Mr. Magazine

Born from the womb of the web, The Fabulist launches its first print issue in 2026 after being a web only platform since 2007.  To quote Josh Wilson, the magazine’s editor and publisher, in his letter to the readers accompanying issue zero of the magazine, “In a world that’s glutted with disposable digital ephemera, we love working with print: It is a tactile, tangible, dynamic, and long-lasting medium that transforms your experience as a reader, and celebrates the meaning and value of the works we publish.”

And Mr. Magazine™ can’t but 100% agree with Mr. Wilson.  There is no better place to combine “amazing stories, rich illustrations, and wild art,” than print.  The Fabulist publishers believe so much in print that they make their business model print first.

Intrigued by the concept and the business plan, I reached out to Mr. Wilson to ask him more about the inception of The Fabulist, the plans and the reason for the print magazine after being a web only platform.  We had a lovely conversation and learned the secrets behind the transformation from digital to print.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this lovely conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher of The Fabulist.

But first, the soundbites:

On the reason for print: “I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.”

On the background history of The Fabulist: “For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.”

On his background: “I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.”

On The Fabulist elevator pitch: “We’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.”

On the business model: “I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model.”

On the zero issue: “It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.”

On the art of curation in print: “There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.”

More on the art of curation in print: “I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for that the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.”

On the future: “We want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about.”

To learn more about The Fabulist or to order a subscription please click here.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Josh Wilson, editor and publisher, The Fabulist:

Samir Husni: First, congratulations on the new magazine.

Josh Willson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Anybody that launches a print magazine today deserves to be congratulated.

Josh Wilson: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Tell me, what’s the story of The Fabulist?

Josh Wilson: The story of The Fabulist

Well, way back in 2007, I kept getting my stories declined by magazines, and I decided to start a little blog, just a website where I could put my stories and those of my friends. About six months later, we began getting submissions, which was very strange because I never posted a submissions link.

People would just email us their stories. It turned out that we had been listed in a writer’s market called Duotrope. I don’t know who put us there, but we ended up in this writer’s market, and the submissions have been coming constantly since then, far more than we can deal with, and usually better than my own stories.

I took down all my stories and, for a long time, posted new work whenever we could get around to it. I would say about the mid-teens, 2015, 2016, 2017, we were at a reading event in San Francisco, where we live. I was approached by Elizabeth Gonzales James, who went on to become a novelist. She has two novels out, The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea. The Bullet Swallower is being developed for a feature film. She approached me before her first book contract and said, Do I need any help?

I remember being overwhelmed by submissions. I said, I could really use a hand managing all the submissions. She read a gigantic backlog of hundreds of submissions and said, You could do a story a week. Why don’t you?

I said, OK. We went with that. At that point, I realized we really should have a contract.

I contacted other publishers I know and asked them for advice. We made a writer contract. There are a few other steps to this.

One is that I realized there is a big difference between genre and literary journals. We were kind of in both places. The literary journals, you often pay a reading fee and don’t get paid for your work, to the extent that I would send a submission’s call to creative writing and MFA programs and get the department chairs sending me their work for this blog.

But the genre magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Asimov’s magazine, these all came out of the pulp era. There was a very strong writer’s advocacy movement. A lot of that business was pretty fast and loose. In the genre world, you don’t pay reading fees. You always pay the writers.

We decided we should at least do an honorarium. We grew that from $25 to $100 per story. Still operating at a loss. All digitally.

Finally, the final chapter for this evolution, in 2023, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, we were, I guess at the end of the worst of it. A colleague of mine here in San Francisco, Jennifer Joseph from Manic D Press, a great local imprint that has their work collected in the Library of Congress, their LGBTQ work, said that she’s going to AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. This was in Seattle.

Did I want to share a table, an exhibitor table at the book fair? I thought, yes, why not? I did that rashly because I didn’t have anything to sell because it was all digital, but I realized the contract that we had been using enabled us to make books. So I got an $80 color printer and began making chapbooks. And my colleague, our art director, Adam Myers, is a gentleman of very high production values.

We produced some beautiful books and they sold. They almost sold out. And I realized that print really was something people were attracted to and aspired to be a part of.

For several years we printed chapbooks, short 20, 30, 40, 50 pages, saddle stitched, single story publications. Then we began to think through our model and what we could do with it, which brought us around to this print magazine. I’m surprised to see that it’s really gaining traction.

This is after months of agonizing and product development. We got a small grant from CLMP, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, to hire a digital marketing specialist. Lots of thoughts about how to convert from a weekly digital blog to an issue-based periodical.

I started out in print in the 1993 – 1995 period. I’m a journalist who worked at SF Gate in San Francisco and never went back to print until now. And it’s been a pleasure. I’m also amazed to find that readers and writers and everybody else is thrilled to see print happening.

So that’s where we are. I guess that’s a little bit of a long intro.

Samir Husni: In 2025, it looks like a lot of independent publishers, like yourself, are rediscovering print and bringing print magazines to the market.You were born from the digital womb, bringing The Fabulist to print. Tell me, if you are going to give an elevator pitch about what The Fabulist is, what would you tell people?

Josh Wilson: My elevator pitch for The Fabulist is that we’re a literary, a speculative literature magazine. We publish fantasy and science fiction.

But with a literary bent, a magic realist bent, there’s a lot of interest in what’s been called new weird and new fabulism. And we feel that there’s a lot of terrain that is undeveloped for speculative fiction and speculative literature, poetry and art that doesn’t quite fit in genre. Genre has a lot of straight expectations.

We feel that there’s a lot more room to develop this stuff, that we don’t want to be constrained by the expectations of the market, that certainly there’s no limit to the work being produced — the fantastical work that’s not realist fiction, that’s not straight genre, that sometimes sits in between. And it needs a place, a beautiful home. We tried to develop that beautiful home on the Internet, and it worked.

We have a brand. We’re an established presence. But we didn’t have a business model.

I find that digital monetization is very, very hard, and it’s amazing to me that print from the previous millennium, the previous century, turns out to be a viable business model. I guess that’s longer than an elevator pitch.

Samir Husni: It’s a very tall building.

Josh Wilson: Yes. We’re on the way up.

Samir Husni: Your business model is based on giving subscribers, a free complimentary zero issue or a dummy copy. So what’s the idea behind this business model, giving the one issue free for people who subscribe and then billing them technically per issue?

Josh Wilson: Yes. Two reasons.

First, the per issue billing was something I observed and we observed in Patreon. It’s a creator’s platform. It’s like Kickstarter, but you make your contributions serially over time. And musicians and artists and so on use it and every month you pay $2 or $10 or whatever and you get a new song or a new story or a new piece of art. So, that seemed like a really viable model.

It’s been of interest in the journalism world as well, this monthly income. Rather than having it all happen at once in a cluster annually, it gives the reader a lot of flexibility to exit without having to make a full commitment. So, we decided, we tried a Patreon account and it did work, but we get double hit with fees.

Patreon takes 3% or 5% and the credit card company takes a percent, and we really wanted to reduce that friction. So, we are selling subscriptions without Patreon. We are going with a bimonthly for now and we hope to increase to monthly. So that’s why we’re billing per issue.

And the free issue was our marketing consultant, a gentleman named Neal Gorenflo. He is a marketing guy. He started a publication himself called Shareable, Shareable.net and it covered the sharing economy when that was first coming up.

He’s a very astute and accomplished marketing person who said, you got to have a free offer. You got to have a no risk trial. And we already knew we were going to forge ahead with the print periodical and had made this issue zero.

You called it a dummy. It is a viable standalone issue. But we wanted to just see what we could do with print.

I had a whole bunch of those, you know, in a box on our shelf in our spacious corporate offices here. I thought, okay, let’s do it. Let’s use these.

I had to do another print run. We ran out. It’s been so popular.

I’m going down to San Jose to a printer a little later today to pick up another 150 copies.

Samir Husni: One of the things about print is you must do more curation than digital. As an experienced journalist, how is your curation takes place or the difference between accepting something for digital or accepting something for print?

Josh Wilson: We remain really concerned about quality control the whole way through. So, we did not and we never wanted to treat the Internet as a disposable medium where we could just throw stuff.

We always had a long review process. How will this look in our pages? How much work does the story need? It starts with whether we love it and we want to see it flourish. And if we love it, we’ll commit to it.

I would not say that we’re treating the Internet as more of an easy medium to throw stuff into.

There are space considerations in print, which makes the curation process more interesting. What order do the stories go in? What’s the effect of reading them in order? Each piece of art and its positioning, the layout.

I find it a much more interesting and creative medium to curate for, because the constraints produce innovation and fun. Whereas on the Internet, every page is the same. It’s a template.

We try to make it beautiful and we’re going to do a design refresh and get that website up to speed. But, although it is a boundless medium, it is ironically much more constrained, I think, than print. Because you can’t do an interesting layout.

For all its dynamism, it’s much harder to make it an art piece. And with this print magazine, we want to make an art piece. This is collectible.

Samir Husni: When’s your first issue coming out?

Josh Wilson: January. We had to push it back because of the two holidays, there’s no way we can get the proof back. And then everybody’s going out of state at the end of December.

So mid-January, we aim to have that out and then bi-monthly afterwards. I was just looking at the new cover and it’s great. It’s quite different, too.

Samir Husni: Is there any question I’m supposed to ask you, that I did not ask you?

Josh Wilson: I suppose you could ask me about the state of genre and literary publishing in print and online. I find that fascinating and something I’ve gone deep into over the summer, although I might talk a little bit.

Samir Husni: So tell me about the competition. Who’s out there?

Josh Wilson: The interesting thing is a realization that the folks here aren’t competing. The audience for written-text genre fiction, fantasy and science fiction mostly, and the stuff that spills out over into the literary edges of that, is substantial and undiscovered and undeveloped.

There are a lot of conventions and conferences that happen nationally and globally, science fiction and fantasy conventions and comic book and movie conventions and the ones that are game conventions. And there’s some overlap, some Venn diagram overlap, but the literary conferences are tiny. The World Science Fiction Convention, where they give out the Hugo Awards, it’s one of the highest awards in genre fiction, only gets about 8 to 10,000 attendees, whereas Comic Con in San Diego or Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia gets tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of attendees.

These people do read books, maybe not a full percentage of them. But a lot of people are genre fans without ever knowing that they’re genre readers. They watch movies, they watch TV, they love Star Trek, they love Star Wars. They’ll follow the movies and the characters.

The same is true in the literary world. When I was at AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Conferences conference in LA, we covered all our expenses, including travel and conference registration and housing.  We covered all our costs.

A lot of it was these young MFAs walking up to our table and realizing that they could do genre, that they weren’t stuck in a realist, forgive the term, a realist ghetto. There was a lot of room for them to follow their interest and desires.

We broadly feel that the audience is vast and undeveloped. And there isn’t a national, there aren’t national scale, mass media scale consumer magazines. They’re more literary journals.

So, we’re all working together. And there’s a lot of great ones. Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Analog are all the warhorses from the pulp era.

There’s a host of amazing online magazines that sometimes have print as well. Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare magazine, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny magazine are really sort of among the top tier of these online magazines that do issues in e-books. And sometimes audio books as well.

But also release all the stories for free on the web. So, there’s this freemium model. And then they’ll do print on demand for print.

I think we may be distinct in really going, switching hard to print first. The editor of, publisher of Clarkesworld, Neil Clarke, who’s an analyst of the industry and an accomplished publisher, pointed out that he goes where the readers are. He has an audio book version.

The people who listen to audio books are different from the ones who read online or who read e-books even. They’re all distinct. And he has a print on demand magazine.

We may be, The Fabulist, may be taking a risk on going so hard on print first. But we are at break-even. We, in about three or four weeks, we sold more than 100 subscriptions with an online ad campaign.

And it’s very interesting to realize that we have such a latent audience. We were getting one to five subscriptions every day. And the subscription drive ends tomorrow.

We’re going to assess, redesign it, redeploy it around our issue one with the new cover. The fact that you must go where the readers are is, as Neil (Clarke) says, is absolutely true. And we want to do audio books.

We can do e-books. And we want to continue to develop work in print and on the web. But we want to lead with print as a beautiful standalone document. This is a distinction.

There’s another magazine, Reckoning magazine, that also does a beautiful print document. And then eyedroppers out their content for free. I feel that that’s an exciting approach that you can do because audiences don’t overlap. Digital is a loss leader. And digital content enters social media and the Internet as a sort of promotional mechanism for your publication.

The print people who are repeatedly exposed to it, they realize they want the magazine. Although there’s a specific strategy we did. We have a landing page.

We show off all the interiors. We boast about the contributors. Try to showcase our production values.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions. If I come uninvited to your home one evening, what do I catch Josh doing? Cooking, having a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book?

Josh Wilson:  I’m cooking. I love to cook. I’m feeding other people. I want them all to eat, so I try to do a good job.

And I’m usually listening to an audio book while I’m cooking, because I can’t read it. Right now, I’m listening to Barbara Tuchman, the historian.

She’s got a great book called The March of Folly about governments doing stupid things over time. After dinner, ideally, everybody else cleans up and I go back to work.

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

Josh Wilson: Worrying about the magazine and its success. There’s always something to worry about. But I have been sufficiently exhausted that I usually fall asleep quickly.

I’m reading a great book that is keeping me up. It’s a new version of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s called Kalivas by the author Nick Mamatas, who is one of our book reviewers.

And it’s in the future. And there’s been a cataclysm. And Caliban/Kalivas lives on the Farallon Islands off San Francisco.

His mother was a nanotech Sycorax. The witch was a nanotech engineer. And Prospero is a techno magnate in this post-human society who invades the island and colonizes it.

And it’s a romp. It’s a great read. That’s been keeping me up a little too late.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Thank you and good luck.

John F. Kelly fell in love with comics at age 10. He was so fascinated by Air Pirates Funnies that he dedicated the second issue of his new magazine, Dummy, to the Air Pirates. His story reminded me a lot of my own childhood in Lebanon, when I first discovered Superman at the same age that he discovered Air Pirates Funnies.

John went on to become a writer, a marketer, an educator, and later in life, an editor and publisher of a new magazine he aptly named Dummy. In the magazine industry, the term “dummy” refers to a prototype edition of a publication. He had originally been showing the prototype of his magazine and referred to it as the Pee-Wee Playhouse zine prototype—essentially, the dummy issue. And thus, Dummy magazine was born.

As a comics historian, John uses Dummy to explore comics history one subject at a time. In addition to the magazine, he also hosts a YouTube channel called DummyZine. I had the pleasure of interviewing John, where we talked about his love for print, his views on comics and their history, the impact of new technologies such as AI, and the reasons many are returning to print as independent publishers in this digital age.

So, without any further ado, please join me in this pleasant conversation with an editor and publisher that reminded me of myself falling in love with comics and transitioning to magazines.  

Enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ Interview with John Kelly, publisher and editor of Dummy magazine.  But first, the soundbites:

On what is Dummy magazine: “It’s a comics history publication that I focus on one particular topic for each issue.”

On why he launched Dummy: “I missed the printed magazine, holding something in my hand that had something that I spent a long time writing about and researching.”

On naming the magazine Dummy: “I was taking out this Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine and showing it to them and saying, here’s the dummy of my new zine, my new Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine. And that’s just what I was calling it because I started in printing and publishing, and that was just a term that I was familiar with.”

On the resurgence of print in this digital age: “There’s an analog movement for different people in this country and in the world. We consume so much information online. Print is like taking a break medium. I think that’s part of it.”

On the difference between issue one and two: “It was very important to me to have it look like a real magazine, so that there was a much more of a disciplined approach to it than my, let’s just throw this thing together, first issue. The second issue, which took a lot longer, in part was also tracking down the art.”

On his love for Air Pirates Funnies since he was a kid: “I opened Air Pirates Funnies number one and looked inside and saw, ah, this is not Mickey Mouse. This is not the Mickey Mouse that I know. They’re doing something very different here. And so from that point on, I’ve been really puzzled and fascinated by the Air Pirates. This was my chance to explore that deeper.”

On his view about AI: “I don’t really consider any technology a foe. I think things can be misused. Anything can be misused, and AI certainly misuses a lot of things.”

More on his views on AI: “Most of my friends are cartoonists or artists or writers. I’m a writer myself. The threat of AI stealing the intellectual property of artists and other people, plus other issues beyond that, makes it extremely dangerous and something that is theft.”

On his advice to start a new magazine: “It’s very difficult and very expensive, but that’s not a reason not to do it, right?”

On what he does to rewind: “I don’t really rewind.  I’m working all of the time.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Nothing. I sleep great. I take care of myself. I eat well. I exercise.  I’m doing something I absolutely love to do.  I’m completely content with everything.”

And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with John Kelly, publisher and editor of Dummy magazine:

Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch of this new magazine, Dummy.

John Kelly: Well, it’s a funny story. The elevator pitch, I guess, would be that it’s a comics history publication that I focus on one particular topic for each issue, and the guideline for what that topic is, is that it’s something that I’m extremely interested in, maybe I know something about it, but I want to know a lot more.

So by doing the research in the writing and putting it all together, I do a very deep dive on that topic so that I educate myself about it. And as a result, when it’s printed, others can also learn what I’ve learned.

Samir Husni: What’s the genesis of the magazine and why did you decide to call it Dummy?

John Kelly:  It’s a funny backstory because I was not planning on doing this at all.

I’ve been writing about comics history for many years. I’ve been writing for The Comics Journal magazine since the late 1980s or early 1990s, but more than 35 years. And I’ve written many, many pieces for that publication.

In recent years, as magazines, the printed magazines, have mostly disappeared, including, for the most part, The Comics Journal. They do a print publication occasionally. Most of my pieces have only existed online, and I was just kind of getting sick of that.

I missed the printed magazine, holding something in my hand that had something that I spent a long time writing about and researching. I’d written many pieces, and they only existed somewhere out there on the internet. I love printed materials.

I certainly am of the age that I grew up with them, and I wanted to put together something for myself. I chose to do that first issue on the Art of the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse show because I knew the people who were involved in that process, and I had seen all their archival material many times. So, I put together, really just for myself, a printed publication about that story, and I brought it to a friend’s house.

He had a color copy machine, and I had laid it out in InDesign and quickly put it together, brought over some flats to his house. We printed out the pages, folded, stapled them, and there it was. I held it in my hand, and I was very happy, and I thought that would be it.

I thought that I was making one copy just for myself because it was something that I wanted to do. Then people started seeing it. I was showing it to them, and I was saying, you know the term dummy in printing? It refers to a prototype publication. I was taking out this Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine and showing it to them and saying, here’s the dummy of my new zine, my new Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine. And that’s just what I was calling it because I started in printing and publishing, and that was just a term that I was familiar with.

More and more people wanted copies of it, so I thought I would print up a couple of them. I wanted to give a copy to the people who I had interviewed, to Gary Panter and Mark Newgarden and Kaz and Wayne White and Ric Heitzman. I wanted to send them copies for their own, and I thought I would print up 10 copies of it.

But more people learned about it and they wanted copies, so I, reluctantly, decided that I would print up a hundred copies of it. And the last thing that I did before I sent the files to the printer was, I thought, well it’s got to have a name, you know? I just don’t want to call it the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse zine? I wanted to call it something, and I liked the name Dummy. It was stupid and it had a secondary meaning to it, so I thought it was kind of funny to call a magazine Dummy.

Very quickly, maybe in 90 seconds, I composed the logotype for that name for the masthead title and just slapped it on to the magazine at the last moment. I was printing a hundred copies thinking that it would take me 10 years to get rid of them, that they would be in boxes in my basement forever. Then I posted one little thing on my Facebook page saying, hey, I made up some copies of this.

If you want one, just contact me. And they sold out in two hours. They were all gone immediately.

I was like, wow. Then the money from selling those copies allowed me to print 300 more, and those sold out immediately too. Then since then, I’ve just been reprinting them and still today, I still get orders for that copy.

That’s basically how it all started, but it was not something that was planned. I’m extremely happy that there are people out there who want it, who want a printed publication. I didn’t realize that there as many people out there, like me, who missed print and the printed matter. I’m happy that they exist.

Samir Husni: Why do you think is this resurgence of the independent return to print?

John Kelly: There’s an analog movement for different people in this country and in the world.

We consume so much information online. Print is like taking a break medium. I think that’s part of it. There’s a novelty aspect to it too, that people are not expecting a printed publication that’s well printed, produced, and designed as possible.

I want it to be a beautiful piece that people can look at. I can only say personally, I absolutely hate reading long things online. I’m getting older, maybe that has something to do with it.

My eyesight is failing and the chore of reading something online that is extremely long and complicated. I just won’t do it, and that includes my own work. I still write for The Comics Journal, and I tend to write very long pieces, one of the things that prompted me to really embrace doing a publication again, myself, was that I would say I wouldn’t even read my pieces online because they’re too long.

Not that because they’re bad, but just because there’s too long, and you get distracted. You get pulled away from something and you think, well, I’ll go back to that. Then you’re bombarded with 9 million other things that take you away from it.

You end up two years later thinking, oh, there was something that I wanted to read. If you have the printed thing, you can read part of it, put it down, read it again. And if you like it, you can save it and read it years from now.

Samir Husni: Your journey from issue one to issue two, has it been a walk in a rose garden or you had some issues?

John Kelly: No, no, no, no, no. With the first issue, since I wasn’t expecting it to exist, I probably designed that issue very quickly. I have rudimentary InDesign skills and layout skills.

I can get by to do like a mock-up of something. I’ve been using Adobe products since they came out, so I know how to use them. Also the subject matter for that first issue, the looseness of the art of the Pee Wee Herman program really worked well with my somewhat laissez-faire design for that issue, right? Once I was going to do a second issue, I wanted to really step it up and make it as beautiful as I possibly could.

All the images in the second issue are scanned at very high resolution from primary sources, so either the original art or usually a very rare, printed publication. There’s a lot of work that goes into cleaning up those images and having them color corrected and presented on the page so that they look like the actual artifact, like you could reach down and pick it up off the page.

That’s what I was going for, at least. It was very important to me to have it look like a real magazine, so that there was a much more of a disciplined approach to it than my, let’s just throw this thing together, first issue. The second issue, which took a lot longer, in part was also tracking down the art.

There were specific pieces of art that I wanted for that issue that took a long time to find, like who owned the originals for this piece, who had the original piece or who had a copy of this thing that there’s maybe three copies in existence. Getting that and then scanning it and working with the it took a long time, but in the end, it was worth it. Also, the Air Pirates story is a very complicated story.

It’s an extremely complicated story that I don’t think has been captured in the way that I’ve done in this issue. So, there were a lot of moving parts and a lot of people that I was talking to from the Air Pirates and around the Air Pirates for that issue. I wanted to make sure that I said that story as well as I possibly could.

Samir Husni: Judging by the poster above your chair, you’re an Air Pirates fan?

John Kelly: Oh yeah, sure. The Air Pirates have been very important to me since I was a little boy. I first saw copies of Air Pirates one and two when I was 10 years old and I was over a friend’s house. This friend had an older brother who was a junior or senior in high school.

He had a stash of underground comics hidden in his room that I knew about. When I would be over their house and when the brother wasn’t around, I would sneak into his room and go through the comics and look at them. I was way younger than I should have been looking at those things. But mixed in with the guy’s copies of Zap and Freak Brothers and some other underground comics were these like Mickey Mouse comic books.

At first, I didn’t know what they were. To me, they were just like regular Mickey Mouse comic books. That’s what they look like to me.

I paid no attention to them. But I wondered why those were there? Why were these Mickey Mouse comic books in there with these dirty comic books? And eventually I opened Air Pirates Funnies number one and looked inside and saw, ah, this is not Mickey Mouse. This is not the Mickey Mouse that I know.

They’re doing something very different here. And so from that point on, I’ve been really puzzled and fascinated by the Air Pirates.

This was my chance to explore that deeper.

Samir Husni: We live in a digital age and AI is everywhere now. Do you consider AI a friend or a foe of the printed matter?

John Kelly: I don’t really consider any technology a foe. I think things can be misused. Anything can be misused, and AI certainly misuses a lot of things.

Most of my friends are cartoonists or artists or writers. I’m a writer myself. The threat of AI stealing the intellectual property of artists and other people, plus other issues beyond that, makes it extremely dangerous and something that is theft.

I agree with those friends of mine who absolutely hate it and don’t want it in their lives. They don’t want their artwork stolen and reconfigured and used for other purposes without their permission. I completely understand that, and I support that.

That said, AI is a lot more than just that. That’s a bad side of what it does. I don’t think we were recording this, but when we first started, you were talking about how you do your transcriptions and that’s an AI process. That’s helpful.

That’s extremely helpful. There are other things that AI can do that is beneficial.

So, I am not 100 percent against it, because in theory it can be a very useful tool. I remember when desktop publishing was first starting, that was a threat to people who were publishing in the earlier, more traditional ways.

Society adapted to the new technology and now it’s what’s used. I still love the old methods of printing. I print a lot of things on a letterpress machine.

I love the fact that I have access to a letterpress, not just one, access to several letterpress machines. And I take advantage of that, and I print things with that technology.

I love the way that they look. It’s not efficient for me to be printing an entire issue of Dummy on a letterpress machine these days. And so it’s offset printed in Chicago and then mailed to me.

I would love it if I had a letterpress machine or some other old-fashioned printer in my basement that I could crank it out whenever I wanted a new copy and do it myself. But, logistically, I’m not able to do that.

So, that’s how I view AI.  It can be a very bad thing. In some ways it is a very bad thing. In a lot of ways, it’s a very bad thing.

In other ways, it’s something that we all use, whether we know it or not.

Samir Husni: If someone came to you and says, John, I have this idea of a new magazine, should I go ahead, and do it? Would you tell them, yes? Or you would tell them forget about it.

John Kelly:  It’s very difficult and very expensive, but that’s not a reason not to do it, right? It would depend on what their idea was. I hope that because of Dummy and a couple of other newer publications that I really love, I hope a lot more people start doing their own, whatever it is, their own printed thing.

I was just at the Small Press Expo this past weekend in Bethesda, Maryland, and I ran, along with Gary Hallgren, a member of the Air Pirates, we ran a workshop for younger artists on how to make mini-comics, Tijuana Bibles, and how to print your own little publication. We had a jammed session. The session was sold out, and it was great to see all these artists making their own little comics and holding them up and showing them. They were coming up to me afterwards and showing me what they did, and I loved that. I think people should explore whatever channels they can to have their expression created, whether that’s digital, whether it’s printed, whether it’s music, whether it’s painting, anything that they have a passion for.

I would say that I think one of the reasons Dummy is doing well is that it’s really a pure labor of love on my part. I think that’s very important. I’m not doing it because this will, I’m thinking, oh, this is going to make me money, because that’s probably not going to happen. My goal is that it makes enough money that I can keep doing it.  So far it is.

The reason to do it is because it’s something I want to do. Each issue of Dummy so far there’s only been two, but subsequent issues, they’re all going to be based on, here’s something that I wish existed, you know, here’s something that I don’t know enough about. As a writer, the only way that I learn, truly learn about something, is through the process of writing about it, through the process of researching it, to talking to the people who were involved in it, and writing the story, and then rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting, and talking to more people, and then it comes together for me. I’m doing it as, because my focus, my target audience is one person, that’s me.

I’m the target audience. It’s something that I wish that existed, that if I walked into a store and I saw, or if I saw somebody posting about it, I would say, I need that, I’ve been waiting my whole life for that thing, and now it exists. So, if other people feel the same way, that’s great, but I’m doing it for myself, and that’s important for people, and especially doing a printed thing like this, it’s just because you got to really do it, because it’s something that you’re just motivated to do, because you want it to exist.

Samir Husni: Well, John, before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I should have asked you I did not? John Kelly:  No, I think you’ve hit all of them so far. I’m having a lot of fun doing this. It’s a lot of work.

It’s a tremendous amount of work. I would say one thing that I wasn’t expecting, I hadn’t really thought about was the amount of work.  I sell a lot of copies of the magazine as a result, I’m going to the post every single day, dropping off stuff at the post office to mail out, sometimes two times a day, sometimes three times a day, bringing piles of mailers stuffed with Dummys to the post office, and that’s great. It’s a lot of time.

It’s a lot of time to stuff them into the envelope to get them to look the way that they want to. All the mailers are hand stamped. You know, they have a little note in there.

There’re some extra items. It’s very time consuming. There’re issues with mail delivery at times, especially right now, international mail delivery is really a nightmare.

You take a lot of questions from people about their orders.  I also sell t-shirts and other related merchandise. Somebody orders the wrong color or the wrong size.  What do you do then? There’s a lot of customer service stuff that takes a lot of time away from the actual writing.

I wasn’t expecting that because I wasn’t expecting any of this. It’s been a real learning experience.

Samir Husni:  If I come to visit you one evening, unannounced, what do I catch John doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine? What do you do to rewind at the end of the day?

John Kelly: I don’t really rewind.  I’m working all of the time.

The only I leave the house is I go to the gym every day, early in the morning. I get up really early. I get up around 4, 4:30 in the morning and I start working on Dummy at that point.

I’ll go to the gym around 7:00 or 8:00 am and then I’m working on Dummy or something for The Comics Journal or some other project until my wife and I usually watch about an hour of non-traditional television. It’s like a movie or a documentary or something, maybe an hour and a half of that before I, I usually start falling asleep about 10 minutes into it. Then we’re in bed at 10 or 9 pm.

Samir Husni: What keeps you up at night?

John Kelly: Nothing. I sleep great. I take care of myself. I eat well.

I exercise.  I’m doing something I absolutely love to do.  I’m completely content with everything.

I’m a very happy person at this point in my life. I don’t think there’s anything that keeps me up at night.  Everybody’s life has issues and concerns, and you just deal with them as they come.

I’m like powerless over most things. Usually, I figure out a way to make things work.

Samir Husni:  Thank you and good luck.

Nothing brings more joy to the heart of Mr. Magazine™ than seeing three young people publishing a print magazine.  When I heard about Craftwerk magazine, I thought it is, yet another magazine aimed at old folks who enjoy arts and crafts at their later years.  And wrong I was.  Craftwerk is not for old folks and nor it is published by old folks.  It is the brainchild of two young graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago assisted with a third graduate from the same school.  Even combining all their ages will not give you one old person’s age.

Smart, driven and determined those three young people are adamant on making a difference in the art and crafts word.  In their issue one, that they labeled “The Manifesto,” they write: “We believe that there is a new American craft movement in hyper-contemporary art.”

The manifesto continues, “The distinction between what has occurred previously versus now is the combination of late-stage capitalism, abundant internet usage, complete globalization, and digital archive accessibility. Culturally, there is an emphasis on individuality in conflicting tandem with mass-production and the search for “one of a kind” objects while impersonal plasticity rules over the maker.  We are divided from our things while being collectors of masses.”

It was my pleasure to sit down for a zoom interview with all three of them and we talked about Craftwerk, print in this digital age, and whether they are out of their minds doing this.

What follows is the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Chloe Harthan, Eli Clayton, and Ayla Hayes, founders and creators of Craftwerk.  But first the soundbites:

On starting a new print magazine: Yeah, probably so. We, since we’re all artists, do a lot of things that are difficult to start, and we see it through anyways. I think that’s kind of in all our natures.

On why Craftwerk with an E and not an A: “In switching the E instead of an O, it’s pop-cultural and very in tune with queer culture to change “work” to being that. It’s also the German ending to change to “werk.”

On trying to create a new manifesto on crafts: “It would be cool if people read it and identified with it. But it isn’t really a specific agenda, I would say, for future generations. I think it’s responding to the people that we’re around and the community that we’re in in Chicago.”

On why Chicago and why crafts magazine: “We talked about Chicago in the manifesto being in the center geographically. And then craft is also in a center of an arts practice. There’s craft as in little, tiny projects like knitting, or there’s craft on the total other end, like Renaissance craft. So contemporary craft is in the middle.”

On the Craftwerk team: “Eli and I are the creators; Ayla is the editor. And so, Eli and I first had the idea for a project with jeans, and that was our passion. But before doing that, we wanted to decide what we were doing entirely. That’s why we did the manifesto.”

 On Craftwerk audience: “A lot of artists, creatives, people in our network or in people we know network. Since it is such a small starting project, it’s really all about connecting and getting people to learn about it through other people.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Chloe Harthan, Eli Clayton, and Ayla Hayes, founders and creators of Craftwerk. 

Samir Husni: For a group of young folks like you, are you out of your mind starting a new print magazine?

Chloe: Yeah, probably so. We, since we’re all artists, do a lot of things that are difficult to start, and we see it through anyways. I think that’s kind of in all our natures.

But it’s been a learning process, and we’re continually learning as we’re doing it. It’s been very fun thus far.

Samir Husni: Why did you decide on craft and Craftwerk spelled with an E instead of an O?

Chloe: All of us being in art school, we saw a trend happening of people returning to craft and the importance of craft in their work. A lot of different things, like fibers work or really anything that is displayed in the manifesto, we saw becoming more popular. And so, we wanted to investigate that and highlight younger artists that were also investigating it.

In switching the E instead of an O, it’s pop-cultural and very in tune with queer culture to change “work” to being that. It’s also the German ending to change to “werk.” But it’s not just about changing the word but contextualizing where we’re thinking of. So, if we changed it and it was just Kraftwerk as in the German spelling, that wouldn’t be accurate to what we’re doing.

“Craft” and then “werk” puts in all the different parts of coming from queer culture, coming from an internet culture, being younger. That’s why we changed that.

Samir Husni: As you look at the first two issues, you had the manifesto in the first issue, then you had the jeans issue. What’s behind the theme? Are you like trying to put a new manifesto on crafts for the future generation?

Eli: It would be cool if people read it and identified with it. But it isn’t really a specific agenda, I would say, for future generations. I think it’s responding to the people that we’re around and the community that we’re in in Chicago. I think being in Chicago is a unique place.

Chloe: We talked about Chicago in the manifesto being in the center geographically. And then craft is also in a center of an arts practice. There’s craft as in little, tiny projects like knitting, or there’s craft on the total other end, like Renaissance craft. So contemporary craft is in the middle.

In the manifesto, we were really trying to get our bearings. In the first one, we were working hard to figure out what we wanted to do. It’s more of a guideline for us, because we started with jeans. Eli and I are the creators, Ayla is the editor. And so, Eli and I first had the idea for a project with jeans, and that was our passion. But before doing that, we wanted to decide what we were doing entirely. That’s why we did the manifesto.

Samir Husni: And why print in this digital age? Why ink on paper?

Ayla:  I’ve always been really drawn to analog ways of making.

I like analog in terms of music, and when I’m looking for reading. And there’s such a power to being able to print things yourself. There’s a whole culture of zines, and magazines, and artists making that.

It’s a very countercultural medium, to be able to do it as an individual, to take on something that seems so daunting, like making a magazine. Yeah, I think that’s why we print. And there’s something so great about having a physical object, too.

I think as makers, it really lends to craft, using physical medium. If it was digital, I just don’t think it would feel as tangible as us as artists and makers.

Samir Husni: And how easy has it been? Is it a walk in the rose garden, or have there been some obstacles?

Chloe:  Not easy at all.

We’re getting better. Eli and I started with the Manifesto, and Ayla informally edited that one by just looking for grammatical errors and small formatting errors. The second one, we brought Ayla on fully to do editing for the whole process. And we figured out, being such a tiny team, how long it takes us to do it, what our goals are visually and physically. Of course, you can see we changed our binding, going from the first one to the second one.

We changed where we got them printed at. We might even change where we get them printed again. Being able to go from one to the other and have the physical version has really been helpful for making it better. And if we didn’t print it, going back to your previous question, I don’t even know how our formatting would look because it’s so different. But it’s a challenge.

Even though it’s more work, there is so much fun stuff to get to change with printing. Even just what type of paper you use is another aspect of it to have fun with. It lends to the theme.

Samir Husni: And who’s the audience?

Ayla: Going back to it not being a walk in the rose garden, we’re all so busy with other things. This is for all of us a side project that is more out of a passion and less from a business or financial standpoint.

It’s a break-even project. That both puts pressure on it but also relieves some pressure in a sense.

But it was a lot of learning, and it was not easy. Still isn’t easy. Still a lot like learning a lot, but for me, it’s worth it at least.

Samir Husni: And who’s your audience?

Eli: I don’t know. I’ll be frank. Anyone that sees it and is interested in picking it up. Mainly right now it’s Chicago based.

A lot of artists, creatives, people in our network or in people we know network. Since it is such a small starting project, it’s really all about connecting and getting people to learn about it through other people.

Chloe: I don’t think it’s a specific group of people. Part of why we’re able to have flexibility within our audience is because we get all the artwork through an open call. We release it online and ask artists to respond to the theme.

For the denim theme, it was much more specific, but through open calls we get lots of eyes on it. People have a free ability to participate in something that will be printed, which is something that many artists are interested in. And then it blooms from that because each person has people that they want to share it with.

That also changes the way that it looks. It’s unpredictable when we put out the open call, but it makes all the work accessible. Everything is different in the denim issue even though it’s based on one thing. All of the pieces have something unique about them that caters to people’s individual interests. So, if you enjoy looking at art, you know, there’s something for everybody, which I like.

Samir Husni: Looking forward, what will be the theme of issue three?

Chloe: We haven’t decided. We have some ideas that we’ve kind of thrown around. We haven’t landed on one specifically.

We all have such different tastes. So, it makes it hard to pick a theme too. But that tension between the things that we all like, whenever it coalesces into something, it’s something that’s able to be responded to by many people, which is great.

Samir Husni: So, you and I are having this conversation a year from now. What would you tell me you’ve accomplished in 2025? Do you want to do another edition by the end of this year?

Chloe: By a year from now, we’ll have another edition, I think.

Eli: Since the second one was put out in 2025, the third might not be put out by the end of 2025. No, it’ll be 2026.

I think it’d be cool to investigate local printing, and being able to be more involved in that process would be cool.

Chloe: Doing something with inserts, just a little texture in the magazine would be something I’m interested in. We’ve talked about having takeaways on the inside, things that are practical, like instructions to make something. We were talking about having instructions on how to mend jeans but didn’t end up having time to do that in this one. Having something that you can use instead of just going through it and reading, something that can impact day-to-day life would be interesting. We’d like to be selling it at local shops and magazine stands, or even non-local places.

Ayla: I’d like to do something that’s more involved and less of us-specific but revolving around the theme instead of just releasing the magazine. That could be much more involved within the community as well.

Samir Husni: So, tell me, how far are you in school?

Chloe: Ayla and I graduated. We both recently graduated this past fall.

Eli: I have two weeks left, and then I’m also graduating from The School of the Art Institute.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions are, one, what do you do to unwind at the end of the day?

Chloe:  That’s a good question. I don’t know if I do unwind. Right now, I can’t afford to unwind.

While we were working on the magazine, I was doing a lot of the editing in very, very late hours of the night because that was when I had the time to work. When I was unwinding at that time, I was shutting my laptop computer when I was done, opening my window because it was the winter, so super cold air would come in.

Things that weren’t screens was good for me, like doing my laundry. Random things that weren’t related to looking at or typing on something. I recently have done lots of gardening on my patio, and that has been nice. Yeah, I think when working on digital projects like this, once you’re doing such small changes, you must just change environment.

Ayla: I tend to just go outside or read.

But reading is hard because your kind of reading when you’re doing this. So, it’s like, what reading is fun reading and what reading is like, working. Painting helps. I’m a painter.

Chloe: I am also a painter.

With that, I can shut my brain off in a different way and activate different parts. So, I think the painting really helps me too. While I was working on this, I wasn’t painting much. And then I was able to dive back into that, which was like an explosion of reward at the end to just be able to paint again.

Eli: I would say for me, that would be sewing. I do a lot of hand sewing and machine sewing.

And it can be such a tedious, monotonous task that I’m able to just kind of let go. I unwind by doing something physical, which I think kind of circles back to the importance of craft that we were exploring.

Ayla: I listen to music a lot at home. My roommate and I have a turntable. We like to sit and do that a lot.

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

Chloe: Well, here we’re in an art space. Ayla and I run this space. It’s a small art gallery and we do a handful of events also. This place keeps me up at night and is another huge thing that we’ve bitten off together. But planning for shows and thinking about the future, thinking about our space and where we want to go and what our goals are. That keeps the gears turning for sure.

Eli: The future. The unknown of the future.

Samir Husni: Well, is there any question that I should have asked you? I didn’t ask you…

Samir Husni: What are your magazine inspirations?

Ayla: Recently, over the past summer, I took a class on artist books. And taking that was really, really inspiring to get involved in making books in some way. The school has a great resource, a library of artist books. They bend and twist the medium of a book so much.

It’s so inspiring. That made me want to get into it. And I’ve always liked magazines – like fashion and skateboarding magazines, all that kind of stuff. I think they are so fun.

Eli: Also took that artist books class. And so that was interesting to me. It is the main reason why I have an interest in print and publishing. Books, magazines, stuff like that. My grandma was a librarian, so I would always learn from the things that she got from being a librarian. I feel that also made me interested in print and publishing.

Chloe: I’m very unfamiliar with print media, so I learn from these two all the time. Especially in digital design, I learn from Ayla. She spits out so many examples of magazines to look at because she’s so in touch with it.

And then Eli, he is a printmaker. Eli knows how to do the different types of binding. When we were physically making the first edition, we were going over the most cost-effective options. We were looking at paperweights. We were looking at the finishes. Eli knows so much more about that than I do. So, I think my answer is them because I’m less familiar.

Samir Husni: Thank you and best of luck on your venture.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Envoy magazine, you easily can.  One of the smartest covers that I have seen in a long time, Envoy magazine’s first issue cover tells it all.  “What we don’t know is blurry for all of us…” says the major cover line that is accompanied by a blurry picture of a dove.  Once you open the cover a stunning and clear picture of the dove welcomes you to the inside of the magazine and the back of the cover declares, “…everything becomes clearer as we learn.”

The brainchild of Razi Canikligil and a group of United Nations based journalists, Envoy magazine was launched in the Spring of 2024. In the first issue Mr. Canikligil writes, “Enovy is more than just a publication; it is a platform for dialogue, engagement, and advocacy.  Through our pages, we seek to illuminate the vital work of the United Nations and its agencies, shedding light on the efforts to address climate change, promote peace and security, and advance sustainable development goals.”

Envoy is published by UNEMAG,  a non-profit 501 (C)  (3) organization and is headquartered in the United Nations in New York City. Razi Canikligil is the founder and president of the organization and is the managing editor of Envoy magazine.

I had the pleasure to interview Mr. Canikligil and to talk about the birth of a new magazine celebrating its first anniversary this Spring.  The conversation was as lovely and intriguing as the magazine itself.  So without any further ado, please enjoy this lively conversation with Razi Canikligil, managing editor, Envoy magazine:

But first the soundbites…

On why Envoy magazine:  “To give opportunity to NGOs to be seen. Give opportunity to UN reports to be published in detail in a magazine. And not just UN, also international affairs, but mostly related to UN issues.”

On the mission of the magazine: “We are creating a new style of current affairs magazine. I might say it’s like a mix of current Foreign Affairs and National Geographic magazines.”

On the magazine’s drive: “We are trying to put the good things happening, positive things, like when we cover the oceans or climate change. We are focusing on the things and process, things that are trying to be done, focus on this, in a positive mode.”

On the current status of the magazine: “We are selling good now. And the ads started to come in. We are happy, very excited.”

On what if Envoy became a huge success: “If we are really doing good, then we will sponsor and support the journalist. We will help, we will give fellowships, we will send reporters to cover all the international issues around the world.”

On what keeps him up at night: “When we start preparing the pages, I’m nervous. I focus on every detail. And sometimes we can’t decide how to cover one issue or what to put on the cover.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Razi Canikligil, managing editor, Envoy magazine:

Samir Husni:  Why Envoy?

Razi Canikligil: Let me tell you briefly, we are a group of journalists at the United Nations headquarters in New York. And we thought that we should create a non-profit organization and publish a magazine.

The reason behind this is we used to have almost 600 journalists covering the United Nations, UN correspondents. Now they are down to 200. The reason behind this is big media corporations, they can’t support correspondents anymore, they can’t pay in full.

They rather like to work on a freelance basis. CNN just retired its correspondent and CBS did the same. The New York Times shut down its office at the UN.

Voice of America recently shut down its operations. And big newspapers, from the British, The Times, and The Guardian, to Turkey’s Hürriyet newspaper or the French Le Monde, they don’t have full-time reporters at the UN anymore. Most of our colleagues are laid off and they are having trouble finding a job.

They are freelancers now and their income is low. The UN is now mostly one person wire news agencies, most of the time. They can’t cover the UN fully. UN is not just Security Council. UN has a lot of other stuff. There is a lot of stuff happening at the UN. There are many agencies. There are 11,000 NGOs, registered NGOs to the UN. They come and do some events at the UN. But nobody is covering them. They want the coverage. But the few remaining journalists don’t have time.

We don’t have manpower. As individual journalists, most of us, cover the Security Council meetings. But the UN has provided a lot of content. They release reports every day on every agenda.

So we thought, why don’t we create this foundation and publish a magazine and a website so we can create a new platform for the resident journalists. They can have new income, and they can cover the UN in detail.

Most issues we cover only up to 300 words or 500 words, like a short article. We thought that we should go in-depth. We should cover deep interviews, deep analysis of these reports. And NGOs.

So that’s what we do now.

Samir Husni: And is that the reason you decided on an ink on paper magazine? To provide that in-depth coverage? In-depth coverage of the UN…

Razi Canikligil: … And give opportunity to NGOs to be seen. Give opportunity to UN reports to be published in detail in a magazine. And not just UN, also international affairs, but mostly related to UN issues.

From climate change, sustainable development goals, diplomacy, human rights, the oceans, AI, immigration, those things. And we also give a new platform to the young journalists. Because when I go to the bookstores to see the magazines, to check the magazines and Barnes & Noble or Hudson News, I see beautiful interior decoration magazines, beautiful women’s magazines, health or car, the garden magazines.

But when I look at the current affairs section, they are almost the same we’ve seen past 50 years. Same magazines. They are afraid to change their style, their coverage, because they have existing readers.

They don’t want to lose them, so they want to do something new, but they are afraid that they don’t want to lose their current readers. But we said, okay, we are beginning, we are new, so we can start new. But most of our colleagues are well-experienced journalists.

We thought that we should mix it with the young journalists. We give chance to all the young journalists coming in from Columbia University, from journalism schools, or international affairs schools, from around the country and the world, not necessarily from New York city only. They contribute, they write for us, and we will give fellowships to these people.

We’re going to mix the real professional journalists and the young journalists. We are creating a new style of current affairs magazine. I might say it’s like a mix of current Foreign Affairs and National Geographic magazines.

There’s a lot of pictures, data, graphics, and maps, along with long articles. It’s very well done.

Samir Husni: Tell me, you just published Issue 4.  Has your journey with Envoy, since you were the founding publisher and the one that came up with this idea, has your journey with Envoy been a trip in a rose garden, or you had quite a few stumbling blocks, and how did you overcome them?

Razi Canikligil: It was difficult. The reason is that: most people were asking, who’s behind this? Who’s paying for this?  The permanent missions of countries and the UN agencies, wanted to see what you publish, and see what you do.

At the beginning, they were shy to give us interviews. We told them, look, we are not politicized, we are focused on the positive things, good things happening. We are not looking to expose things.

We are trying to put the good things happening, positive things, like when we cover the oceans or climate change. We are focusing on the things and process, things that are trying to be done, focus on this, in a positive mode. We needed to get, of course, donations from NGOs and foundations, and they were shy at the beginning.

But now, the donations are coming in. Ads are coming in. We didn’t have any database, any profile or a media kit.  We created the first issue, and we thought that we should just give it away for free. We gave the first issue of the magazine to the UN missions, the NGOs, and the delegates at the United Nations. We printed 5,000 copies and the people loved the magazine so much.

They said, why don’t you just sell this magazine, try to distribute. And we said, okay, let’s try. Many people turned us down.

But one big national distributor, Disticor, said they loved the magazine, they want to distribute it, and they talked with Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble loved the magazine, and they started selling it all across the country, and Canadians loved it. So we started distributing in Chapters and in Nego in Canada.

They loved it. And then the third issue came, and Hudson News started distributing it. Hudson News is a big one, because Hudson News, has the train stations and airports.

They are a big seller, and they love the magazine. They distributed the third and fourth issues of our magazine. They placed it as a hot read among all the other magazines.

We are selling good now. And the ads started to come in. We are happy, very excited.

Last night we celebrated our first anniversary, with the fourth issue release. It was good.

More journalists will contribute to us, not just from the UN. We are open to all the freelance journalists around the world, also young journalists who are passionate about our issues. They give us ideas, they send us some pictures, they think they can write about this, and we talk with them. And we give them a chance.

So far, we are happy with the results.

Samir Husni: Excellent. If you and I are having this conversation a year from now, as you celebrate your second anniversary, what can you tell me you’ve accomplished in 2025?

Razi Canikligil: We started subscription now, we started taking subscriptions.

We want to reach out to a high number of subscribers. It’s a challenge for us because we don’t know how to publish, we don’t know how to market. We are all journalists.

We never published a magazine before, but we are getting a lot of help. We are all investigators, we understand, we talk, we learn.

Another issue is half of our journalists corresponds at UN are TV reporters, broadcasters. We should have a YouTube channel on the web for webcasts, Podcasts, etc. I think we’re going to start this because many of our journalists are having difficulty because they don’t write, they just do TV stuff. More TV, the webcasts will be available, I think, next year when we talk.

Also, next year, the next summer issue will be distributed in Europe.

We have a great distributor in London. They will put us in London, Geneva, Brussels, and Vienna. And then hopefully by fall, we’ll go to other capitals in Europe, Paris, and Istanbul and other places.

Then maybe next year we’ll be in Asia. Envoy is not an American magazine; it’s an international global magazine.

Samir Husni: So, Razi, tell me, is there any question I should ask you I did not ask you?

Razi Canikligil: Well, what happens if this magazine becomes big and you guys make enough money?

If we are really doing good, then we will sponsor and support the journalist. We will help, we will give fellowships, we will send reporters to cover all the international issues around the world. We will have a powerful group to support journalists around the world to have really excellent coverage. Expert journalists, experts diplomats, and UN people.

We don’t go into the country’s political issues. We are just going into how it affects all the other countries.

If something is happening in America or other countries, how it affects, side effects.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions that I ask always in my interviews. If I come to your home unannounced one evening, what do I catch Razi doing to unwind from a busy day? Reading a book, watching TV?

Razi Canikligil: Trying to sleep. I go to bed early and get up like 5 a.m. in the morning because the time difference. I don’t have much of an evening. I go to bed 9 p.m. and get up like 5 or 4:30 a.m. in the morning. Do a lot of reading about publishing, marketing, it’s a new field for us. We are learning about AI. How can we use AI to help us or how can we teach AI to our colleagues? Because everything is expensive in the publishing. And we are trying to find out ways. This magazine really doesn’t cost that much.

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

Razi Canikligil: When we start preparing the pages, I’m nervous. I focus on every detail. And sometimes we can’t decide how to cover one issue or what to put on the cover.

Of the magazine, I get stressed out. They prepare a lot of graphics for us, a lot of alternatives. It’s hard. And I think the cover, it’s hard to choose the cover. We have a lot of ideas, and we get conflict among us which cover should be best for the magazine. At the end, I make the final decision.

That’s very difficult for me. But I think this fourth cover, this new cover, I think we all like it. We were on the same page with this cover.

We had confusion with other covers in the past. But this cover, everybody loved it. Nobody had any other idea, had other options, everyone loved this cover.

So that’s a first. Because the cover tells the reader who we are.

We are a new magazine.

It’s important, especially in the first couple of years. It was a little bit political cover also. It gave us some stress, but so far everybody loved it.

Samir Husni: Thank you very much and congratulations on your first anniversary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first the soundbites:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samir Husni: Did your gamble pay off?

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

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

Marianne Howatson: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s a very different publication.

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

Marianne Howatson: No, I think you did terrifically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samir Husni: Thank you.

The legacy of cannabis and the legacy of magazines collide to introduce The Other magazine: A magazine devoted to cannabis, its dispensaries, and the customers who partake in enjoying the plant that for years has been the forbidden fruit.  With more states legalizing cannabis for recreational use, magazines devoted to the once forbidden plant are sprouting across the nation. 

The Other is the latest entry into the cannabis consumer magazines serving the audience of the Hudson Valley in New York State and New York City.  Peter Shafran, the founder and witty publisher, has high (pun intended) hopes for The Other.  His wit is evident in the cover of the first issue.  Take a look at the cover and read what he had to see about it:

“So if you look closely at the mountains, you’ll see that they’re not really mountains. It’s all cannabis. And the bridge, the base of each of the bridges are bongs, or at least the big bridge in the back is.

And this is all based on a real photograph. The big bridge is the Bear Mountain Bridge, which goes over the Hudson River, but the two boats floating on there, one is just a pipe, and the other one is a pipe, it is a boat with a puff on it.

The small bridge in the front, which is the bridge that takes you over the Taconic State Parkway, all those little side things, those are all joints. So when I bring this into the dispensary and I tell people, you know, so do you like the mountains? And they’re like, oh yeah, I like the mountains. I was like, do you really like the mountains?”

I had the opportunity to interview Peter, and his strategic communications consultant, magazine veteran, Stu Zakim.  But first the soundbites:

On the name of the magazine: “The title of the magazine hearkens back to a newspaper that came out in 1968 called the East Village Other. It was one of the first underground countercultural newspapers in the country.”

More on the name of the magazine: “But the reason we chose that name is because we as cannabis consumers have always felt that we were on the outside, we’re the others.”

On the reasons the magazine is regional: “We felt that the regional way was the way to go, because especially in the cannabis industry, much of the industry is vertically aligned in terms of the growing, the processing, the distributing and the retail is all contained in New York.”

On why The Other is in print: “Well, tactile. It really is. In other words, cannabis has its legacy. So do print magazines. And I think there’s a marriage there.”

On the mission of the magazine: “The conversation has changed so that we’re focusing more on the lifestyle, the alternatives, the education, the normalization and destigmatization.”

On the status of the cannabis industry: “The cannabis industry is so much mainstream now that they’re providing a portion of the revenue to these towns and villages that they never saw before, or at least haven’t seen since manufacturing was here.”

On the future plans of the magazine: “I really have no desire to go into California, Colorado, Massachusetts, or any of those places. What I’m looking for is a place like New Jersey, which has two or three years of growth. There is no magazine in New Jersey that does what we do.”

On the role of The Other: “It’s a wonderful place to be in because we’re past what we used to call the wild, wild West. But now it is a functioning, growing economy, and we’re able to be there at the ground level and helping make it flourish.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Peter Shafran, founder and publisher of The Other:

Samir Husni: Congratulations on the launch of The Other.

Peter Shafran: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Would you please give me the elevator pitch of The Other and tell me what’s the idea behind the name?

Peter Shafran: Oh, sure. The magazine is a countercultural lifestyle magazine for people in the Hudson Valley, in New York City, for people who enjoy cannabis and other lifestyle things like psychedelics and the whole lifestyle. The magazine is a consumer magazine.

Unlike most of the magazines that are out there in the community, which are B2B magazines, this is a lifestyle consumer magazine. Though there is a little bit of a space here for another business magazine. So we’re going to add some industry focus on there as well.

I live in the Hudson Valley, which is why we started here and I grew up here. The title of the magazine hearkens back to a newspaper that came out in 1968 called the East Village Other. It was one of the first underground countercultural newspapers in the country, which spurred on the development of other countercultural magazines in Berkeley and Chicago and a couple of other places.

That became the beginnings of the underground movement in the 60s. The people who wrote for the East Village Other were all the top minds and writers of the 1960s and the anti-war and revolutionary writers. So we hearken back to that to give them some props.

But the reason we chose that name is because we as cannabis consumers have always felt that we were on the outside, we’re the others. And even in terms of where we are today in the industry, probably not before a year or two ago was cannabis really discussed among real people, among my friends. I’ve been living in this village for 18 years and people did not discuss cannabis openly, definitely because of the stigma attached to it. We are all parents and we don’t want our kids to talk about it and stuff like that.

So it really has only been in the last couple of years where that openness, and of course, the legalization in New York and the opening up of cannabis dispensaries has changed the whole landscape. It has changed the conversation. We felt there was a vacuum here and we’re hoping to fill it.

Samir Husni: Why did you decide to fulfill that vacuum via ink on paper in this digital age?

Peter Shafran: Well, basically, because I’m insane. Nobody in their right mind would do this, but the reality is that the regional magazines and local magazines are actually flourishing. The national magazines, especially in fringe areas, have a hard time in attracting advertisers and attracting money. We felt that the regional way was the way to go, because especially in the cannabis industry, much of the industry is vertically aligned in terms of the growing, the processing, the distributing and the retail is all contained in New York.

The New York focus was really helping us to find that we want to make a regional magazine. But the eventual goal that “if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere,” to quote Frank Sinatra.

Samir Husni: Besides the fact that regional magazines are doing well, what do you think is the power of print in this digital age? What do you offer your readers, your customers?

Peter Shafran: (Holding the magazine in both hands) Well, tactile. It really is.

The response has been unbelievable. I’ve been driving around to dispensaries within a half hour, 45 minute radius. The magazine’s been out a week.

Every place I go, I wear my shirt or I wear my hat (with the magazine name on them). I walk into the dispensary and one of the workers in the dispensary says, I know that logo. Where did I see it before? Is this where you saw it? And every single bud tender, every single person in the dispensary is like, wow, this is really cool.

Why hasn’t somebody done this before? We’re seeing that from across the spectrum, from the readers to everybody we’ve seen. We went to, Stu and I, and a couple of members of the team went to Reveille Buyers Club a couple of weeks ago when we started talking about the magazine. The magazine hadn’t even been out yet, and the buzz around it was huge because nobody else is doing it.

Stu: There’s another cannabis title out here, but it’s newsprint. Unlike Peter’s point of a tactile and the beauty.  A slick, glossy, four-color publication in an era where, to your earlier point, things living digitally is amazing, number one.

It’s an emotional attachment, which I think we all have. The newsprint book has never taken off. You know, it’s not well designed.

It looks like a high school project.  When people see The Other at the retailers, at the point of sale, where they pay for the products, curiosity will definitely attract them. They’ll see this gorgeous cover, which in itself has a little gimmick built into it.

Peter, I don’t know if you’ve explained that or not. And, you know, the demographics of the cannabis consumer are me and Peter. And, you know, not that we’re old men, but we grew up in the, we grew up with magazines and the role they played in all of our lives was very central.

So it’s, in other words, cannabis has its legacy. So do print magazines. And I think there’s a marriage there. That’s one thing that’s going to work to their advantage.

But the reality is that community with a big C is really what we are looking forward to becoming the community focus for this region.

Samir Husni: How is The Other different than the cannabis magazines of the 70s and 80s, such as High Times, Inside Dope, The Weed Journal and all these titles that were published before it became legal?

Peter Shafran: Very easy answer. Before we didn’t have dispensaries. So the curiosity, ooh, let’s see what cannabis looks like.

And you’ve got these beautiful pictures, now we call it cannabis, but the whole industry has become such that the curiosity to see something in a magazine, first of all, you can see anything you want on the web. So you don’t need to see beautiful pictures of a bud. Now, of course we have, but I have buds in my background of my pictures, more of a joke than anything else.

The realization is that we have evolved from that point where we’re curious about what bud looks like, because you can walk into any dispensary and see exactly what bud looks like. The conversation has changed so that we’re focusing more on the lifestyle, the alternatives, the education, the normalization and destigmatization.

Also one of the things that New York has going for it that some other states don’t have, is a very strong social justice part of the industry where specifically it was designed to let mom and pops come into the dispensaries and to the growers and the processors and not the multi-states which are coming in, but the mom and pops have the stronghold.

They’re already in here. They’ve been nurtured and they’re growing and developing. So it’s a lot different than it was in the seventies.

Samir Husni: You mentioned in your magazine introduction that the Hudson Valley have changed from what used to be a pumpkin growing area to a cannabis growing area. What’s the reaction of the consumers? Has it been accepted now? Is it just a matter of fact?

Peter Shafran: Number one, New York has the highest use of cannabis than any other place in the world, in terms of per capita. Number two, growing up in the Hudson Valley, my father was a home builder. And the three things that they used to say are going to bring this area back is an international airport.

Well, we have that in Newburgh. High-speed rail, we don’t have it. Casino gambling, we don’t really have it. There’s one or two places around here, but all the things that they promised were going to happen to revitalize the economy in New York, never really happened in those terms.

What’s going on now in cannabis in New York is just incredible. Between the processes and the growers and everybody else that’s coming in here, the jobs and the local towns, the villages, the municipalities, the development corporations, they’re seeing real growth.

It’s not just the dispensaries. They’re employing 500 people at a facility when nobody else is putting these shovels in the ground to build processing plants, to build grow houses and things like that. So even the most right-wing conservative politicians and people who follow them are saying, well, wait a second, you’re building construction jobs, permanent jobs, money coming into the community, both in terms of sales and retail, but also in terms of taxes.

The cannabis industry is so much mainstream now that they’re providing a portion of the revenue to these towns and villages that they never saw before, or at least haven’t seen since manufacturing was here. But going back to the pumpkins and apples, there are still plenty of pumpkins and apples, but several of the smart people in agriculture, like the Hepworths, for example, realized that this is coming and had the foresight to say, let’s start growing. So people who were worried about surviving in the agricultural field now have a secondary and sometimes a primary source of income that is not related to pumpkins and apples.

There’s a company called Ayrloom, which started out as an apple grower, one of the most successful apple growers. And still is. They make delicious apple cider. Well, now they make really good apple cider with a little bit of a hint inside. And I’m a fan.

I happen to love their honey crisp apple cider, which is just absolutely delicious. But here’s a company who been growing apples for a hundred years, and all of a sudden grew into one of the major players in the region. So from the economic standpoint, it’s fantastic for the Hudson Valley. It’s fantastic for the state of New York.

Samir Husni: Do you envision seeing more of lifestyle advertisement or are you on purpose sticking to the advertisement from the cannabis industry?

Peter Shafran: No, we’re actually going about 50-50. That’s our focus now.

We’re hoping to do that in the next round of advertising. But we’re looking at our magazine as more of a lifestyle magazine rather than a cannabis magazine. And the difference is that we’re talking to advertisers and saying, we have a base of probably 250,000 readers geographically in this region.

And that’s not to mention New York City, but just 250,000 people who can read the magazine in the area. And guess what? They buy cars. And guess what? They buy cookies, and they buy candy, and they buy all kinds of things that they want to eat after they smoke.

So we’re approaching the snack companies, the insurance agencies. I mean, we are a niche lifestyle brand, but the numbers are just too hard to ignore.  

Stu Zakim : If you look at the other categories, Samir, for advertising, one of the biggest growth areas as an ancillary to the cannabis is cannabis tourism, where they’re taking people from the city or wherever.

They pay a lot of money to go on this tour bus. They come up. They check out the farm. They get to see the fields. And there’s hospitality. There’s hotels that are, since it is legal, welcoming this new population for them because it’s a new customer base.

And rather than having a chocolate on your pillow at night, you may have an infused chocolate on your pillow. And they can serve infused beverage. All this stuff is an offshoot of what Peter’s been talking about with the growth in the industry.

And the other categories, to his point, if we just restricted ourselves to dispensaries and farms, there won’t be any revenue. It’s these ancillary categories that are more normal to regular publications that are actually, as the consumer, it’s not cheap to be a cannabis consumer. So you have to have a lot of extra income, which is the same logic when Rolling Stone transitioned from their newsprint and they became a slick glossy, they went after cars and autos and fashion and beauty and other lifestyle categories who felt more comfortable living in a magazine that had that feel to it and also the kind of customer readership that they had.

Samir Husni: Peter, before I ask you my typical personal last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you or anything you would like to add?

Peter Shafran: Good question.

The growth model that we see here is, you know, in answer to one of your previous questions about why we go regional, I think that this model can be replicated in other areas. I’m not looking to become a national magazine. I’m looking to make The Other something that can be duplicated in certain areas, especially in new growth areas.

I really have no desire to go into California, Colorado, Massachusetts, or any of those places. What I’m looking for is a place like New Jersey, which has two or three years of growth. There is no magazine in New Jersey that does what we do.

There are very few places that do this kind of magazine, which is why I go back to the point of being insane. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but the reality is the buzz around the magazine has been huge. And we’re just seeing fantastic replies and the growth in just in our Instagram page in the last couple of days has just been explosive.

Our model was providing free magazines and putting them in every single dispensary in our region. So we distributed 5,600 magazines in one week to dispensaries and ancillary places. And in one week, we’re already getting responses: We need more magazines.

In addition to being a magazine, we have realized that what we can become and what we’re really launching towards is becoming the backbone of a community. There are groups out there that have networking events and they have little things in here, but there is nothing here that is really containing in terms of the lifestyle and the advertising and the culture for this region.

What we’re finding is when we talked to a couple of dispensary owners in the last couple of weeks, and I floated the idea about starting a dispensary owners roundtable. Every single one that I spoke to said, I’m in, tell me when you want to do it. And last week, in bringing the magazine to different places, I said to the bud tenders, what do you think about having a bud tender event of the month? Like, yeah, you want to do it? If you’re going to be providing something free, we’ll all come.

But the reality is that community with a big C is really what we are looking forward to becoming the community focus for this region.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Well, my typical last two questions are if I come to visit you unannounced one evening, what do I catch Peter doing? Smoking a joint, drinking a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book?

Peter Shafran: Well, so the easy answer is that I have become over the last year or two, more of a, maybe not a connoisseur, but I’m learning how to become a connoisseur.

But what I found is that prior to my involvement in the magazine, and prior to probably two years ago, I used to have a glass of wine with dinner every night. I haven’t opened up a bottle of wine unless company is coming for about six months, maybe more. I’ve had a sip of beer just to taste it in the last couple of months.

So one day I’ll roll a joint and smoke it. And the next day I’ll smoke out of a pipe or a bottle or I’ll do a gummy. The wonderful thing is that we live in a society right now where choice is unbelievable. It was whatever the guy had is what you got for 40 bucks. You got an ounce of whatever he had, whether it was terrible or not, it was what you got.

And now you go in for to any dispensary and you got two, three, 400,  a thousand skews of products and it’s dizzying. That’s one of the things that we can provide is that benefit to say, we’ll give you reviews. We’ll show you what’s out there.

It’s a wonderful place to be in because we’re past what we used to call the wild, wild West. But now it is a functioning, growing economy, and we’re able to be there at the ground level and helping make it flourish.

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

Peter Shafran: Well, of course keeping the magazine funded. We wanted to get the business of the magazine up so that that could be our tent pole to be able to use in other areas. We have a newsletter coming out, an online presence, and the live events, which will provide streams of income to be able to fund everything together. But until that happens, it’s hard to go to sleep at night. But I just take a gummy and I’m fine.

Samir Husni: Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.

StuZakim: But as a hardcore magazine person, you know, the, the role of this format has been diminished over time. And here, I think it takes courage in this rather tough market to break out a new title. To your point about the earlier titles of High Times and all that shit that’s another generation.

We’re in a new world now. And if not only educate people about it to help eradicate the stigma against cannabis, educate people about the beauty of the magazine format and why photography jumps off the page. I mean, look at that cover.

You’ll never see that in a newspaper where it catches your attention as you walk by and bringing this to a whole new group of people who haven’t really grown up with it the way we did. So, you know, whenever you get to it, it’s fine. I would appreciate the, the forum, the platform, and as you know, I’m, I’m just really thrilled that this conversation is taking place.

Samir Husni: Thank you