I hate that. It’s one of the things that I hate about television news, this increasing sense of polarization.

And also the increasing sense that you can pretty much say anything because nobody is going to check. We at The Nation, we fact check what we run. You can’t do that in a daily newspaper, but then when I worked in daily journalism it was definitely widely understood that if you got it wrong more than a couple of times you were going to get fired. (Laughs) So, it had its own powerful fact check.

This is sort of a looping answer to your question, but I think journalism is essential and I think that the kind of journalism that The Nation does has become much more important even than it was in say, the George W. Bush era when we were alone and lonely and the brave voice of sanity.

Samir Husni: You’re an author, you have a few books under your belt; you’re an editor and you’ve been a correspondent; you’ve worked with big, major newspapers and smaller newspapers; from all of these manifestations of your journalistic skills, what is dearest to your heart? Is it being an author, an editor, or is it the last job that you’re doing?

Don. D. Guttenplan: I think they all shape each other. “American Radical,” which is my biography of I. F. Stone , The Nation’s long-time Washington correspondent, and then founder of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, that was a 20 year book. (Laughs) I had been living with that for a long time. And that probably left a pretty deep mark on me. But I took a break in the middle to write “The Holocaust on Trial,” which really wasn’t a book that I wanted to write. I’m Jewish and I’m aware of the Holocaust. My father’s best friend was a Holocaust survivor, but it wasn’t something that I had been immersed in.

What attracted me to it was my interest in British libel laws and because the libel laws in Britain are different. In America the burden of truth is on the person who is suing, the claimant. In Britain the burden of proof is on the defendant. Rich people and powerful interests use British courts to suppress information that they want to suppress. And it was in the course of being interested in that this trial came to my attention and I ended up writing a book about it.

In writing the Stone biography, I spent a lot of time reading the newspaper that Stone wrote for in the 1940s, which was called “PM.” And I don’t know if you know very much about it, but it was really a very revolutionary thing for print in America. It was a very intelligent left wing tabloid. It revolutionized the way papers looked, because it had, for example, Margaret Bourke-White as a photographer. It had Dr. Seuss as a cartoonist; it had a childcare advice columnist named Benjamin Spock, and it had I.F. Stone as its Washington correspondent.

The manifesto of the paper was written by its publisher and founder, a guy called Ralph Ingersoll. And it was “We don’t like people who push other people around.” And I feel like that’s kind of a thread that runs through pretty much everything I’ve written: how do you deal with people who push other people around and how do societies organize themselves; how can people who have been pushed around defend themselves the way the defendant in “The Holocaust on Trial” defended herself.

And it’s not just because it was my last book, it is in some ways the thing that is most pertinent to, certainly, my sense of politics, which is my most recent book, “The Next Republic,” which is partly a series of hysterical essays about what you might call the Rise of the Populist Left in America, which is something we don’t hear very much about these days. And also a series of profiles of activists from organized labor, from racial justice, from the environmental movement, and the last chapter is about Zephyr Teachout, which is about monopolies and corporations and how to control huge corporations. So it’s essentially about people fighting back and doing it successfully. And whether you can build a political movement out of that. It’s an open question, but it’s a question that I certainly want to lend my support to as editor of The Nation.

Samir Husni: As you look at this new position and contemplate the future, what do you think will be the biggest challenge that you’re going to face and how do you plan to overcome it?

Don. D. Guttenplan: There are lots of challenges. There are business challenges and I’m not the business side, that’s the publisher and the president’s side. But I’ve been in this business long enough to know that you can’t ignore that and you can’t not pay attention to it. So, I think one big challenge is to ensure that the magazine flourishes. That we reach our full print audience potential of paying subscribers and that they’re happy to pay what it costs to keep The Nation in business. That’s a business challenge.

Editorially, I think the challenge is in fact the challenge that any editor faces, which is selection. There is so much happening and there is so much going on and it’s a signal to noise question. How do you filter out what matters? How do you decide? We’re not the Huffington Post or The Intercept. We don’t have an enormous staff or vast, multimillionaire backing. We have an incredibly hardworking, not tiny, it’s not a skeleton staff, we have a very good staff and we have a very large universe of writers who are delighted to write for us.

But still we can’t chase everything. We certainly don’t have room in print for everything that we’d like to say, which is one of the reasons why it’s wonderful that we have a website. And it’s so active and so full of interest. But it’s still the question of figuring out what to pay attention to; picking your fights; picking your issues, and focus.

I read a piece earlier on in the Trump administration about chaff, I don’t know if you saw it. Chaff was the term the British used for their defense against missiles and bombing during World War II. And it was essentially we’re using thousands and thousands of little pieces of metal, sort of like aluminum foil in order to deflect and confuse radar. It’s a radar defense tactic. And I was saying that’s kind of Trump’s tactic, that he says all of this stuff all the time and sometimes he means it and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he just says it. And if we spend all of our time tracking that, then we’re going to be exhausted and demoralized and we’re not going to have any time to think strategically.

So, I guess my biggest challenge is figuring out what really matters. And that’s not my personal biggest challenge, it’s the biggest challenge of any editor in this environment.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Don. D. Guttenplan: One of the experiences you have editing a magazine that everybody knows about but not everybody reads, (Laughs) is you’re meeting people who say they used to read The Nation or they used to subscribe to The Nation. And my message to those people is take another a look. We have a new editor; we have new energy; we have I think a really important understanding of our responsibility and we are going to work very hard to live up to that responsibility. I say that not as a sense of duty, but I feel like our responsibility is not just to parse out what’s happening politically and provide cogent and trenchant analysis, which I think we do every week, but also to give people sources of delight and encouragement and energy.

There’s a wonderful book and all I’m going to do is nod to the title. The book is about the cultural survival of Native Americans and their culture, but it’s called “Radical Hope” by Jonathan Lear. It’s an amazing book, but my point is that I feel that’s one of the things that we have to offer people, radical hope.

Our columnist, who is also a Guardian columnist and also a friend of mine, Gary Young, said about my book, which is called “The Next Republic,” he said it’s optimistic but not delusional. And I feel like that’s the space that I want to be in. Optimistic, but not delusional. It’s very easy for anybody who is engaged in political struggle to kid themselves and spend a lot of time just reinforcing their own prejudices and preconceptions. We’re not going to do that. We are going to tell people the truth and we are going to believe in the radical power that comes from telling people the truth.

Samir Husni: What’s the biggest misconception you think people have about you?

Don. D. Guttenplan: (Laughs) I don’t think people have any conception about me because I don’t think that I’m that well-known. I’ve left a very long record, people can look at what I’ve written on all sorts of things. It’s all out there. My views are no secret. I suppose to the extent that there is a conception about me and that it’s a misconception, which I’m not sure either of which is true, I suppose that it’s I’m an entirely political creature. I am passionate about politics, and particularly about “small d- democracy,” but I care a lot about other things too. I care about music and food and all those things. And poetry and the natural world. So, I would say that if there is a misconception of me it’s that I only care about politics.

Don. D. Guttenplan: (Laughs) That’s a good question because I only moved to New York recently and I still haven’t moved into my apartment. So, you’d catch me cooking for the friends who are putting me up. (Laughs again) If you were to catch me relaxing in the evening, I suppose you’d catch me talking to friends or maybe reading. I read lots of novels. Every night before I go to bed I usually read some of a novel. The problem is if it’s one I can’t put down, it ends up keeping me up too late, so I find I do my literary reading at the end of the day because most of those demand a kind of stillness and thought that I can still muster, but they also don’t keep me awake.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps Dr. Don up at night?

Don. D. Guttenplan: (Laughs) It’s nice of you to call me Dr. Don and it’s true that I have a Ph.D., but nobody calls me that. What keeps me up at night is my three children. They’re grown up, the youngest is 20. He’s a Jazz musician; my daughter lives in New York and she works in publishing, in small press publishing; and my oldest son is in The Netherlands and he’s a scientist. What keeps me up at night are their trials and tribulations, which like any parent, I think about. I suppose I could say the world we’re leaving to them. I don’t actually think in such grandiose terms really, most of the time. What keeps me up at night is the personal, rather than the political.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | 1 Comment »

A Blast From The Past: Gossip Magazines Reign Supreme… From The Vault of Mr. Magazine™

June 11, 2019

You may have noticed lately that I am not as active on the blog as usual. Two reasons for that, first, the summer break and second, working on two books, the first on how to launch a magazine and the second on the magazines of the 1950s.

In my research I came across this article from Show magazine, July 1955 about Gossip magazines (what we now call Celebrity magazines…)

The similarities between now and then was striking to me, so I decided to publish the entire article here. Would love to hear your comments…

Enjoy this blast from the past…

GOSSIP…

America’s Newest Parlor Game

“ WHO WOULD have believed two years ago that gossip magazines would be sweeping the country,” remarked a Pulitzer prize winning author at a recent interview. He’s not the only one who has been shaking his head at the new trend in American reading habits.

Unlike anything in the history of the publishing business, gossip magazines have captured the fancy of readers of all ages. What’s behind this reading revolution? Why does the average American delight in seeing other people’s dirty linen washed in public? Is it a new vogue?

In the first place, it’s the reader, not the magazines, who creates the demand for the gossip publications. The publishers just supply the demand. To date this demand has resulted in over two dozen such publications- all of them following the lead of confidential magazine. Confidential, the first publication to realize the unlimited potential of this market, today outsells on the newsstand any other single magazine- including such giants as Life, Ladies’ Home Journal or TV Guide. Its actual printing is an excess of 4 million copies.

Like any other controversial medium, scandal mags have come under their share of fire- and praise. Al this being done in public arouses public curiosity- and, of course, more sales.

Scandal, which includes anything from the love affairs of top movie stars to the café society set, was certainly not discovered by magazines. Gossip columnist have attracted to their newspapers millions of readers with scandal tidbits. Such items as “ Who is Renovating”- and why, has earned a fortune for Walter Winchell. Other columnists who try to jump into the gossip gravy train, are just imitating the master, Winchell.

DON’T BE SHOCKED

This may be a surprise to you, but in many instances the person whose life or romances is being exposed often gets early proofs of the story for corrections.

The reason? Some playboys and stars feel that publicity either flattering or damaging is good publicity. The publisher of one of the top scandal mags was thanked recently by an entertainer for revealing his “affair” with a movie star. Why? Well, as the entertainer put it, “You sure put me in the big leagues- now a dozen girls in Hollywood want me.”

Another Hollywood star who was a juvenile delinquent with a long record was fully aware he was getting the “treatment” in a gossip mag. It was his one way of getting attention- and did he get it! Readers revealed in the juicy gossip. There’ll be a lot of blushing faces when they read here that this movie star had read and okayed the story for publication. Result? Besides prestige, he now is in greater demand than ever and he’s boosted his movie price per picture by $50,000.

Scandal mags are based on the principle that people forget what they read in the newspapers.

The second gimmick is to research the past of famous people because mistakes and misdeeds of a dozen years ago makes juicy reading to new audiences today. Thus, someone in his or her twenties would be titillated by the Mary Astor Diaries and George Kaufman, the Fatty Arbuckle case, and the Simone Simon Affair- all of which appeared in the papers in sordid detail a number of years ago.

Such people as ex-Madame Polly Adler and Jelke and his V-girls are also fair game for the scandal magazines. The mags seldom, however, present anything that is new to the gullible public.

For any reader who isn’t aware of the pasts of famous stars, members of café society and the what’s what of the who’s who in the social register, the gossip mags provide rather entertaining reading.

SHOW magazine, curious as to why people revel in other people’s inglorious pats, checked with several psychiatrists. For the most part of the doctors agreed that: “Scandal magazines serve a need and are quite comparable to the Charlie Chaplin movies of old. People all over the world enjoyed watching the down-and-out tramp, for no matter how badly off the viewer was, there was someone (Chaplin) who was worse off than he. With the scandal magazines, the same principle holds true. Many people have skeletons in their closets- Kinsey’s report proved that. Yet people are eager to read the exposes of famous men and women whose skeletons are rattled in public- so they can gnaw at the bones. It boils down to the fact that gossip magazines appeal to the snobbishness in all of us.” P.S Several of the psychiatrists admitted that they read the scandal magazines themselves.

It is not mysterious, therefore, to figure out why people stand in line to buy Confidential or Uncensored, the second-best seller in that field. The magazines all follow the same, newsy format of three or four pictures on the cover with splashes of gaudy color all geared to invite the gossip reader to shell out that quarter.

All in all, total sales for the twenty-odd magazines in this scandal category reach close to 10 million per month. This fabulous impact has reacted on other top, general magazines who now seek to compete by placing at least one “scandal-type” expose story between the covers of every issue. The magazines reached the height of something or other recently when Jackie Gleason’s program plugged Confidential, and Time magazine interviewed the publisher of said magazine.

HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?

As long as the gossip holds out that’s how long the magazines will continue their run of popularity. Naturally, this could go on indefinitely- or as long as the public taste for gossip holds out. This could be tomorrow – or 50 years from now.

Posted in From the Vault, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

Welcome To The Newsstands: April & May Usher In 20 New Titles…

June 4, 2019

April & May continue the magazine excitement as 20 new titles are born on the nation’s newsstands.It’s been a wonderful Spring for the world of ink on paper! Check out the titles below…

From the Outdoor Sportsman Group, one of the largest media companies solely devoted to bringing the best in content and entertainment to America’s 80-million+ outdoor sports enthusiasts, comes a new title called Backcountry Hunter. The magazine focuses more on the adventure of hunting, rather than a set of impressive antlers. Backcountry Hunter covers all aspects of wilderness hunting in the western U.S., Alaska and Canada, with a particular emphasis on DIY adventures for the hardcore sportsman. While Mr. Magazine™ himself may not be an avid hunter, I am an avid magazine lover and this one is amazing!

The latest digital brand to expand into ink on paper, Bumble, the dating app, now has its own lifestyle magazine produced in partnership with Hearst Magazines titled Bumble Mag. The dating app has really grown into a social platform and may have felt the need to present a more tangible way for the digital site’s users to engage with the brand, but whatever the reason behind the print extension, Mr. Magazine™ says welcome to yet another cyberspace resident who has seen the light and realized the value of ink on paper!

A niche magazine delivering articles and photographs related to sports history, this new title, Sports History Magazine, focuses on the history of sports, not today’s live streaming or the graphic replays of gridiron heroes in real time, but an actual ink on paper magazine that captures the essence of some of the best (and worst) times in the history of sports. Founder and Editor in Chief, Gill Schor, is the entrepreneur whose own passion for sports history motivated him to fill a void in this very niche market. In fact, Mr. Magazine™ interviewed Gill in early May and we talked about this great new magazine. Check out the conversation here.

The long, hot summer awaits us and rest assured there will be a great collection of new titles to both fan the flames of the season and cool us off! But until then…

I’ll see you at the newsstands…

And now our great covers for April & May:

Posted in Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

BoSacks Speaks Of Peril And Opportunity In ACT 9’s Capstone Speech. The ACT 9 Experience. Linda Ruth Reporting… Part 16

May 12, 2019

Bo Sacks wound up the Magazine Innovation Center’s ACT 9 on Thursday with a much-anticipated capstone speech, where he sounded some very strong warnings and spoke of great opportunities. Sacks, we remember, spent a decade debating the future of journalism with Dr. Samir Husni, Mr. Magazine™; and Sacks reminded us that Husni actually created the Ph.D. in magazine journalism that did not exist. Mr. Magazine™ has been recognized for his significant influence in shaping this business and popular perception of it.

Sacks referenced the highlights of the conference: Linda Brooks identifying magazines as invited guests; Jeff Joseph mentioning the history of vinyl as a comparison to print; Lori Oglesbee saying that without a free press, democracy dies; James Hewes warning of the risk of depending on a single revenue stream.

Tying it together, Sacks spoke of the incredible acceleration of growth of technology into the present. Soon nothing will be mobile because everything will be mobile. It came too fast, and it led to some chilling consequences. Today, the digital giants are exploring every part of our lives. Facebook, Amazon, and Google, are intruding into every part of everyone’s existence, learning where we are going, what we are doing, what we are saying, what we are thinking, and using it to sell to us.

No one could have known the Gutenberg press would have had effects from fueling the reformation to changing the shape of our brain. Today, new technologies have started a new revolution. Living through this revolution makes it impossible to take a long view. We have combined digital technology with a mutant form of capitalism—surveillance capitalism. It takes our private experiences and turns them into revenue opportunities. It changes everything.

It’s impossible to overstate the peril of our times. Robber barons of yesterday have been replaced by e-robbers. We used to fear the totalitarian government who knew everything about us, followed us everywhere. Well it isn’t the government, but it’s happening.

Digital advertising has surpassed the other forms, including TV—yet the level of fraud in digital advertising is mind-boggling. It’s the largest crime in terms of money generated globally. Fake humans, click fraud, fake ad placement, fake websites, are all grabbing loot online. And technology companies are designing content with the sole intention of capturing as much attention as possible, creating a race to the bottom of the brain stem.

The online advertising ecosystem is impossible to understand or control, and there is no competent leadership. Why is it happening? Ad trade organizations and marketers are making too much money to change anything. The intrusion and fraud could be ended in a heartbeat—but there is no cure for greed. The lawmakers with the power to change it have absolutely no idea how it works.

Print should be a shining beacon in a sea of criminality. We have the trusted content. Everywhere on the planet, it’s as simple as this: Let’s have the readers pay for the content. Ad revenue should be the gravy on the meat, not the unreliable indigestible thing advertising has become. Give the readers what they want, when they want it, and have them pay for it—that’s the formula for success.

Diversification is opportunity. Your brand may be venerable, but it shouldn’t be static. Without alternative revenue streams you have zombie momentum. Create a better user experience. Add experiences, memberships, products. A relationship is a strong building block to revenue. Consider every option to keep readers engaged with personalized bundles. There are billions of dollars left to earn.

And try new things. Structure follows strategy. If you base your strategy on your existing structure, you limit your potential to what you’ve already done.

Addressing the students, Sacks finished: Now is the time to re-think the unthinkable. This is a unique and historic period where the unthinkable has never been more possible.

To watch Bo Sacks presentation click on the video below:

Posted in ACT 9 Experience, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

Hola! Magazine, A 75-Year Old Success Story. The ACT 9 Experience. Linda Ruth Reporting… Part 15

May 12, 2019

Jay Annis, VP of Hello Media, invited us to celebrate with him on day 3 of Mr. Magazine’s ACT 9 at the University of Mississippi. It’s the 75th anniversary of Hola! magazine, launched in Spain in 1944. Coming out of Spain’s bloody civil war, followed by the impact of World War 2 on the country, Hola’s mission was to offer good news and uplifting features. There is not and never will be anything dark or negative in this magazine.

Hola! is credited as the first magazine to create celebrity journalism. Hola! covered Elizabeth Taylor throughout her life; it covered the royal family of Monaco from childhood to old age. Its interest in the full range of celebrity lives creates continuity, so that generations of families read this publication. It covers tragedy—for example JFK’s assassination—but in a way that celebrates the victim’s life. Celebrities trust Hola, because they know there will be nothing negative in their coverage.

Hola! came to the UK thirty years ago as Hello magazine. Now there are 30 editions in 10 languages reaching 20 million readers per week. Every second around the world 15 people pick up their magazines. They do SIPs—cooking, homes, décor, parenting, travel, in packages ranging from 250 to 400 pages. Hola runs eight different websites with 27 million monthly uniques, tied together by design and voice. They have 18.5 million social media follows; a Spanish YouTube channel with influencers submitting content; the channel has over 16.5 million viewers and almost 200,000 subscribers.

With this global footprint, the US has been in the franchise’s sights, and they decided to launch in the US in 2016. The US hispanic community is 54 million, making the US the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. This big, broad, young, growing market is perfect for Hola magazine. They launched with print, Hola.com, social media, Hola TV. Now they have between one and two million on every digital platform; in print, their readership has grown to 400,000 in less than three years.

Hola! is published in both English and Spanish; subscribers can take their pick. Older readers want to read in Spanish; the younger readers prefer English. The magazine accommodates reader preferences, both online and in print. And because the readers are different, the online content is not necessarily the same.

Getting advertising is tough—but Hola had over 60 major advertisers in its first year. They work with their advertisers on branded content, video, cross platform.

Hola! is a global brand with local relevancy. Their global prestige allows for worldwide exclusives.

Hola! was recognized as one of the ten best magazine launches in 2016.

After 75 years, the magazine that celebrates the good, the happy and the uplifting has amply earned its own celebration. Happy birthday, Hola!

Click the video below to watch Jay Annis presentation:

Posted in ACT 9 Experience, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

An Historic Meeting Of the Four Media Associations CEOs: Magazine Media Challenges Today. The ACT 9 Experience. Linda Ruth Reporting… Part 14

May 9, 2019

The third morning of ACT 9 brings together for the first time the heads of the four major trade associations: Linda Thomas Brooks from the MPA, James Hewes from FIPP, Jerry Lynch from MBR, and Michael Marchesano from Connectiv.

Yes, the magazine industry is disrupted, says Brooks. So is every business I’ve every been in. There is no one answer, there are lots of answers. There is no silver bullet but there might be silver buckshot. I signed up for this business because it really, really matters.

Lynch adds that there are lots of industries (e.g. video rental) that are gone; magazines are still here and worth fighting for. This is a passionate business, and that passion is what brought me into this business.

In fact, says Hewes, this is the most exciting time to be in the business, with so many new ways to get our content to our audience. Most people would kill to have a job in media.

The biggest job this industry faces, says Hewes, is vocabulary. What do we call ourselves? We need to be more comfortable and confident as to how we describe ourselves.

From the distribution side, says Lynch, there is a disconnect between the understandings of the publisher and the retailer. It’s hard to bring the two parties together. The opportunity is in bringing the two parties together around the consumer. That relationship is so valuable, publishers need to show retailers that relationship can benefit the store.

On a B to B level, says Marchesano, the challenge is to make sure the audience, who has a buying influence, recognizes the value of the data provided. Making the investment, making the commitment, and looking for ROI.

From Brooks’ perspective, data can be a challenge. Data—and especially a single piece of data—does not equal truth. You can lead yourself to bad business decisions looking at individual bits of data. Algorithms do not get handed down from on high, they are written by people, and included the biases or limitations of those people. We need to use those algorithms and data in the right way. Understanding data bias, data perspective, is hugely important. Business fundamentals are math—never say you hate math when interviewing for jobs in journalism.

Putting together data, legacy and passion: computers are great for correlating data but not good at finding what the correlation means. You have to have a combination of understanding data and using your common sense to evaluate it, says Hewes. Consumers have no idea how much data is being collected about them. When they find out, there will be blood on the streets. Do the mattress test—put your phone on the kitchen table, talk about mattresses for an hour, then see how many ads you get served about mattresses.

This led to a flurry of comment:

Brooks: It’s like you’re sitting in a bar talking about mattresses, and a mattress salesperson interrupts to try to sell you one.

Hewes: This behavior might be getting normalized. It doesn’t mean it’s right.

Brooks: In China they’re collecting a social score. They’re assessing your worth based on it, and assigning consequences to it.

Hewes: And it’s a short step to assigning credit ratings in this country.

Brooks: Many industry bodies are working on privacy issues, but it’s going to take everyone in our industry working with our government to figure this out. MPA spends much time in Washington talking about it.

Marchesano: State level laws with strong consumer rights bias could have an impact on the national agenda.

Lynch: This kind of data is key to business. We need to get in early to help craft the right decision.

Hewes: Facebook will be broken up. They don’t know it yet; but the EU and other bodies will be creating regulations. This is the reason we need trade associations. There are issues to consider that these associations can address.

Lynch: These associations can craft a consistent message in a diverse category.

Brooks: The business isn’t changing as fast or dramatically as we’d like it, but we’re seeing some good indicators.

Ten years ago when I started the MIC, says Dr. Husni, my goal was to amplify the future of print, and everyone thought I had lost it. Last year Linda Brooks stood in front all the ACT Experience attendees and said, don’t ever say print is dead or print is not dead. It’s a vindication.

To watch the entire panel discussion please click on the video below:

Posted in ACT 9 Experience, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

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