Mr. Magazine

“I think that you can really have a lot of things on your desktop or on your mobile phone, in the sense that you collect movies, TV shows, music and images, but the type of collectability that we’re talking about is very different. A magazine is something that lives as a whole and not just as one story. A magazine is about the conceptualization of each image and the way each story relates to the other. It’s a living package, a living organism and it’s not just something that can be taken apart.” Stefano Tonchi

“Now, that we’re incredibly successful, the challenge is how do we continue to keep this beautiful print product special and continue the growth? I believe we absolutely have runway in print, despite the decline in the overall print market, and we’ll scale digitally. And that’s really what’s exciting for both of us because we’ve achieved such great success in the past five years and there’s so much brand love. When we look at various studies and data about our readers and brand awareness; if they know us, they love us. So, how do we spread the brand love and how do we scale? And that’s been a really fun and exciting challenge for us.” Lucy Kriz

Collectability in its finest form; Condè Nast’s W Magazine represents the very best in fashion, film, and art and is filled with awe-inspiring images that are often unanticipatedly cutting-edge and always some of the most beautiful photography around.

Stefano Tonchi has been editor-in-chief since spring 2010 and Lucy Kriz, publisher and chief revenue officer since 2012. The two together are an unbeatable team that has brought the magazine to new heights under their combined leadership. With W experiencing its strongest advertising performance in five years, and being named to Ad Age’s A-List under Lucy’s guiding hand, the magazine is on track with its third consecutive year of growth, in both print and digital revenue, with new positioning to “escape ordinary.”

And with Stefano’s unprecedented direction, the magazine has been a finalist 7 times in the past two years for the prestigious ASME Awards, with two nods in the General Excellence category. And in 2012, Stefano oversaw the publication of W’s first-ever special-edition book, W: The First 40 Years, a photographic celebration of the magazine’s 40th anniversary.

To say the two make an incomparable tandem for success would be an understatement. Recently, I visited with them in their new offices at the 32nd floor of 1 World Trade Center in downtown NYC and I must say the dialogue was open, oftentimes filled with humor, and really delightful. We talked quite a bit about the DNA of W and how Stefano redefined the magazine’s roots without digging them completely up and tossing them onto the weed pile.

A few of the magazine’s achievements with Lucy and Stefano at the helm:

• Print revenue is up +7% in 2015, and up +32% over the past three years since Lucy’s appointment as publisher and chief revenue officer

• Digital business is up +42%

• Ad paging has increased by +15% vs. five years ago

• Total audience (including print, digital, social) is 7 million, with a +17% increase vs. 2014 (according to the MPA 360 July brand report)

• Social media footprint is up +52% vs. last September, with more than 5 million total across social platforms

• Digital edition single copy and subscriptions continue to grow (+9% year over year) (Source: AAM June 2010-2015 statements.)

So, sit back, relax and enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with two people whose alphabet always begins with the letter “W” Lucy Kriz, Publisher and Stefano Tonchi, Editor-In-Chief, W Magazine.

But first, the sound-bites:

Stefano Tonchi, editor in chief, W magazine.

On whether he thinks W Magazine in its digital format will ever be the collector’s item that the print magazine is (Stefano Tonchi): I don’t think digital can be a collector’s item in that sense. I think that the idea of collecting something is having something tangible and that you can actually possess or have in your hand, so something that’s on a screen and is available to everybody is not really anything that you can collect.

On how the role of editor has evolved through the 40 or so years that he’s been in the magazine business (Stefano Tonchi): This is interesting because a lot of my colleagues would say it used to be pure and now it’s a lot of different things. Maybe it’s because that when I was 15 I started my magazine and I had to go and sell the ads, do the stories, hire and fire; I was playing all the roles, so the job was quite similar and still about making choices and taking responsibilities.

On the nature of the first magazine he created in high school (Stefano Tonchi): The magazine that I was doing when I was in high school was about the records we were listening to at the time, the people we were admiring and nothing has really changed; it was all about the people and the things that defined the times we were living in.

Lucy Kriz, publisher and chief revenue officer, W magazine.

On how the publisher’s role has changed over the years (Lucy Kriz): It’s definitely changed. Sometimes I think that I became a publisher 10 years too late (Laughs), because it was just easier back then when you could make a phone call, have a meeting, talk about your unique selling proposition and in-book the pages. Now, we have really evolved from sales people to modern-day marketers. And it is a much more involved and strategic approach to partnerships, and I think in a way I didn’t come 10 years too late, I came at exactly the right time because that’s what invigorates me and gets me excited every day. It’s just more involved.

On whether she uses the unique size of W when selling the magazine to clients (Lucy Kriz): : There’s a sea of sameness in media and you can really look across the digital landscape certainly, it’s been commoditized enough, and even in magazines, and you don’t even know what anyone stands for anymore. And W has always been memorable. And so I absolutely use our oversized format and our bold editorial to sell. And to make sure that we’re highlighting that it’s really about the consumer who engages with the magazine because they love our editorial and believe it offers something different.

On whether his five-year journey has been all smooth sailing or he’s experienced some choppy seas along the way (Stefano Tonchi): Every year you have to prove what you can do. It was very hard at the beginning because I didn’t have the full knowledge of the magazine. The DNA of the magazine was very diluted and there was a lot of misunderstanding in what W meant and people were very confused about the magazine.

On how the challenges they’ve faced have redefined the magazine and made it even more successful (Lucy Kriz): Now, that we’re incredibly successful, the challenge is how do we continue to keep this beautiful print product special and continue the growth? I believe we absolutely have runway in print, despite the decline in the overall print market, and we’ll scale digitally. And that’s really what’s exciting for both of us because we’ve achieved such great success in the past five years and there’s so much brand love.

On whether it’s been a rose garden for her since she began at W (Lucy Kriz): I would say that I’ve never been happier in my life to be out in the market with this product. Is it a rose garden? I would say yes. When I can walk into any one of our partners, certainly in the luxury space, and now Coach’s, we’re one of their biggest partners, because they know that we have a really desirable consumer market, and to be honest, that particular consumer; we have more of them. So, it isn’t a struggle, it’s a joy and we love what we do.

On the nudity in W: We never do anything to provoke just for the sake of provoking. We’re not in the business of scandal; we’re not that kind of publication. What we do is really express the conscience of the time we live in and I think there have been times, especially in the 1990s, with certain kinds of images; W was there first. We worked with photographers who were expressing a sensibility of the moment. We will follow wherever the culture and the social conversation takes us. We’ll cover up if that’s the conversation or we’ll undress if that’s the conversation. We are moved really by the creativity of our contributors.

On whether any advertiser has ever canceled an ad because of the nudity (Lucy Kriz): Our advertisers are also interesting because the people that we work with want to be on the leading-edge. They come to W for a reason. There are some advertisers who don’t love our content and that’s OK. They can keep their money because there are more advertisers and we have great, great partnerships, who want to be a part of the culture conversation.

On anything else he’d like to add (Stefano Tonchi): I would say quickly, touching on diversity, that’s also part of our DNA too, in terms of how the magazine relates to different cultures and how it also presents many points of view. This is not a magazine that has one vision. I really let my editors express their personalities; I think that’s very important. It’s a magazine that has a lot of personalities and people who come from all over the world, so that’s kind of our way of being really diverse.

On what motivates him to get our bed every morning (Stefano Tonchi): I’m very curious. I think curiosity is the most undervalued quality in people. A new exhibition, seeing what’s in the paper for that day; I’m just very curious about everything. What makes me get up every morning is questioning and discovering all the new things that the day might bring.

On what keeps him up at night (Stefano Tonchi): My kids very often. (Laughs) I don’t necessarily bring home my problems. The last couple of years have been very positive at the magazine. Clearly, I think a lot about how to bring this content to a new generation and how to keep our signature and our content branded, so that people understand that it comes from us, it’s not free, and that there are people who work very hard to make that happen.

On what keeps her up at night (Lucy Kriz): The question that keeps me up at night is how do we be as bold and provocative in digital as we are in print, because we’re not interested in doing what everyone else is doing. And we have a plan in place to do that. We love to foster innovation here at W and we support our teams and it’s an exciting moment for this brand.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Lucy Kriz, Publisher & Stefano Tonchi, Editor-In-Chief, W Magazine.

Samir Husni: As you have mentioned before; W Magazine is a collector’s item with every issue. Do you think you’ll ever reach the stage where digital can be a collector’s item?

Stefano Tonchi: I don’t think digital can be a collector’s item in that sense. I think that the idea of collecting something is having something tangible and that you can actually possess or have in your hand, so something that’s on a screen and is available to everybody is not really anything that you can collect.

I think that you can really have a lot of things on your desktop or on your mobile phone, in the sense that you collect movies, TV shows, music and images, but the type of collectability that we’re talking about is very different. A magazine is something that lives as a whole and not just as one story. A magazine is about the conceptualization of each image and the way each story relates to the other. It’s a living package, a living organism and it’s not just something that can be taken apart.

Samir Husni: You’ve been working with magazines for…

Stefano Tonchi: …for almost 40 years, I think. (Laughs) I had my first magazine when I was in high school, that’s when I started my first magazine; it’s my passion.

Samir Husni: How has the job of editor evolved through those years?

Stefano Tonchi: This is interesting because a lot of my colleagues would say it used to be pure and now it’s a lot of different things. Maybe it’s because that when I was 15 I started my magazine and I had to go and sell the ads, do the stories, hire and fire; I was playing all the roles, so the job was quite similar and still about making choices and taking responsibilities.

And you always have to think about your financial responsibilities. I’ve never had a job where I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted and everything else was taken care of for me. That’s something that I think is still a constant.

On the other hand, clearly it used to be only about editing a magazine on paper and all the people around you were working on paper and you were creating one product and that product was also from you to the readers. They might like it or not and they might write you back, they might come and protest at your door if you were a political magazine (Laughs), but it was still kind of a one-way communication. And it was also one medium and it was once a day, if it was a newspaper, or once a week or once a month. But it was something very specific and it was the final product when it was printed, it was there. You could not change it.

Today, we live in a completely different time. The digital revolution makes your magazine as though never finished basically, because your digital version is evolving continuously. It’s no longer a one-way conversation; it’s at least a two-way conversation. You continuously relate and hear back from your readers. And they want to be part of the magazine. They want to participate. There are magazines now that are just made by the contribution of the readers. I don’t know if that’s the right way or if you can really define it as a magazine, but it is a collection of things written by people.

Samir Husni: What was the nature of your first magazine that you created in high school?

Stefano Tonchi: Technically, I never changed my interest, because it was all about contemporary culture. That moment in time and place growing up in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s; it was about music and music was what we grew up with. I had so many friends who ended up working at Rolling Stone or Musical Express or other magazines of the 1980s.

Clearly, in the 1990s, I moved into the direction of fashion and design and architecture and all those kinds of areas that were probably more right for me at that moment, design in particular.

Recently at W, we’re doing a lot of art, but fashion is our bread and butter, but it’s always in the context of contemporary society. So, the magazine that I was doing when I was in high school was about the records we were listening to at the time, the people we were admiring and nothing has really changed; it was all about the people and the things that defined the times we were living in.

Clearly, my point of view was a little bit more provincial than it is now (Laughs), but by age 20, I had interviewed John Galliano and Yohji Yamamoto, people who are still alive and significant. I could still show you my magazine from those days.

Samir Husni: I would love to see them.

Stefano Tonchi: I have a deep love for paper.

Samir Husni: On a side note; I started at age nine and I still have three of my magazines that I created. There was no technology then, of course. When I needed pictures in my magazine, I would bring a candle and drop wax onto the paper and rub it across the surface and then rub the waxed paper on an old newspaper or magazine to lift the pictures. And after 40 or 50 years, they still look great.

Stefano Tonchi: Amazing, isn’t it?

Samir Husni: Lucy, let’s talk a bit now about the changing role of the publisher. I think the main role is still chief revenue officer, revenue, so that’s selling and selling and bringing in the money. Is your job easier or harder today? How have things changed over the years?

Lucy Kriz: It’s definitely changed. Sometimes I think that I became a publisher 10 years too late (Laughs), because it was just easier back then when you could make a phone call, have a meeting, talk about your unique selling proposition and in-book the pages. Now, we have really evolved from sales people to modern-day marketers. And it is a much more involved and strategic approach to partnerships, and I think in a way I didn’t come 10 years too late, I came at exactly the right time because that’s what invigorates me and gets me excited every day. It’s just more involved.

Instead of a more tactical transactional relationship, you’re having conversations about solving real business challenges and coming up with solutions that are much more than run a page in my magazine, right? So, the solution could certainly involve media, but it involves potentially experiential and social; it could involve really measuring a lot of factors, depending on the objectives of the client, it is just a much more in-depth approach.

Stefano Tonchi: It’s a 360° kind of service that you offer.

Lucy Kriz: And what you have to do is really think about who are the right partners; you have to prioritize your time. All of the time/energy resources that you put into every interaction have to mean something. So, you have to make sure that you’re doubling down on the clients who really understand your brand and W has a very specific brand. We’re a bold, provocative, differentiated brand now more than ever and that means something. And the world has come to W in a lot of ways, which we’re benefiting from; this is our third year of consecutive growth, in both print and digital, since I’ve been here, while most in the industry are declining. It’s the fifth year of growth since Stefano has been here. And that’s really important.

So, this brand has had consistent growth across all platforms and also growth in audience and relevance and that’s something that we’re really proud of. We’re the only brand in the competitive set to show print growth in paging and share this year. And obviously, we’re growing exponentially in digital, but the job has changed and it’s changed from when I was a salesperson 15 years ago to publisher, but in a good way. It’s very exciting.

Samir Husni: Literally, W Magazine stands apart from the competition…

Lucy Kriz: (Laughs) Literally; based on its size.

Samir Husni: (Laughs too) Based on its size. How do you use the uniqueness of the magazine’s size to your advantage when selling W? Or do you?

Lucy Kriz: When I came here, in a way I always felt like being different, oversized, bold, and provocative; that was our greatest strength, because every consumer and marketer wants to stand out. And our brand position and value proposition is “escape ordinary.” So, what does that mean?

There’s a sea of sameness in media and you can really look across the digital landscape certainly, it’s been commoditized enough, and even in magazines, and you don’t even know what anyone stands for anymore. And W has always been memorable. And so I absolutely use our oversized format and our bold editorial to sell. And to make sure that we’re highlighting that it’s really about the consumer who engages with the magazine because they love our editorial and believe it offers something different. And that audience is so desirable that it’s easy to bring that to a client, so how I then create the package is where the magic happens, right? But absolutely, I take our oversized format and our differentiation to market successfully.

Stefano Tonchi: It starts with the content and I think that we have a very specific point of view that is not only edgy and provocative, but very often it’s really like the insider point of view. Mr. Fairchild (John Fairchild – former editor-in-chief of Women’s Wear Daily and founder of W magazine), was obsessed with being an insider and with being first too. And he really wanted to have a voyeuristic look into the life of the rich and famous, for example his obsession with Jackie O. and the paparazzi and with what she was doing, what she was wearing; how she would keep herself beautiful and where she would go on holiday. And that was his attitude.

And interestingly enough, that is very much the attitude over the Internet, but we’ll go there when it’s time. (Laughs) I think that is really like the social set and the social scene; an insider point of view into that scene is like the core, the DNA of the magazine.

What I think has happened in the last 20 years, after Mr. Fairchild left his position as editor-in-chief of the magazine, is that the visuals also took a very important part of the DNA, especially a provocative type of photography. Fashion photography, portraiture, I think art photography; they all came together to define this brand in a new and different way. And through the 1990s, it really took on a strong personality.

It’s the first magazine where people like Steven Meisel, Mario Testino and Mario Sorrenti; like the most important 10 living photographers started their careers in W. Still today, I think it’s a magazine that has a strong recognition in the photography and art communities.

What I’ve done in the five years that I’ve been here is to maybe clarify our stand in the cultural context because sure, there’s always been a lot of art in the magazine, but there was never an art issue in December and two art issues every year and structured in a certain way. The same way we always had; W has a great tradition of covering Hollywood, it’s not that I invented anything, but they did inherit something called the Golden Globe issue that is kind of the opening of the Oscar season. And we made it really like something straight out of the awards. It’s probably our most important business proposition somehow, the Golden Globe Week and our presence.

We really push the Hollywood scene. I hire people like Lynn Hirschberg from The New York Times; I met her, and she has been my partner and is probably the best-known and most respected, for sure one of the most controversial, Hollywood journalists around today. She’s a great writer and has an incredible nose for what’s happening in pop culture today. She came to me and she said, ‘We have to do Kim Kardashian because the world of TV is changing, it’s all about reality TV, most of the programming is going to reality,’ and this was six years ago. I followed her clearly; I took my risk and we were early and everybody else followed.

We became very close with David Fincher and we did Rooney Mara on the cover. My first cover five years ago had Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Lawrence on it, two of the hottest actresses of that moment. And last April we had Alicia Vikander, she has seven movies coming out this year. She’s one of the hottest actresses today and we put her on the cover before anyone else.

We can take those risks, because in my mind, we don’t have to sell millions of copies at the newsstand; we’re very specific, but we also know who to put on the cover. We can take risks, but we take the right risks, I would say, and those risks have been paying off. Most of our covers really start conversations or they are of people who people do not know, but they soon discover them in a big way. Or we show people they do know in ways they’ve never seen them before. Take Jessica Chastain in the last cover that we did of her and it received so much exposure. Or the ones of Jane Fonda or the so many surprising women we have featured.

Samir Husni: Has this five-year journey been all smooth sailing or have you had some
choppy seas along the way?

Stefano Tonchi: Every year you have to prove what you can do. It was very hard at the beginning because I didn’t have the full knowledge of the magazine. The DNA of the magazine was very diluted and there was a lot of misunderstanding in what W meant and people were very confused about the magazine. It took a good two years and Lucy arrived at the right time and we have gone through a lot of problems, because when I took this magazine, it was at the lowest possible point it had ever been, so that was a marketing problem, but it was also a positioning and financial problem, just a lot of problems in a lot of areas. I was seduced by the history of the magazine, but it did have problems when I first arrived.

David Granger said something very interesting once, I don’t know if he said it in the interview you did with him too. But he said, ‘Sometimes your past is your worst enemy.’ So, everybody when I took this job at W five years ago could only remember the 1,000-page advertising issue or the great Brad and Angelina issue, they all had those in mind.

Lucy Kriz: The truth is this brand has so much life in it, with consumers and certainly with the industry. Stefano has really hit the ball out of the park over the last few years, just refining that vision and going back to our roots.

Now, that we’re incredibly successful, the challenge is how do we continue to keep this beautiful print product special and continue the growth? I believe we absolutely have runway in print, despite the decline in the overall print market, and we’ll scale digitally. And that’s really what’s exciting for both of us because we’ve achieved such great success in the past five years and there’s so much brand love. When we look at various studies and data about our readers and brand awareness; if they know us, they love us. So, how do we spread the brand love and how do we scale? And that’s been a really fun and exciting challenge for us.

Samir Husni: Lucy, has it been a beautiful rose garden for you, since you came after Stefano?

Lucy Kriz: I would say that I’ve never been happier in my life to be out in the market with this product. Is it a rose garden? I would say yes. When I can walk into any one of our partners, certainly in the luxury space, and now Coach’s, we’re one of their biggest partners, because they know that we have a really desirable consumer market, and to be honest, that particular consumer; we have more of them. So, it isn’t a struggle, it’s a joy and we love what we do. We are one of the only print magazines to really maintain a print audience as well so the audience is not declared in the same way either; certainly digital is leading a lot of audience growth, social in particular. It’s very exciting for us.

It’s interesting as far as spending power; I think we have the number one most affluent consumer and the most influential. When you’re talking about bringing a consumer to a marketing partner who is that desirable; it’s a pretty powerful proposition.

The challenge now is how do we expand on that partnership and bring it into digital and bring it into more of a 360-type relationship.

Stefano Tonchi: The last year has been incredibly interesting from my point of view and I would say that Lucy would probably agree, because we’ve kind of reached a great place when it comes to print. I think we have, I always say, the mothers of mothers; we have a very solid audience of women and some men who love this magazine and they’re very in touch with it. They understand what it is and they want more of it, but W isn’t for everybody, so in that group of audience I think we have them with us.

But suddenly we have exploded on social media; we have exploded with a completely new generation and I ask myself, do they know this is a magazine? What they love are the images. The images and the stories that we tell; they love the way we photograph people and the way we report even from the street, because our editors, especially the young ones, or the ones that are doing the social media, have a point of view. They show things from the main side. It’s never like the obvious. Not your usual picture of a cat or something. It’s always somebody in a provocative pose; there are a lot of celebrities in places and in ways that you don’t expect.

Our audience is 1.4 million in print and 7 million total with print, digital and social. It just exploded on digital. In one year, we’ve reached the top five in our building for Instagram followers. Why, because premium imagery means something, certainly on that front and content is king even on the Internet.

We have that generation that knows and loves paper, that generation of people who have grown up with W and they’ve had the magazine in their families forever. But now suddenly, we also have a new generation that I don’t think necessarily relates to the magazine, they’re really just in love with the images, totally mobile; they get our content on social media. So, our questions are how are we going to monetize that and how are we going to understand this audience and make them basically addicted readers or users, however you want to call them, but in a completely different media.

But the quality and the tone of the content is the same; it’s just delivered in different ways. You customize this content that we know on paper in the way that serves that specific platform. We may have a series of photographs on Instagram; a series of quotes on Twitter; we’ll show videos on Periscope; a mood board on Tumblr, and so on. And who knows what else is coming. We think we know, but Snapchat wasn’t around even two years ago, so who knows what’s next. It’s about customizing our DNA, our history and bringing it into the places where our readers are already, social media, and at the times and in the ways that they want to see it.

Lucy Kriz: And ultimately, this isn’t about reaching everyone even there. We’ve done market sizing and we know that we have a young, affluent audience now, we’re at number one with that and we’re trusted. And so how do we take some of the unexpected risks, taking the bold imagery that we do in print and then scale it across digital, making sure that we’re serving content to the right people, on the right platform. And that’s a fun thing for us to do and with our plans we expect to scale significantly within those target audiences of affluent millennials, culturally connected, those fashion and style enthusiasts.

Samir Husni: Can you ever imagine yourself editing W without the print edition?

Stefano Tonchi: I think that’s something that could happen; that’s like asking a film director if he could see himself directing movies only on Netflix, but why not? I think it has a lot to do with what digital media will offer as a platform. I believe there are a lot of new platforms that will come up. People didn’t think about TV as cable or premium, then suddenly it’s all about premium TV.

Everybody thought that serialization was the way to go, a little bit every week; suddenly we all look at shows, five episodes in a row or the whole season in one night. I think science and technology could really change our proposition, so yes, I can see myself working on digital media. Can I see myself just doing Instagram? That would be hard. (Laughs) But who knows what else digital technology will offer us.

There is so much happening. We’re in the middle of a huge revolution. We don’t even know where we’ll go. And at the same time, hopefully, and I really hope that the magazine on paper will not disappear. I think it will probably become more and more precious and something that we’ll want to hold onto since it offers something very special as an important object like a book.

Even books I think somehow on the one side are disappearing, but on the other side you have all of these photo books and large format-type books that are exploding everywhere. So, you’re living this contradiction of yes, we want to read a quick novel on our Kindle or iPad, on our digital device, but if you want to hold that book, you take an edition that actually has a hard cover and it’s tangible in your hands and actually tells a lot about who you are and your place in society, because it becomes a signifier. It’s very important. What you have on your coffee table is significant.

Samir Husni: Part of the DNA of W is the nudity; with Playboy removing its nudity, is W going to be the last standing magazine to maintain it?

Stefano Tonchi: I think what they’re doing is playing devil’s advocate. They remove it from the print pages and put it all online or something. It’s a bit like playing a game on that.

But we never do anything to provoke just for the sake of provoking. We’re not in the business of scandal; we’re not that kind of publication. What we do is really express the conscience of the time we live in and I think there have been times, especially in the 1990s, with certain kinds of images; W was there first. We worked with photographers who were expressing a sensibility of the moment.

We will follow wherever the culture and the social conversation takes us. We’ll cover up if that’s the conversation or we’ll undress if that’s the conversation. We are moved really by the creativity of our contributors. In the end, I’m very lucky to work with a lot of photographers, writers and stylists who are geniuses in their own right. They’re artists in their own right. And as all artists, they feel things, sometimes even unconsciously, before we rationalize them. Sometimes I see pictures or I see stories that express a feeling of happiness or frustration that is very much the feeling of the moment in a certain cultural environment. I don’t use boundaries when it comes to expression.

Lucy Kriz: There is a lot of creative freedom at W.

Samir Husni: If you look at most of the fashion magazines overseas, nudity is part of the equation. But when it comes to the United States; we are much more conservative. Does that have any impact on advertising? Has any advertiser ever said they were pulling their ad because of the nudity? Recently, Norm Pearlstine at the Folio show told us that 300 people canceled their subscriptions to Cooking Light because it has Michelle Obama on the cover. And that was the first time ever they had an actual person on the cover. And 300 people canceled their subscriptions.

Lucy Kriz: That’s interesting because it’s also about what the audience expects and about whom they are and are they curious and global. You’re talking about who our audience is, right? We’ve always been provocative and our audience is super-curious, they expect to be surprised and delighted.

And our advertisers are also interesting because the people that we work with want to be on the leading-edge. They come to W for a reason. There are some advertisers who don’t love our content and that’s OK. They can keep their money because there are more advertisers and we have great, great partnerships, who want to be a part of the culture conversation. What we did is we always put something in cultural contacts and we did something called “Privacy Settings” recently, which was a shoot with several top models, and it was certainly provocative and it created a cultural moment. And I don’t know many brands or publications that could create that kind of moment and “Nipplegate,” Chrissy Teigen, was a moment. And that was a big deal.

Stefano Tonchi: We started a conversation about whether Instagram should have censorship or not.

Lucy Kriz: This is a big deal in social media, should pictures be censored. Why is it OK for men and not women? I think that we as a brand feel very strongly about freedom of expression and creativity and I know Stefano gives his photographers a lot of elasticity. I don’t want to speak for him, but advertisers that we work with believe that is part of their brand ethos as well and feel very strongly that the consumer this content attracts is that culture creator consumer that is so powerful to them. And to convert that culture creator consumer for their brand is really important.

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

Stefano Tonchi: I would say quickly, touching on diversity, that’s also part of our DNA too, in terms of how the magazine relates to different cultures and how it also presents many points of view. This is not a magazine that has one vision. I really let my editors express their personalities; I think that’s very important.

It’s a magazine that has a lot of personalities and people who come from all over the world, so that’s kind of our way of being really diverse. We’re not only different, but really diverse inside our editorial content. It’s not about quota; it’s not about being politically correct; it’s really about an environment of multi-opinions and a magazine that offers a lot of points of view and actually cultivates those types of people with points of view and opinions. It’s never about fitting in; it’s about standing out. And that’s something that I believe in and that we try to do with every issue.

We also want to surprise. One of my missions is to surprise. You cannot just deliver the same package over and over. Diversity and you have to have a certain constant consistency of values, but really every month you have to surprise, every week and every day.

Samir Husni: What motivates you to get out of bed every morning and say it’s going to be a great day?

Stefano Tonchi: I’m very curious. I think curiosity is the most undervalued quality in people. A new exhibition, seeing what’s in the paper for that day; I’m just very curious about everything. What makes me get up every morning is questioning and discovering all the new things that the day might bring.

Samir Husni: Lucy, what gets you out of bed?

Lucy Kriz: My kids wake me up in the mornings. And I run to work every day. I have to say; I run to work.

Samir Husni: Hopefully, you don’t live in New Jersey. (Laughs)

Lucy Kriz: (Laughs too) No, I live here in the city. And I’ve never been more invigorated by what I do and what’s happening in the industry. We’re meeting these challenges head-on. We want to stay true to our DNA, which is bold and provocative and risk-taking.

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

Stefano Tonchi: My kids very often. (Laughs) I don’t necessarily bring home my problems. The last couple of years have been very positive at the magazine. Clearly, I think a lot about how to bring this content to a new generation and how to keep our signature and our content branded, so that people understand that it comes from us, it’s not free, and that there are people who work very hard to make that happen.

What worries me is that there is a lot of the younger generation who are used to getting everything for free on their phones or the web. They don’t understand how difficult it actually is to create good journalism, and when I talk about good journalism, I mean great stories and great interviews and great pictures, because to make that actress or that artist do something, you need a relationship, an investment and time and talent; it’s a lot of work to create one of our cover images. There is really a little army of people who work on them. I’m talking about talent, time and passion. It’s not just something that magically happens and then appears on the covers. And it’s perfect.

Samir Husni: Lucy, what keeps you up at night?

Lucy Kriz: The question that keeps me up at night is how do we be as bold and provocative in digital as we are in print, because we’re not interested in doing what everyone else is doing. And we have a plan in place to do that. We love to foster innovation here at W and we support our teams and it’s an exciting moment for this brand. And there is going to be a lot more to come. It’s just a really great time.

Samir Husni: Thank you both.

“The advantage that print has is really two-fold. One is that as digital media moves to the phone, it’s pretty easy to see what the difference is between digital media and print media. Print is just so much bigger and the display is huge, the colors are vibrant and you get to use design and it’s just a completely different experience. Fifteen years ago everybody was just trying to put what magazines did or what newspapers did onto a computer screen. And this is kind of the same thing. Now, what gets created for a phone is very different from what gets created for a magazine. In general, though there are some exceptions to this these days, what’s being created for a magazine is more ambitious and more sprawling and more built-to-last.” David Granger

“I’ve been discouraged and disappointed when people expressed this idea that inevitably print was going to go away. And it’s not just because I believe that it’s the greatest medium ever created. I think that there is some appeal to it that is being demonstrated all over again. You see sales in books, in paper, are climbing while the digital experience in books is beginning to decline.” David Granger

Esquire has been the original men’s magazine on style and fashion for the last 82 years. And with a legacy of quintessential content such as that, finding an innovative and creative way to present it to the masses and bring that premier information to life once again in new ways was the driving force behind Esquire Classic. Well, that and its prolific team led by their insightful Editor-In-Chief, David Granger.

David has been at the helm of Esquire for 18 years and knows a thing or two about what the magazine’s readers want when it comes to their essential dose of Esquire. He has immersed himself in the brand and believes the key to being a successful editor in 2015 is to be constantly open to new ideas and possibilities, whether his own or ones from his superb staff.

Recently the 1000th issue of Esquire was lovingly dressed (in Esquire-finest, of course) and sent on its way, with scores of references to people, events and articles of the last 82 years. And as an added feature to its readers, and through a partnership with Shazam’s new visual recognition technology, readers are able to use their mobile devices to connect directly from the print magazine to Esquire’s coverage of those moments within the new digital archive.

And also to celebrate the 1000th issue, Esquire joined forces with PRX, an award-winning public media company, to launch a podcast deconstructing classic non-fiction stories from the vault of the 82-year-old magazine that continues to push the envelope when it comes to narrative journalism. These podcasts will be published every two weeks. Talk about creative innovation.

I spoke with David recently about his time at Esquire and the many innovations and creative ways he and his team are constantly reinventing and reinvigorating the brand. It was a delightful conversation that took me back to the magazine’s past and invariably full-circle into its future. And truly it’s a given, no one knows Esquire like the man in charge.

So, I hope you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with the charismatic David Granger, editor-in-chief, Esquire, as you read how a legacy magazine can take a cue from its past and continue to flourish.

But first, the sound-bites:

On the last 18 years he’s spent at Esquire and what conclusions his own life has lead him to draw about the magazine: That’s such a good question. The only thing that seems to be consistent about Esquire is that for it to thrive we have to constantly think about how to reinvent and reinvigorate it and continue to enable it to address the desires and needs of our readers as the world changes. I can’t say that there’s something that we can do or have done consistently for 18 years, except to try and come up with new ways to use the magazine mediums. We try to find interesting new ways to use paper and ink and design and words.

On how busy he is as an editor in the 21st century and when he has time to sleep: I have really good people working with me and that enables me to entrust them with many responsibilities. I don‘t do this all by myself is what I’m saying. I think the key to being an editor now in 2015 is being constantly open to new things. I don’t have every idea but I have to be open to the possibilities when the people on my staff or people from outside my staff present me with new opportunities like the whole thing we’re doing now with the archive and with trying to make a business essentially out of our past. That wasn’t my idea, but I was open enough that I wanted to advocate for it with David Carey and the other people in the Hearst executive pool to make it happen.

On whether his editor’s role today makes him more of a curator than a creator, especially with the launch of Esquire Classic: It’s both. Yes, have the idea, but once Tyler had the revelation, I thought, wow, we have like hundreds and hundreds of audio interviews; what can we do with those? And then I think it might have been Cal (Fussman), who’s done the bulk of our “What I’ve Learned”s, who introduced us to an animator who’d actually animated an interview that Cal had done with Larry King just for his own purposes. And after that I knew that we could do this with a lot of people, so it’s not just being a curator, but it’s having the idea to do something different. Curating is very important, especially with the archive.

On whether he thinks there are more editors out there like him that believe in both print and other forms of expression: I think there are a lot of really excellent editors who believe in print, but also believe in expanding their creative impulses across other forms of expression too. I don’t think that I’m unique; I think there are more people who see the unique value of print, but also see the power of dissemination that’s offered by the web or other forms of digital media.

On whether there was ever a time in his career that he believes that print was a dying breed: No, I’ve never felt that. I’ve been discouraged and disappointed when people expressed this idea that inevitably print was going to go away. And it’s not just because I believe that it’s the greatest medium ever created. I think that there is some appeal to it that is being demonstrated all over again. You see sales in books, in paper, are climbing while the digital experience in books is beginning to decline.

On a major stumbling block he’s faced and how he overcame it: The biggest challenge for anybody is overcoming the conventional wisdom, because from 2008 and for at least five years after, the conventional wisdom was that print was a less exciting medium, which is kind of why I did all of those gimmicks because I wanted to prove that print was the most exciting medium ever. It makes your job even harder when you have to do your job, plus convince people as well as you can, that what your life’s work is will continue to be the most exciting medium that’s ever been invented.

On whether he thinks consumers today are gravitating more toward the tried and true brands that they’ve always known rather than the new ones that have come and gone: If that’s true I think it’s because in this generation that advertisers and marketers call millennials, there’s a hunger for the most overused term in marketing, which is authenticity. I believe a younger generation that’s looking for guidance looks to tried and true sources.

On what he might be doing in the evenings if someone came unannounced to his home: (Laughs) It depends on the season. When it’s warm, I’m usually sitting on my back deck with a glass of tequila and reading either a magazine or a book. But I could also be watching television, but yes, I think you would find me most likely having a drink and reading something, or enjoying dinner with my wife.

On anything else he’d like to add: I’m in the midst of a series of planning meetings for issues in 2016, so I’m intensely looking forward to what we’re doing and where we’re going. But I’m also finding that exploration of our past to be really fascinating. It’s just so cool that in addition to the archive, we’ve also launched this podcast series called Esquire Classic that dovetails with that. So, the archive is promoting the fact that we are using elements from our archive, whether it’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald story or a Nora Ephron story, to create new forms of entertainment in this podcast that we’re doing with PRX that we recently launched.

On what keeps him up at night: I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately. It’s been an extremely good year and I guess that’s my answer; I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately.

And now for the complete, lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ conversation with David Granger, editor-in-chief, Esquire magazine.

Samir Husni: David, you’ve published at least one-fifth of all the issues Esquire has done in its entire history, and if my math is correct, that would be about 200 issues under your belt.

David Granger: Yes, it’s more than 200, but I don’t know exactly how many.

Samir Husni: But it’s around one-fifth of the total number of issues.

David Granger: Right.

Samir Husni: You took the job in 1997 and Esquire was a completely different magazine then than it is today. Through those 18 years, what conclusions has your own life lead you to draw about the life of Esquire over the last 18 years?

David Granger: That’s such a good question. The only thing that seems to be consistent about Esquire is that for it to thrive we have to constantly think about how to reinvent and reinvigorate it and continue to enable it to address the desires and needs of our readers as the world changes.

I can’t say that there’s something that we can do or have done consistently for 18 years, except to try and come up with new ways to use the magazine mediums. We try to find interesting new ways to use paper and ink and design and words.

The only thing that I can think of that we’ve done the entire time is this column called “What I’ve Learned,” which seems to have some enduring appeal because we do exactly what you’re asking me to do right now; try and draw conclusions and wisdom from them. And that has proved to be sort of eternally entertaining or gratifying to our readers. But other than that I think we’ve changed just about everything.

Samir Husni: With the column “What I’ve Learned” and in just taking a look at the older issues of Esquire; you’ve left almost no one out when it comes to learning something from them, from God to just about every mortal. (Laughs)

David Granger: (Laughs too). Are you saying we should be running out of subjects?

Samir Husni: (Laughs again) You have all the angels left, you can expand on them.

David Granger: (Continues to laugh).

Samir Husni: When you started 18 years ago, you knew exactly what the job of editor entailed. Today, if I follow what you do in just one week, the question that comes to my mind is when does David have time to sleep?

David Granger: I have really good people working with me and that enables me to entrust them with many responsibilities. I don‘t do this all by myself is what I’m saying.

I think the key to being an editor now in 2015 is being constantly open to new things. I don’t have every idea but I have to be open to the possibilities when the people on my staff or people from outside my staff present me with new opportunities like the whole thing we’re doing now with the archive and with trying to make a business essentially out of our past. That wasn’t my idea, but I was open enough that I wanted to advocate for it with David Carey and the other people in the Hearst executive pool to make it happen. That started more than two years ago when I was able to convince Hearst to allow Tyler Cabot to accept a Nieman fellowship. And nobody in the Hearst magazine division had ever been offered or accepted a Nieman before, so they had to make an exception. Their policy is to allow that to happen and they did.

When he got back and he had a billion different ideas of new ways to both tell stories and sell stories, I had to advocate for his ideas with David and get him to approve a modest budget so that we could move forward.

It’s been amazing, but as the editor I don’t always have all the ideas, I just have to be open to the best ones or the ones that seem like they can lead us to someplace that enhances the potential of the magazine. And this idea of trying to use elements of the magazine’s past to create something that’s completely new is thrilling to me right now. We’ve been working on this for 2½ years, this notion and how to bring it to life. And I think it’s really something that’s pretty unique and it’s exciting. It’s going to do good things for us.

In my editor’s letter about this issue, I talk about this idea of “the eternal now,” how more than ever everything is present and my metaphor was when the iTunes store launched I would see my daughters browsing it and occasionally buying music from it, and they weren’t buying music because it was new, they didn’t know if they were listening to the Beatles and a song that came from 1967, they were just experiencing it as something new. And I think that’s what’s happening with the archive that we’ve created and launched. And with several other projects as well.

What we’re doing is we’re taking things that were created decades ago in many cases and we’re making them completely new to people who were never aware of their existence, which is just fascinating.

We did that with the “What I’ve Learned” mini-site that we created on the medium platform where we used the old interviews from “What I’ve Learned.” We actually had the audio and we turned them into animations. So, we had a three minute animation of George Clooney’s “What I’ve Learned” and a three minute animation of Tom Cruise’s “What I’ve Learned” and we did eight or ten others. And then we did a lot of original ones and some classic ones and created a whole new experience for people who were probably never aware that Esquire did this. And we got Microsoft to sponsor it and actually made some money.

It’s like this whole idea of taking things that we created a long time ago and giving them new life; I think it has a ton of potential and it’s really exciting right now.

Samir Husni: Does that put more responsibility on the editor to be more of a curator, rather than just a creator?

David Granger: It’s both. Yes, have the idea, but once Tyler had the revelation, I thought, wow, we have like hundreds and hundreds of audio interviews; what can we do with those? And then I think it might have been Cal (Fussman), who’s done the bulk of our “What I’ve Learned”s, who introduced us to an animator who’d actually animated an interview that Cal had done with Larry King just for his own purposes.

And after that I knew that we could do this with a lot of people, so it’s not just being a curator, but it’s having the idea to do something different. Curating is very important, especially with the archive.

And that’s what’s radically different about Esquire’s archive from any magazine archive that’s come before. Most magazine archives, or all of them that I know of, they’re just sort of presented for you. Here it is. It’s from The New Yorker and it’s organized by issue date and cover and there is a search function, but they don’t actively tell you what you might be interested in reading. So, we created a homepage that is distinct from the archive platform, but it dovetails with it, on which we take news events and say, OK, this happened today, people could be interested in reading this. Recently when the MacArthur grants were announced, we went back into the archive and found all the MacArthur geniuses who had written for Esquire in the past. And we surfaced their stories.

Or when Elon Musk recently launched a new model X, we resurfaced Tom Junod’s epic profile of Elon and promoted it on the homepage of the archive. So, we’re giving people the sense that the past is urgent. In order to understand the present, you can come to us and we can help you put things that are happening right now into context.

Samir Husni: You’ve always been a defender of print and talked about the necessity of print, but you’re always looking to all the other platforms or media and everything that’s out there. In fact, on the web you identify yourself as the editor of Esquire magazine, not just Esquire. Why do you think we don’t have more David Granger’s out there?

David Granger: I think there are a lot of really excellent editors who believe in print, but also believe in expanding their creative impulses across other forms of expression too. I don’t think that I’m unique; I think there are more people who see the unique value of print, but also see the power of dissemination that’s offered by the web or other forms of digital media.

It’s a cliché, but look at Adam Moss who creates a great magazine and whose web offshoots are as exciting as anything on the Internet. The guys at Fast Company in ink work really hard across all sorts of media without ever thinking that print is the ugly cousin. I think there are a number of people who are thinking in all of these different ways, while continuing to try and improve what they do in print. And they seem even more vital and special.

The advantage that print has is really two-fold. One is that as digital media moves to the phone, it’s pretty easy to see what the difference is between digital media and print media. Print is just so much bigger and the display is huge, the colors are vibrant and you get to use design and it’s just a completely different experience.

Fifteen years ago everybody was just trying to put what magazines did or what newspapers did onto a computer screen. And this is kind of the same thing. Now, what gets created for a phone is very different from what gets created for a magazine. In general, though there are some exceptions to this these days, what’s being created for a magazine is more ambitious and more sprawling and more built-to-last. I think more than ever, and I see this when I go out and talk to advertisers around the country, that they’re beginning to see that we’re not even in the same game. Digital media has created one thing and print is creating another and they’re probably appealing to different kinds of people in large part. So, you have to create advertising and marketing that’s unique to those forms. I think you kind of have to keep your feet in both camps while you’re trying to do amazing things in each.

Samir Husni: You’re one of the few editors that I’ve met who never lost faith in print. Am I dreaming that fact about you or did you believe at one stage in your career that print was dying?

David Granger: No, I’ve never felt that. I’ve been discouraged and disappointed when people expressed this idea that inevitably print was going to go away. And it’s not just because I believe that it’s the greatest medium ever created. I think that there is some appeal to it that is being demonstrated all over again. You see sales in books, in paper, are climbing while the digital experience in books is beginning to decline.

There’s just an inherent appeal to it that, even if you don’t do anything extraordinary, is going to survive. But then when you take the advantage of the print, the things that get me excited that we’ve done to try and expand what print can do then I think it will have a long and colorful and wonderful life. I’ve always believed that and I’ve been open to the possibility that I was completely wrong, but as it turns out my and my staff’s faith in our medium has been rewarded for quite some time.

Samir Husni: For you personally, what has been the major stumbling block that you’ve faced and how did you overcome it?

David Granger: I would say that each year every editor in the business is faced with trying to do the things that we value and the things that make a magazine successful with slightly fewer resources. So, you have to be endlessly creative on how you get the most out of the dollars you spend.

But that’s been true for every year of the 18 years that I’ve been at Esquire. We’ve produced cost for at least 17 of those 18 years. There might have been one year where we stayed about level with the previous year. And that’s always a little bit of a challenge, but we’ve sort of gotten used to that.

The biggest challenge for anybody is overcoming the conventional wisdom, because from 2008 and for at least five years after, the conventional wisdom was that print was a less exciting medium, which is kind of why I did all of those gimmicks because I wanted to prove that print was the most exciting medium ever. It makes your job even harder when you have to do your job, plus convince people as well as you can, that what your life’s work is will continue to be the most exciting medium that’s ever been invented.

Those are like little stumbling blocks, but mostly the hardest thing is having good ideas. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

David Granger: But that’s the joy of the job too.

Samir Husni: As we look ahead to the next five years; I feel, at least as an outsider looking in, there’s some sort of resurgence of men’s magazines, such as Esquire and GQ, they seem to be getting fatter and bigger. Do you think that our audience, our consumers, our customers out there are gravitating more toward the tried and true brands that they’ve always known, rather than the new brands that have come and gone, and if so, why?

David Granger: If that’s true I think it’s because in this generation that advertisers and marketers call millennials, there’s a hunger for the most overused term in marketing, which is authenticity. I believe a younger generation that’s looking for guidance looks to tried and true sources. I just think that we can be trusted in a way that some newer brands can’t. Newer brands have the advantage of being exciting and groundbreaking and all of those things, but I do think there is a valued heritage and that may be part of why some of these well-established brands are having a pretty good run right now.

Samir Husni: If I was ever to visit you unannounced at your home, what would I catch David doing in the evening? Are you reading a magazine or a book on your iPad or none of the above?

David Granger: (Laughs) It depends on the season. When it’s warm, I’m usually sitting on my back deck with a glass of tequila and reading either a magazine or a book. But I could also be watching television, but yes, I think you would find me most likely having a drink and reading something, or enjoying dinner with my wife. When I’m home, I’m pretty low-key. I dabble in watching sports and television series, but when I’m home it’s mostly time for some kind of relaxation or meeting with friends.

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

David Granger: I’m in the midst of a series of planning meetings for issues in 2016, so I’m intensely looking forward to what we’re doing and where we’re going. But I’m also finding that exploration of our past to be really fascinating. It’s just so cool that in addition to the archive, we’ve also launched this podcast series called Esquire Classic that dovetails with that. So, the archive is promoting the fact that we are using elements from our archive, whether it’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald story or a Nora Ephron story, to create new forms of entertainment in this podcast that we’re doing with PRX that we recently launched.

I love doing original journalism, but I’m also really getting excited about doing completely novel things with archival material. It’s like to make the past present and it’s really exciting. It’s like a new way forward and I think there are many entities that have done that, whether it’s movie studios using their catalogue of old film, but it’s very rare in the magazine business that people have found a way to make the old both new and profitable. And I think it’s really exciting.

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

David Granger: I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately. It’s been an extremely good year and I guess that’s my answer; I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“I think forever and always there will be an audience for print. I don’t think the inevitable path for print is to go away, I don’t even think the inevitable path is for print to be some sort of retro-iconic version of what records are to music lovers. But what I do think is print will evolve and print will change and I believe the path that we’re on, expanding the size and the weight and increasing the experience for consumers as opposed to decreasing, which is what most of our competitors are doing, is the right path.” Howard Mittman

The pinnacle of men’s fashion and lifestyle, GQ Magazine is looking to the future with creative innovation and boldness, both with its print product and all of its digital facets. And the man leading and driving the brand into the future is celebrating his one year anniversary with the magazine this month.

Howard Mittman is gregariously passionate when he talks about the brand he now calls his own. Coming from Wired after serving as vice president and publisher; Howard took the technologically savvy magazine to new heights under his guidance and he’s doing the same with GQ.

I spoke with Howard recently and we talked about the changes that have already been implemented at GQ and a hint about a few that are in the works. It was a lively and enjoyable discussion that made me feel as if I was talking with Howard in the comfort of his living room at home. The man is personable, open and very knowledgeable when it comes to the role of publisher of a major magazine.

So, straighten your tie and polish your shoes (ladies too) and get ready to enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Howard Mittman, Publisher, GQ.

But first, the sound-bites:

On why if print is dead, the October issue of GQ is filled to capacity with advertising: Let me say first; print is not dead, a statement I’m fairly certain that you agree with. I truly think that print is evolving, and really all of media is evolving. So if you’re lucky enough to have the opportunity to work at a brand like GQ that is clearly number one in its category, whether you’re looking at fashion, style or just general interest for men, I have a really strong notion that we’ll be able to capture a significant part of the, not only advertising dollars, but the consumer mindset and attention that comes along with having a brand that’s more than a brand; it’s an adjective.

On how his approach has changed from being chief revenue officer at Wired to becoming chief revenue officer at GQ: One of the opportunities afforded to me at Wired was to be deeply immersed inside the digital culture. And the opportunity to take that kind of culture and bring it here is enormous. GQ, from a digital perspective, has a fair amount of really good things going on. Think about it this way for a second and this almost translates back to your first question about print being dead; every 60 seconds a consumer types in #GQ into Instagram. Every 30 seconds a consumer types in #GQ into Instagram and Facebook and every 20 seconds a consumer types in #GQ across all social media. That means consumers are associating their pictures, their friends and themselves with our brand. That’s a really powerful statement about what GQ is, what it means and the relationship it has with not only it’s current consumers, but with millennial and Gen Z consumers.

On whether he believes the tablet and the homepage are dead: So often in the industry things are cool, and shiny new objects get our attention, like dogs with firetrucks that go down the street, inevitably we realize that we can’t catch them. One thing I will say though, what happens is maybe tablets haven’t realized their full dream, in terms of transforming the entirety of our business, but they’re a really smart component to print. The whole direction of the future of Condé Nast and the industry of print has not been changed by tablets, but we still have 85 or 90,000 subscribers a month and it’s a really healthy component to print. And I think that’s the difference; we’re too quick to anoint new things as the next savior, or the next end-all-be-all versus the reality of them as just being a part of a larger story.

On whether GQ is doing anything different with its print product: We’re doing a few things that I think you might find really interesting. In September we pushed the cover price from $5.99 to $7.99. And we’ve seen no negative impact at all on sales; it’s been a really wonderful test that gives us a sense of the potential of elasticity on the consumer side. In December, we’ll be doing the same thing, but in addition to pushing the price, we’ll also be pushing the size of the folio. It’s going to be a larger folio and a heavier paper stock. Again, testing the consumer side’s demand for a product that we think can be more luxurious and look more like a coffee table book than a magazine. And I think the inevitable future of print is that it will become an enthusiast’s product; people who love it will love it.

On why it took so long for publishers, using Jim Nelson’s (editor, GQ) quote to “make print printier,” when it wasn’t too long ago everyone was decreasing their print product instead of increasing it: That’s a good question. I think ultimately like all businesses and all mediums everywhere, like television or radio, when you’re the only game in town; you tend to do things that work for that moment as opposed to building for the future. Who could have predicted that GQ’s Instagram feed would have 2 million followers or that Taylor Swift would have 50 million, right?

On any major stumbling block he’s faced and how he overcame it: The challenge has been transitioning the mindset and the behaviors of the team. What I’ve been really excited to find is that there was and is this absolute thirst to learn the secret sauce of what it means to exist in a multi-platform business and a digital environment. And I’ve seen this team, on both ad and edit, and not all because of me, run toward this opportunity to transform themselves in so many different ways.

On how his role of publisher/chief revenue officer has changed over the years since the dawn of the digital age and is it easier or harder: We’re competing with startups that don’t care about profit, but care about evaluation. In video we’re competing against broadcast, networks and cable networks; in digital we’re competing against social networks; in events we’re competing against event spaces. So as we continue to grow this footprint, to grow this brand, we’re seemingly in competition with everyone. That’s the challenge. And there are only so many hours in a day and you have to figure out how and where to focus your attentions. So, it is harder; I think it’s significantly harder. The flip side is this kind of challenge or opportunity, or these kinds of distribution mechanisms, digital and otherwise, interest you; I don’t think there has ever been a more interesting or exciting time to be in this seat or have this role.

On whether he can ever envision the GQ brand without the print component: I can envision it, but I don’t actually think it will ever happen. I think forever and always there will be an audience for print. I don’t think the inevitable path for print is to go away, I don’t even think the inevitable path is for print to be some sort of retro-iconic version of what records are to music lovers. But what I do think is print will evolve and print will change and I believe the path that we’re on, expanding the size and the weight and increasing the experience for consumers as opposed to decreasing, which is what most of our competitors are doing, is the right path.

On what motivates him to get out of bed every morning: I set the alarm for 5:23 and I go to SoulCycle most days before work, so that truthfully is what gets me out of bed. What gets me showered and to work is there’s a genuine level of enthusiasm here for this brand at GQ and for the opportunities that lay ahead. And some days I’m just completely left in awe at the level of intelligence and passion and dedication of the team here at GQ. They are some of the smartest people that I’ve ever worked with. And I think that what you find throughout this floor is that the cheekiness and the irreverence and the humor, the intelligence and the style that exists in the magazine and in the content online permeates the offices and the cubicles here in a way that I’ve never seen before.

On anything else he’d like to add: I’d like to talk about young talent for a second because we hear a lot about millennials and the challenges of working with millennials, but I’ve found the complete opposite hear at GQ. We’re surrounded by so many 20-somethings who work incredibly long hours and are passionate and dedicated and are the complete opposite of what popular culture and mass media would have you believe about that generation.

On what keeps him up at night: Finding a private school for my son. (Laughs) To be honest, I’m sleeping soundly with GQ, but the private school admission process in New York City is a daunting one for sure.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Howard Mittman, Publisher, GQ.

Samir Husni: If print is dead; why do I have to wait until page 56 to find the Letter from the Editor in the October, 2015 issue of GQ? It’s filled to capacity with advertising, what’s going on?

Howard Mittman: Let me say first; print is not dead, a statement I’m fairly certain that you agree with. I truly think that print is evolving, and really all of media is evolving. Television is probably going through what print went through three or four years ago. There are a lot of seismic shifts happening.

But from a print perspective, gone are the days when men are going to subscribe to three, four or five magazines. There’s just an infinite amount of choice and there’s an ability to find likeminded content almost anywhere these days, from your laptop to your phone to the screen inside your elevator.

So, I think what’s happened is men specifically, and I’ll speak about men since I know that market better, are looking to maybe invest in one magazine brand. And they’re looking at it not as a magazine; they’re looking at it as a media property that they can go deeper and wider into.

So if you’re lucky enough to have the opportunity to work at a brand like GQ that is clearly number one in its category, whether you’re looking at fashion, style or just general interest for men, I have a really strong notion that we’ll be able to capture a significant part of the, not only advertising dollars, but the consumer mindset and attention that comes along with having a brand that’s more than a brand; it’s an adjective. GQ is a heck of a lot larger than just two letters, it’s an actual representation of what it means to be an American gentleman; it’s a compliment.

From my perspective, magazines are evolving but strong brands and brands that even outpunch their weight, such as GQ, have a real opportunity in a variety of different ways and places.

Samir Husni: Coming from being publisher of Wired, you were used to working with people and technology. When you were offered the job of publisher at GQ, where you would be dealing more with humans-only and men specifically; can you take me back to that particular moment when you took the job and what you were feeling?

Howard Mittman: Probably wow; I’ve got to buy some new suits. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

Howard Mittman: (Laughs again).

Samir Husni: Can you tell me the difference in your approach from being the chief revenue officer at Wired to now the chief revenue officer at GQ? How has your modus operandi changed when it comes to selling, marketing and just taking care of your new brand?

Howard Mittman: One of the opportunities afforded to me at Wired was to be deeply immersed inside the digital culture. And the opportunity to take that kind of culture and bring it here is enormous.

GQ, from a digital perspective, has a fair amount of really good things going on. Think about it this way for a second and this almost translates back to your first question about print being dead; every 60 seconds a consumer types in #GQ into Instagram. Every 30 seconds a consumer types in #GQ into Instagram and Facebook and every 20 seconds a consumer types in #GQ across all social media. That means consumers are associating their pictures, their friends and themselves with our brand. That’s a really powerful statement about what GQ is, what it means and the relationship it has with not only it’s current consumers, but with millennial and Gen Z consumers.

It also speaks to the opportunities inherent from a social and digital perspective to us should we put ourselves in a position to capitalize on it. And I’ve spent the better part of the last year, along with Jim Nelson and Mike Hofman and a lot of really talented people here, doing just that.

We revamped the entirety of our web program from the CMS (Content Management System) the site runs on, to the homepage, to the article pages, to the mobile platform, the recirculation modules and the slideshows, to say nothing of the massive amount of content we’re now producing. We’re doing maybe 35 to 36 unique stories per day on GQ.com. We’re publishing across multiple platforms and doing it seamlessly and we’ve seen our track click increase from 6 million uniques to 11 million uniques. These are some miraculous jumps inside of a year and I think they hint at just the very beginning of what opportunities that we have digitally.

Wired helped me because I knew how to do this; GQ helps me because the enormity of the brand is unlike anything else, I think, in this entire industry. There are very few brands, maybe a Vogue that has that kind of presence, and so capitalizing on that and being able to stand on the shoulders of it is fun.

Samir Husni: The first time you and I met you were at Wired and you were showing me the Wired app.

Howard Mittman: I remember that, yes.

Samir Husni: Now I hear people in New York telling me that the tablet is dead, the homepage is dead; why do you think we’re so quick to welcome all of these new digital devices and platforms, yet so quick to bury them as well? Do you really believe the tablet and the homepage are dead?

Howard Mittman: So often in the industry things are cool, and shiny new objects get our attention, like dogs with firetrucks that go down the street, inevitably we realize that we can’t catch them.

One thing I will say though, what happens is maybe tablets haven’t realized their full dream, in terms of transforming the entirety of our business, but they’re a really smart component to print. And I think that what we’ve found is ultimately the tablet is in between a desktop and a laptop, but moreover it’s really much more of a consumption device than a production device. And in that, it’s more akin to a digital magazine than it is a mobile phone or a desktop, so sure, the whole direction of the future of Condé Nast and the industry of print has not been changed by tablets, but we still have 85 or 90,000 subscribers a month and it’s a really healthy component to print.

And I think that’s the difference; we’re too quick to anoint new things as the next savior, or the next end-all-be-all versus the reality of them as just being a part of a larger story.

Samir Husni: Why do you think now, more than ever before, that we’re seeing this resurgence of life to the print product, specifically GQ, it’s becoming bigger and fatter. Is it the whole combination of your process or are you doing something specific with print that you haven’t done before?

Howard Mittman: We’re doing a few things that I think you might find really interesting. In September we pushed the cover price from $5.99 to $7.99. And we’ve seen no negative impact at all on sales; it’s been a really wonderful test that gives us a sense of the potential of elasticity on the consumer side.

In December, we’ll be doing the same thing, but in addition to pushing the price, we’ll also be pushing the size of the folio. It’s going to be a larger folio and a heavier paper stock. Again, testing the consumer side’s demand for a product that we think can be more luxurious and look more like a coffee table book than a magazine. And I think the inevitable future of print is that it will become an enthusiast’s product; people who love it will love it. And what we’ll find inside that reaction of enthusiasts is that they’ll be willing to pay more for a product that has a greater level of luxury that gives them more of what they love about the medium and as Jim Nelson is fond of saying. “Makes print printier.”

We’re testing this now actively on the newsstand; we’re testing the size and the weight of the issue in December and I believe that will help us transition the kind of experience we deliver in print at the same time that we increase our digital offerings and make sure that we push content out across a variety of distribution mechanisms, because ultimately it’s the consumer who decides if they want to interact with GQ. We just happen to be fortunate enough to be in a brand they want to interact with in all these different places. Print will still be a big part of that.

Samir Husni: I’m delighted to hear that because I’ve always wondered why magazine publishers as a whole went through a period where they were decreasing the quality of paper and almost giving the magazine away. Why did it take us so long to quote Jim, “Make print printier?”

Howard Mittman: That’s a good question. I think ultimately like all businesses and all mediums everywhere, like television or radio, when you’re the only game in town; you tend to do things that work for that moment as opposed to building for the future. Who could have predicted that GQ’s Instagram feed would have 2 million followers or that Taylor Swift would have 50 million, right?

We used to own the printing press, literally and figuratively. Now, there’s a printing press in Taylor’s pocket; there’s a printing press in my pocket. As the world evolves, I think some of those decisions to decrease the point of entry for the price of the magazine to increase the scale of the audience and have that subsidized by advertisers, well, that model doesn’t work in the same way that it used to.

And so what we’re doing, in terms of pushing price and trying to move the brand out, is get it into a space where we can probably transition subscription through membership. That’s our goal. A subscription is $20 per year and someone sends a check. A membership is $60 or $100 or $200 or even $500 and it involves product boxes, samples or access to events and concierge services, and just a whole host of other things. All of those opportunities are being explored around this moment of disruption. And in spite of the disruption, it brings a ton of opportunities if you have a strong brand and strong connections with your community and GQ has both.

Samir Husni: Just from hearing you, it would seem that it’s been smooth sailing and full steam ahead during your first year as publisher of GQ. Have you had any moment that you would call a major stumbling block during this past year, and if so, how did you overcome it?

Howard Mittman: The challenge has been transitioning the mindset and the behaviors of the team. What I’ve been really excited to find is that there was and is this absolute thirst to learn the secret sauce of what it means to exist in a multi-platform business and a digital environment. And I’ve seen this team, on both ad and edit, and not all because of me, run toward this opportunity to transform themselves in so many different ways.

So, making sure you have the right people in place; making sure that you have the right mindset in place; these things are never easy and they take time. But from a digital perspective, whether it’s traffic or the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) we’re delivering for advertisers or the revenue that we’re bringing in, we’re so far ahead of where I thought we’d be at this time. But like always, there’s still work to do.

Samir Husni: Speaking of more work to do; comparing your job of publisher/chief revenue officer prior to 2007, prior to the dawn of the digital age, to today’s role; do you think the job has become easier or harder? How has it changed?

Howard Mittman: I was promoted to publisher in February 2009 at Wired, so I wouldn’t know what it was like before that. And that was the worst time to be promoted as far as the economy goes, by the way. (Laughs) But the job is significantly different. It’s significantly harder.

We’re competing with startups that don’t care about profit, but care about evaluation. In video we’re competing against broadcast, networks and cable networks; in digital we’re competing against social networks; in events we’re competing against event spaces. So as we continue to grow this footprint, to grow this brand, we’re seemingly in competition with everyone. That’s the challenge. And there are only so many hours in a day and you have to figure out how and where to focus your attentions. So, it is harder; I think it’s significantly harder.

The flip side is this kind of challenge or opportunity, or these kinds of distribution mechanisms, digital and otherwise, interest you; I don’t think there has ever been a more interesting or exciting time to be in this seat or have this role. We are in this wonderful position where we get to look out onto the horizon and chart the course for what this business will look like in the next five,10 or 20 years. And that’s a really enviable position. And it’s probably the most fun thing we do. The decisions that we’re making now are building the foundation for what GQ will look like in the next 50 years and what the magazine will be. That definitely means longer days and a little less sleep and it means the era of the three-martini lunch is long gone and won’t be coming back. But I love my job and I think it’s so much fun to have this opportunity to do more than just sell a page for a color bleed.

Samir Husni: Can you ever envision the GQ brand without the printed magazine?

Howard Mittman: I can envision it, but I don’t actually think it will ever happen. I think forever and always there will be an audience for print. I don’t think the inevitable path for print is to go away, I don’t even think the inevitable path is for print to be some sort of retro-iconic version of what records are to music lovers

But what I do think is print will evolve and print will change and I believe the path that we’re on, expanding the size and the weight and increasing the experience for consumers as opposed to decreasing, which is what most of our competitors are doing, is the right path.

And when you look at things like GQ Style, which is our biannual magazine that we produce; we’ve seen enormous consumer success with that, and it sells for $13.99 on the newsstand and it’s up 30% every year. So, again there are opportunities for expansion in print if you can find the right opportunity to hit the cross-section between advertiser and consumer interest. And I think some of those specialty properties like GQ Style are doing a really nice job of that.

Samir Husni: Can you expand a little bit on the whole idea of the GQ membership; are you going full-force with that and testing it now as we speak?

Howard Mittman: We are testing it now, but I probably don’t want to get too far down the path with that, but we are in the middle of doing a handful of tests that are producing great excitement about the possibilities of what this could do to transform the subscription model here.

Samir Husni: As you celebrate your first anniversary as publisher of GQ; what motivates you each morning to get out of bed and say it’s going to be a great day?

Howard Mittman: I set the alarm for 5:23 and I go to SoulCycle most days before work, so that truthfully is what gets me out of bed. What gets me showered and to work is there’s a genuine level of enthusiasm here for this brand at GQ and for the opportunities that lay ahead.

And some days I’m just completely left in awe at the level of intelligence and passion and dedication of the team here at GQ. They are some of the smartest people that I’ve ever worked with. And I think that what you find throughout this floor is that the cheekiness and the irreverence and the humor, the intelligence and the style that exists in the magazine and in the content online permeates the offices and the cubicles here in a way that I’ve never seen before. And so there’s a collegiality and a level of dedication and pride for what we do that I’ve never had the opportunity to work with in that level of intensity before. Coming here to work every day is a treat and I’ll do it as long as Bob and Chuck let me.

Samir Husni: If I met you on the streets of New York today, would I say that you’re definitely a GQ man?

Howard Mittman: (Laughs) It’s funny; I laugh because I think the power of the GQ brand when it comes to fashion and style is such that the things I wore at Wired that no one noticed, I think they’d notice now. I have a feeling that I could come in wearing tuxedo pants and a Knicks jersey and people would think that’s in style just because I work at GQ. (Laughs) It’s hard for me to say.

But if you’re lucky enough to see folks like Jim Moore, Mark Anthony Green, Will Welch and Jim Nelson come in everyday, you can figure out ways to copy a little ebit of what they do so you look better than most, but never as good as them.

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

Howard Mittman: I’d like to talk about young talent for a second because we hear a lot about millennials and the challenges of working with millennials, but I’ve found the complete opposite hear at GQ. We’re surrounded by so many 20-somethings who work incredibly long hours and are passionate and dedicated and are the complete opposite of what popular culture and mass media would have you believe about that generation.

And I think part of the reason that we’re able to have that is because while startup brands and places like Google and Twitter seem like wonderful opportunities for young talent, the truth is that in the same way that it was true in the 70s, 80s and 90s coming with us is an incredible experience and incubated unlike anything else we’ve ever seen.

And the way that this company, and not just GQ, but this entire company is pushing out into digital and social, events and licensing and a whole host of other places, the access and the opportunity you get on these brands is unmatched, I think. We don’t produce people or brands that stay in one specific vertical. We don’t produce linear opportunities for knowledge and I think I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by so many smart, talented young people who see that. And I wish that was spoken about a little more frequently inside of magazines and with the popular press because these jobs are a treat, a pleasure and a privilege and we’re always looking for smart people.

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

Howard Mittman: Finding a private school for my son. (Laughs) To be honest, I’m sleeping soundly with GQ, but the private school admission process in New York City is a daunting one for sure.

Samir Husni: Thank you.