Mr. Magazine

Sit back and count yourself “Fortunate” as you enjoy Andy Serwer and Mr. Magazine™ as they ponder the bliss that is Fortune!

When the economy busted in 2009, magazines in general were hit hard, and business magazines specifically were hit even harder. And if the economy bust was not enough, the digital burst landed with a bang in and around the media business. Publishers could not tell whether to blame the economy or the technology for the decline in the magazine business. Fortune magazine is used to bad times. It was born in the worst of times. So, if anyone knows how to adapt to the bad times, Fortune should be the one.

The man behind Fortune is Andy Serwer, the magazine’s managing editor (i.e., editor of the magazine in Time Inc. lingo). Andy was my guest at the CPR for Magazine Media in New York City last month. I conducted a morning conversation with Andy at the event. What follows are the sound-bites of this conversation followed by the entire lightly edited transcript of the entire conversation. The conversation is engaging and lengthy, so feel free to print the blog, grab a class of wine and enjoy reading the fortunes of the man behind Fortune.

First the sound-bites:

Sound-Bites:

On how Fortune magazine has managed to withstand tough times and be “Fortunate” enough to still be around: I think this, maybe speaks to perseverance and staying with it and understanding if you have premium content and you really stick to your guns and stick to your knitting you can be successful.

On the “reinvention” of Fortune: One thing that I’ve come to realize in this transition to digital is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet and if you’re sitting there waiting for something to happen, to come along, to totally transform this business, to make everything OK then forget about it.

On the steps it took to reinvent Fortune: We looked at our strengths and our opportunities and we tried to match them up and proceed. One thing we have at Fortune for instance, right away I realized, were these franchises — these sorts of brands within brands, and I think those are very important and I’ll explain.

On the role of an editor in today’s magazine media world: Now I have a challenging magazine environment, I’ve got this digital platform, which is really hard to figure out and of course there’s digital dimes and nickels versus print dollars and trying to get people to do that.

On being “spun off” by Time-Warner and the future of Fortune magazine: I think it’s a great thing that we’re being spun off. We were a little tail on a big media company dog.

On the added duties of journalists today and the amount of time they have to complete it all: I think about that every second of the day and I think about my personnel and it’s really tough because I’m scared about burning them out.

On what keeps him up at night: All of the above. I actually have been sleeping less well over the past three years. There is just so much.

On his disdain for special issues of magazines: “…I’m not big on special issues. I don’t like special issues — like “the food issue.” Some people like them, but I happen to not like them. This is purely as a consumer. The New Yorker is a magazine that I admire, but when they do a special issue, I’m frankly a lot less interested. I like the curated, general interest of each magazine.”

On the brand dilution that has stemmed from the Fortune/CNN Money partnership: That’s an interesting question. CNN Money, that kind of speaks to the difficulty of building a brand. CNN Money doesn’t’ have the same brand power that Fortune does. You’re putting together a joint venture and slapping a name on it. That’s not really brand building.

On what worries him about as the responsibilities of a journalist increase: I think about that every second of the day and I think about my personnel and it’s really tough because I’m scared about burning them out.

On the role of advertising in magazines: Our magazine, InStyle, Vogue at Condè Nast, Cosmo at Hearst — they’re all putting out their biggest issues ever. Why is that? Because if you ask a reader of those magazines if they would buy those magazines if there were no ads in it they’d say of course not. Those ads are part of the experience. And advertisers say “Hallelujah!”

And now the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ interview with Fortune Managing Editor – Andy Serwer.

Samir Husni: When Fortune magazine was launched in the midst of the depression it was the worst time anyone could ever publish a business magazine. Henry Luce published Fortune and charged a $1 cover price when everything else was calling for five cents and 10 cents. Is there a good time to publish a magazine and what can you tell us about the beginning of Fortune — how was Fortune fortunate to launch in the worst of economic times and still be with us after all these years?

Andy Serwer: First of all to give you a little color on that launch, if anyone cares about Great Depression launches of magazines, it’s interesting because you have to remember leading up to that we were in a great economic boom. The stock market was going like crazy and there were the flappers and all that. And so it seemed like a great time to launch a new magazine, particularly a new business magazine in 1928-29 when the business plan was put together.

So, Henry Luce got a great response initially in 1929. The fall of 1929 came and there was a very serious stock market crash and his backers and bankers asked him if he was sure he wanted to go ahead with this because it looked like things had gotten rocky all of a sudden. And Luce reportedly said he thought it would pass, you know it’s just a little hiccup in the market. The first thing always looks like a little bit of a hiccup and that’s what he thought.

So they decided to launch in February of 1930. At that point, you don’t see that you’re heading into the teeth of The Great Depression. Had he known that, maybe he wouldn’t have been so brave.

But he didn’t know that. Fortunately he went ahead and launched. Yes, indeed it was a dollar an issue or $10 for an annual subscription. It was a monthly back then. Obviously things just got worse and worse. Back then of course the top one percent or 10 percent was still doing OK which is primarily what the magazine was targeted to at that point.

While it was tough sledding it wasn’t impossible. It’s interesting because we have an international licensee in Korea which launched Fortune Korea in 2009 and that looked very, very difficult also and we had the same conversation saying, you know we launched in 1930 and you’re launching in 2009. And in fact, Fortune Korea is doing very, very well right now.

I think this, maybe speaks to perseverance and staying with it and understanding if you have premium content and you really stick to your guns and stick to your knitting you can be successful but you’re going to be having a lot of discussion with various constituents saying you shouldn’t do this, you can’t do this, you need to be shutting down, you need to reduce your trim size, you need to go to lesser quality paper, you need to go to cut your frequency, you need to fire your journalists, you need to reduce costs, you need to cut costs and maybe you need to shut this down. And you’re going to constantly hear this kind of stuff.

And in fact I’m sure that people hear those kinds of comments and get in those kinds of discussions all the time right now. So, the environment is tough and you pick and choose because I think in some instances compromise is the right thing to do but you really have to understand who’s reading your magazine and who’s advertising your magazine and does it make sense when people ask you to make those compromises.

SH: You had the same opportunity when you became editor of Fortune and then when the economic crisis or when the economy busted in 2009, but yet you were able to reinvent Fortune. We see all the numbers — your circulation is up, there’s your global edition, you’re all over the world and your brand is as solid as it was back then. The storm has passed. How did you go through the reinvention of Fortune and how did you survive the business and economic meltdown of 2009?

AS: Well, it really was a trial by fire and it was kind of like holy what a great thing when I became editor of this magazine in 2006 and then afterwards it became obvious pretty quickly that there were some ants at the picnic to put it mildly.

What happened, of course, is that we’re going through this secular change which is to say the transition to digital that all of us are going through, and at the same time there was a cyclical downturn which is to say 2009 was very, very difficult. And frankly our costs were out of line and our business side and the other side — we probably weren’t paying as much attention as we should to our cost bases. And we did have to cut back.

One thing that I’ve come to realize in this transition to digital is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet and if you’re sitting there waiting for something to happen, to come along, to totally transform this business, to make everything ok then forget about it.

I think what made us think that this might be possible is I looked at the music business and I said OK the music business was in crisis and terrible turmoil and then Steve Jobs just poof came up with iTunes. Now, iTunes wreaked a lot of havoc on the legacy music companies, but it did reinvent the music business onto the digital platform and successfully transitioned there.

Now, since iTunes there have been new business models such as Spotify and Pandora, but that was the great demarcation point to turn that business into a digital platform and move forward.

For print it just doesn’t seem that easy, does it? Off course, Apple is doing its thing, Amazon’s doing its thing, Flipboard is doing its thing, Pulse is doing its thing and it makes it very, very complicated for all of us because there are a million different choices and a million opportunities.

But what it means is instead of waiting for one lightning bolt to come out of the sky you have got to do a million things right — both on the editorial side and the publishing side. It’s just like what they used to say is old Big Ten football, like three yards and a cloud of dust: Just keep grinding and going forward and making a lot of decisions.

I think focus is a very, very important thing because you are going to be faced with just a huge array of choices, you know, because like I said the Pulse people are going to come in your office and say you need four people at your magazine working on Pulse. It’s like, well maybe you don’t, but they’re going to convince you that you need to. Anyway, what we tried to do is to just do a million different things. So, focus and try to do a lot of things right.

SH: Can you take us through the reinvention process? How can you take those one million things and put them in maybe four or five steps for someone if they’re trying to reinvent their magazine and they were hit by this double whammy, the economy bust and the technology burst? What should an editor do — how did you do it?

AS: We looked at our strengths and our opportunities and we tried to match them up and proceed. One thing we have at Fortune for instance, right away I realized, were these franchises — these sorts of brands within brands, and I think those are very important and I’ll explain.

So our franchises at Fortune include the Fortune 500, which is the largest 500 companies in the US and we have the Global 500, which is the list of the 500 largest global companies.

The Fortune 500 is actually a stronger brand than Fortune. A lot of times I’ll get in a taxi cab in a city and a cab driver will ask me what I do. And I’ll say I’m editor of Fortune and they’ll always say “oh Fortune 500.” So boy what can you do with that?

And besides that we had other franchises as well. Our most powerful women’s franchise is incredibly powerful and growing. Best company to work for, most admired companies, 40 under 40, 40 hottest business leaders under 40 years of age.

And what I realized is that we needed to grow these franchises and really push them out on digital platforms and then also something we’ve been very strong in as well are live event conferences.

So we tried to make sure that we have these three platforms, magazine, platforms and live events and then drive advertising across all three platforms. So when someone is sponsoring one of our live events, we would also encourage them to also buy advertising in the magazine and on our website as well.

The other thing is, we’re not at 18 issues a year and I want to make sure that every issue has one of these franchises. I’m not talking about special issues — I’m not big on special issues. I don’t like special issues — like “the food issue.” Some people like them, but I happen to not like them. This is purely as a consumer. The New Yorker is a magazine that I admire, but when they do a special issue, I’m frankly a lot less interested. I like the curated, general interest of each magazine.

But to have a franchise like our “40 Under 40” in our magazine — which drives advertising into the magazine — advertisers want to not only be close to that particular section, that particular franchise, but then what happens is they’ll just want to be in that issue overall and that’s where you really hit the sweet spot because then you’re able to do all kinds of edit. Of course, advertisers more and more want sponsored edit — edit they are closer to — and I’m sure that’s something we’ll be talking about today.

SM: You’ve been named one of the leading business journalists in the country from a journalism point of view. How have all these things impacted the role of an editor of a magazine? Did it take away from the journalism skills and make you compromise a little bit or is this the best time of your life as the editor of a magazine?

AS: Well, I’m busy I’ll tell you that. You know, and I talk a lot to the editor in chief of Time Incorporated, it was a guy named John Huey who recently left after serving a number of years. And he was editor of Fortune in the late 1990’s, which was an incredible time for Fortune and for many magazines in general. That was the tech boom and we were getting so many ads at that point that literally, and I was a writer at that point, they’d send us out to do more stories because we had too many ads. It was just mind boggling. At one point, we actually had to just put out a whole special issue and we just kind of called it the digital issue.

What was happening back then, just as a quick aside, is that during the tech boom these companies would get funding from say Kleiner Perkins, the big venture capital firm in the Bay Area in Palo Alto, and they’d get their round of $50 million of funding and they’d look at John Doerr, who’s the head of Kleiner Perkins, and they’d say, “what should we do?” And John would say go brand yourself and then we’d have an ad salesmen right at the door as they walked out. Literally that’s how it worked.

It was pretty amazing — Food Puppet, Sock Puppet, Web Van, I mean all these companies that don’t exist anymore, were advertising in the magazine. Basically there wasn’t a real Web at that point, there wasn’t much of a Web business, so it was really you’re putting out a magazine with all these ads.

So I talked to John about it and how quickly things have changed. Now I have a challenging magazine environment, I’ve got this digital platform, which is really hard to figure out and of course there’s digital dimes and nickels versus print dollars and trying to get people to do that. The live events business that we do now has gotten much, much bigger so we’re doing events in China, Europe, multiple events in the United States and that’s very time consuming and complicated.

Back in the 1990’s a guy was running a magazine and now we’re running a magazine, live events and digital. That’s one thing.

The second layer is sort of the transition to digital and doing that whole change over which kind of forms everything I do everyday. Right now, the third layer for us at Time Incorporated is that we’re being spun off from Time Warner which is another level of complexity as well that I hope none of you have to go as you’re simultaneously trying to run your magazines and your websites because it’s like playing a game of 3D chess against Mr. Spock. It’s like whoa. But you know we’re doing the best we can.

SH: I know this is like a segue, and we’ll go back to Fortune the brand, but since you’ve been spun off by Time Warner it’s my understanding that you’ve interviewed the new CEO, Joe Ripp at Time Inc. What can you tell us about where you are heading? Where is Time Inc. heading? That’s the 800-pound gorilla sitting in this room… What’s going to happen to Time Inc. and what’s going to happen to Fortune?

AS: I did interview Joe Ripp, the new CEO, at something called our quarterly management meeting, which is exactly what it sounds like. I think it’s 200 of the top executives of the company and we meet every quarter. I did a live interview with Joe in front of the group. It was actually a lot of fun and it was very refreshing. I will say this: Joe is our fifth CEO in three years. I mean that’s a lot of turnover as we say in the old county. So, it’s good to have some stability.

Joe worked in the company before and then he went into the digital place, into private equity, which is sort of a good skill set at this point and comes back somehow. He knows the company really well but he also knows the outside world, which is really great because you can get too insular.

I think it’s a great thing that we’re being spun off. We were a little tail on a big media company dog. And our CEO, actually wisely from our perspective, took that money and invested it in the Time Warner movie business and HBO and Turner which was probably a wise thing from his perspective because you get a higher return but it meant that our magazine company was somewhat starved for capital and had our hands tied that way.

We’re 10 percent of Time Warner and so we wouldn’t necessarily get the attention and love that we needed. Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, made it very clear he was going to focus the company and get rid of Time Warner Cable, which is just distribution of the cable company, of course AOL which they spun off as well and now we’re the third spin off, the magazine company, and now Time Warner is going to be solely a movie company and television company.

So, we’re going to be an independent public company, which is different and slightly daunting. You talk about some of the other companies — Meredith, Conde Nast and Hearst — they’re private and you could make the argument that it’s a good thing to be private during the transition that we’re all going through because it requires a longer time frame and the the public markets usually not so good with being patient that way.

But we all recognize that on the other hand I think it’s going to be great to have the visibility and the discipline because I think some of those companies that I’ve mentioned previously have suffered from a lack of discipline and you can make that case I think about Condé Nast, maybe in particular, and maybe Hearst, but I would say that about Condé Nast — perhaps they’re maybe getting their ducks in a row now.

But we’re going to be under the microscope and scrutinized and the decisions that we make, we’re going to be held accountable for those decisions. And I think there will be some good that will come from that.

It’s definitely good that we’re not going to be shipping our money up to Columbus Circle, which is where Time Warner is headquartered and we’ll be able to invest in our own things. I’m very excited for instance to be able to build out our website and our digital business. We have had a joint venture with CNN so that Fortune has been under the umbrella of a joint venture called CNN Money, which has been good on the one hand because it’s provided us with a lot of traffic and dollars that have followed that traffic.

On the other hand, our brand has been very, very sublimated in the digital space so that if you find a Fortune story it will say CNN Money and maybe it’ll sort of say Fortune somewhere, which is not great branding at all. And also having the freedom to tie our website into our tablet a lot more helps from a social perspective, which I think is really increasingly important because I think that’s how people are getting their stories now.

Just to go back as far as Time Inc. and the other titles, we’re going to be this big magazine company. People is the behemoth of our company and they’re already putting forward a lot of new plans in terms of circulation and consumer marketing. Sports Illustrated. Time. InStyle. Real Simple. It’s an incredible stable of properties, so we’re looking forward to going out in the wild blue yonder.

SH: You mentioned the brand dilution and CNN Money. In my trips overseas everyone refers to Fortune as the business magazine but you rarely hear anyone refer to CNN Money. What’s your plan on building the Fortune brand rather than saying Fortune magazine now we are dealing with the Fortune brand that has a magazine — an ink on paper magazine — has the digital. As you see this future coming in the next few months, how are you preparing? How’s that going to change your 24/7?

AS: That’s an interesting question. CNN Money, that kind of speaks to the difficulty of building a brand. CNN Money doesn’t’ have the same brand power that Fortune does. You’re putting together a joint venture and slapping a name on it. That’s not really brand building.

Fortune is 83 almost 84 years old now and how do you build a brand? This is the question that all of face in this room. Again, I think there’s not any magic to it other than just a lot of hard work and you know it’s one of those things like building trust with your consumer’s every day that can unfortunately get ruined really quickly. You look at a certain celebrity chef homemaker persona woman who found her reputation business destroyed very quickly by herself — by her own actions and so you have to be very careful.

You have to be authentic and you have to be honest. You have to do a lot of stuff and you have to spend. I believe marketing is very important. You have to have great journalists and you have to produce. You have to make sure that you’re punching above your weight. That’s something that I really focus on a lot.

For instance, we compete against Bloomberg and Dow Jones and Reuters. These are companies with thousands of journalists — Bloomberg in particular, which now owns Business Week. There are three legacy magazines in my set: Fortune, Forbes and Businessweek and Businessweek is owned by a private equity venture capital firm, Elevation Partners, which Bono from U2 is a part of. I have the opportunity to talk to Bono occasionally and I think it’s kind of funny that his politics don’t match Forbes’ politics, which is something I always remind him of and ask him how comfortable he is about and he kind of says, “I don’t know.”

And then Businessweek is owned by the mayor, Mayor Bloomberg, and when I see Mayor Bloomberg I say, “How’s your little business going Mike?” and he says, “How is your little business magazine going?” so we just go back and forth on that.

The thing about Businessweek is that they don’t have a P&L really — it’s part of a giant company and they don’t make money and that doesn’t seem to bother the mayor but as you know that’s a tough nut to compete against, with someone who doesn’t care whether or not they make money. Wow. I hate that, right? I don’t have that luxury. Bloomberg has a couple thousand journalists. I have scores. That’s who I’m competing against. I always say it’s kind of like Lord of Rings. There are the good guys and there are fewer of the good guys. That’s what I like to tell my staff. It’s inspirational a little bit.

But punching above your waste is very important. You don’t have the opportunity to have six people sit around all day and talk about some story they might do. I mean, we have to go out and get it. Our journalists have to be multimedia, multitalented people nowadays. My ideal journalist is someone who writes, edits, does social, does TV, does live events, hosts live events does things like this, does interviews. That’s a journalist that punches above their waste. And I especially look for someone who does long form journalism. And very few do all those things but if I get people that can do three of those things that’s great. My people are always fortunately thinking about this. So when they go to Europe they’re always multitasking, going out and pushing out the envelope as much as they can. I think all those little things every single day helps branding.

SH: When I have a student coming from Europe or when I visit European companies, they wonder about the layering of our process, where you have a reporter, then a writer and then an editor when they are multitasking — doing the reporting, the editing, the writing of the story, and in some cases in Italy they actually designed your story. My question to you is are we putting more responsibilities on journalists? Are we forcing journalists to be journalists and marketers and videographers and yet we’re not adding a single minute to the day or a single page to the content?

AS: I think about that every second of the day and I think about my personnel and it’s really tough because I’m scared about burning them out. There are two things — there’s bandwidth and there’s conflicts of interest. Those are two things to be concerned about because you mentioned marketers and business journalism is even trickier than most fields, I would say because we are covering our customers.

We write stories about the companies that advertises not only in our magazines but in all of Time Inc. magazines and that’s not lost on some of these companies. From time to time we have written stories that have pissed off major advertisers of Time Inc. You know in the army when you mess up, you don’t have to do pushups, but everyone in the platoon does. There was one in particular that said we’re not going to pull ads from you, we’re going to pull ads from all the other books. I thought that was really pernicious. The other managing editors were a little ticked off. We’re constantly facing those pressures.

If IBM wants someone to do a speech or do a talk even if it’s for free, that’s possibly a real conflict of interest. We have to watch that stuff all the time. Then people don’t have the time to do all this stuff. And then people just fall in love with Twitter. They just fall in love with it. I’m a journalist and I’m just tweeting my life away. That’s great for twitter and I do realize they have an IPO coming up and so they’re really happy that you’re tweeting a lot. But what’s that doing for Fortune magazine?

People are getting pulled in so many directions now. It requires a lot of management and a lot of balance in terms of individual journalists, particularly our tech journalists because they’re just being bombarded with new social media, new platforms and new things to try. They have to keep up with all the other tech journalist sat The Wall Street Journal.

And then there’s a new tech website every week. Verge is really hot right now. Verge is the one this week, and they’re great and they’ve got venture funding and so they don’t have a P&L either. None of these guys have P&Ls because they’re all venture backed and they’re all looking for an exit. Business Insider with Henry Blodget has been very successful, they’ve really grown share, but I don’t think they’re profitable. I don’t think they’re profitable right now. You can ask Henry. Henry at some point is looking to do something with that. Maybe Fortune will buy it. Or maybe like the last time around, Business Insider will buy Fortune. That would be like AOL buying Time Warner. Remember that? Some things like Politico looks like its established itself, and did a pretty interesting and good job. What has Politico done now? Print magazines. I love that they’ve seen it fit to go into print.

SH: Before I open the floor for questions from the audience, I’d like to ask you my typical last question that I ask people I interview: What keeps Andy up at night?

AS: All of the above. I actually have been sleeping less well over the past three years. There is just so much.

I’ve experimented with different things. What do you carry with you to write down ideas? I used to use my phone and take notes on it. I had a bigger notebook, a smaller notebook and a pad. Things just hit me all the time. I swim pretty much every day and that’s where I have all these thoughts, in the pool, and then I was thinking should I bring a notebook to the pool and jump out of the pool. And people would be like, what do you have at the pool? There’s so much.

I’m sorry to be so open ended here. I want this spinoff to go well. I want to make sure that we have the capital to invest in our website. I think Fortune has a great opportunity and I want to make sure that we realize that opportunity by really being a thriving endeavor five years form now. I mean sure we’re going to be around this year and next year but what’s it going to be like in 10 years. I realize that’s my most important job, which is to make sure that when I’m no longer the editor of Fortune that the magazine is a strong sustainable, thriving journalistic enterprise. That’s my most important job. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Questions from the Audience…

Question: I think we all agree that the industry is in a transformation. Some magazines are more advanced in that transformation than others. Meredith with their group of readers is adapting later than some. I’d be very curious to hear where you are in the adaption towards the digital future and if your readers are ahead of the curve or middle of the curve in reading and adapting digitally.

AS: That’s a great question and it’s so vexing and curious and it’s changeable in terms of the continuum of readers who want print versus digital. Let’s take women’s magazines as an example. Our magazine, InStyle, Vogue at Condè Nast, Cosmo at Hearst — they’re all putting out their biggest issues ever. Why is that? Because if you ask a reader of those magazines if they would buy those magazines if there were no ads in it they’d say of course not. Those ads are part of the experience. And advertisers say “Hallelujah!”

I don’t know much about Vogue and Cosmo and InStyle and Glamour — I know a little more about InStyle. If you’re doing the digital stuff there are you so, “Oh my God, we have got to convert all of our readers to digital right now?” because we’re going to close down Vogue right now and everyone’s going to get vogue on their tablet. I don’t think you have the same urgency at all.

I know at InStyle we have a great digital team and they’re doing all kinds of things. If you’re a newspaper you’re at the complete other side of the spectrum. If you’re a newsweekly, you’re closer to the newspapers. If you’re a business magazine, you’re kind of in the middle.

The other thing about business magazines is that we’ve got a tech savvy readership. Most of our readers have several smartphones. Everyone’s got an Apple phone and a Galaxy Note and tablet and an Amazon device so they’re trying everything all the time. Our first instinct is we have to rush into it willy-nilly and we have. Our tablet is fantastic, our tablet app is great and we were fairly early on.

What we discovered early on is that consumers have been a little slower to change over to the tablets and apps than what though. That’s because magazine are a different experience and people are staring at screens all day long to the extent that your magazine is a respite from a screen. That is probably a really important point of differentiation.

Our magazine is information, vital information, but it’s also something you can look at to provide, I don’t know if it’s recreation or relaxation, but a bit of a respite from work even though it’s about business because it’s often long form journalism, where you want to lean back as they say. In terms of us really pushing that way we’ve realized that we need to take it easy a little bit. We need to go very strong but not to lose sleep over the fact that our readers are not converting as fast as we thought because the reason is they like the magazine still.

It’s still the early days as far as the tablet goes and that’s what we’re really talking about versus the website, which is really a different experience. And we’ve realized that the tablet is a different experience from the Web as distinct from the magazine as distinct from live events. You can get Fortune all those ways. And we didn’t talk about mobile, which is a variant from the web and then getting the information on mobile through social which is increasingly how people are getting things like Fortune.

Our referrals, from the “40 Under 40” package for instance, our referrals from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were up year over year, 60 percent 100 percent, and 200 percent. I forget which percent, which goes to which of those three platforms but those are the percentages. So that’s just flying. People read those stories on Facebook, on twitter and on LinkedIn and come to the website that way. So that’s another totally different way.

Question: What percentage of revenue are you getting from your web platforms compared to print?

AS: Well that’s a slightly complicated question because of the joint venture and the joint venture that we’re unwinding so that the digital revenue — it’s a 50-50 joint venture with CNN Money — so it would be 50 percent of the joint venture and then the tablet revenue which is fairly small still is all ours. On a percentage basis revenue, I would say it’s about 25 percent. So we’re still getting the bulk of our revenue from print advertising. And the important thing to remember is that the other 75 percent is not all print advertising. It also includes our conferences as well, which is significant. It’s kind of a 3-way split there.

Question: I really resonated with what you said when you were talking about the franchise content style versus special issues. I’d appreciate it if you’d like to add a little more color to the concept of franchises and how would somebody in any specific niche look across their community and get those ideas for what’s going to make a really effective series — or I like the word franchise — or ongoing content stream that feeds the magazine?

AS: Some of our journalists don’t like franchise because they say it sounds like Wendy’s or something. That’s for the business side maybe. We have these franchises that we now have in every issue. And we have a meeting for – several meetings – but we have one big one lets say three months in advance before it comes out and we’ll be planning the magazine all the time. In the meeting, we’ll have people from the pub side, media relations side, web side, print side and our event side. We’ll take this “40 Under 40” thing and it’s on my mind because it’s the issue that’s currently out. So, we want to blow it out across all of our platforms.

First of all you have to come up with your idea, and I can’t come up with your idea, but so you want to have it in the magazine, you want to have it on the website, and we want to have a live event and we want to get our people on TV talking about it. And so you know with the magazine we’ll do all the usual magazine stuff. What can be a great article? How many sidebars? What are the other articles? What about charts? We’re talking about just all the traditional, great magazine making.

Then we want to do that on the Web. And then we want to have it as a walk up so we’ll have a reader’s poll leading up to the “40 Under 40.” Who do the people who visit the website think are America’s or the world’s “40 under 40 people? We’ll poll CEOs. We’ll poll the previous “40 Under 40s.” We’ll do anything to drive traffic and drive engagement before the franchise itself comes out. When the franchise comes out on the web, you do not just push out the list — you do video, you do photo galleries, you do all kinds of sidebars, all this incredibly creative stuff that wouldn’t necessarily fit in the magazine, but more importantly looks better on the Web or works better on the Web or works better on the tablet.

Our live event, this is our fifth year of having a live event, our “40 Under 40” party. And live events are tricky. You can have a live event and throw money away — which is have a big party. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. That’s called marketing.

Then you can have a live event sponsored by someone — a liquor company, a hotdog company, Dupont’s local plant in your city. And that’s easy because you just get a bunch of beer, you get a Dupont sign, you get someone from Dupont saying “We’re delighted to be here to sponsor your thing.” And that’s a little harder but not so hard.

But the next step, what we’d like to do is what we call a real conference or live event, is to get people to pay to come and that’s really much more difficult. When you start being able to do that you have two streams of revenue, attendee revenue, which is like readers and you have sponsor revenue, signage and things like that which is like advertising revenue. And we like to build them so you start small. Maybe you start with a party or you start with a sponsorship and eventually you can have attendees come. Maybe you can do these things or maybe you can’t. You have to see and understand who your constituents are and what kind of people read your magazine, etc. We started the “40 under 40” just as a party. Now we have it sponsored. It’s in San Francisco at a hot tech company and we invite the “40 Under 40” people to come. Then we have a live event. Then we tie in the sponsor and all that stuff. Then we try to get the people on TV. Maybe it’s the “40 Under 40” people doing radio interviews, or our journalists on TV. It’s a huge deal.

Question: Two parts. With all the multi-platform formats that you’re now looking for. I ‘m assuming your audience is expanding. Can you identify the people coming to those multi-platforms?

AS: It’s not as different as you would think as far as people coming to our digital platform versus the magazine. Yes, it’s younger and there are more women, which is great. But they are business people and they’re somewhat aspirational. They want to succeed in business. They want to join Fortune 500 companies or work for fortune 500 companies or do business with Fortune 500 companies. They’re interested in Fortune 500 companies.

Because if you’re a business person, it’s pretty hard to do business with a Fortune 500 company as your business grows — as a customer, as a shareholder or as something. But having said that, our typical reader is a 50-year old guy getting on a plane at O’Hare. That used to be our guy. He’d grab our magazine at O’Hare and jump on a United plane to somewhere. And that’s cool. But who we also want to get is the 26-year-old Indian woman PhD from Stanford who works at Google. That’ s who I also really want to get. I think she is. I think increasingly she is. I think it’s more true that she’s more digital and finding the stories. You have to ask yourself if people are really going to go to your website in the morning Be honest with yourself. That’s why the social thing is so important. That’s why you have to create great content and push it out across social because that’s where they’re going to see it. “Holy smokes that’s a cool story. Click.” I think that’s where she’s getting stuff. She’s probably checking — maybe it’s The New York Times maybe it’s the Wall Street Journal. Some of the big companies that aren’t aggregated, they’re producing their own original content, but then also social and maybe some aggregators as well so it is changing.

Question: You made a statement about push and pull. People do not go to your website every morning. But every one of your business people read your email every morning. That’s the first thing they do. So, if you’re pushing to them then you have a greater chance of grabbing their attention at the right moment instead of trying to pull them to your website.

AS: It is hard to pull. It’s interesting if you look at BuzzFeed and young people, it’s hard to do that. The thinking is that if you can continually push out stuff that maybe people will make it a daily habit but it’s unclear.

Question: So you’re really looking at the future of multi-platform readers not so much in our business. Especially now that AAM counts digital subscribers that we can save money paper on ink if you’re a digital subscriber but you’re after the multi-platform?

AS: Yes, I am. For right now I really feel good about having three legs: the magazine, digital — and digital is everything, it’s very complicated — and our conferences, our live events and maybe that’s not something that not all of you can do and it’s not so big for us but it’s actually very profitable.

You have to play and that’s what I’m saying. It’s complicated and there are a lot of moving parts. That may not work for everybody though. Everybody’s got a different thing. Consumer Reports is able to charge money for people going to their website. We talk about pay walls and stuff. You have to realize everyone’s different. There are takeaways and sometimes you have to say no. You watch what Steve Jobs did and it’s like you can’t do that. You can’t park in the handicap parking space, and not have a board of directors that you answer to, and be a genius and create products that change the world. I mean it’s amazing what he did, but you can’t necessarily do that. There are some things you can take away from him but not everything.

SH:Thank you.
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Love it or hate it, MagNet is on a mission to cleanse the single copy sales data for the magazine industry while attempting to make sense of that data at the same time. On Oct. 24 MagNet is offering a training day for publishers, circulation people, marketeers, and anyone interested in learning more about the single copy sales data and how to better understand and utilize that data. I asked Joshua Gary from MagNet why is the company doing this and why should publishers attend.

Here is The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Joshua Gary, vice president for systems and operations at MagNet.

Samir Husni: Why is MagNet doing this?
Joshua Gary: At MagNet, our goal is not only to aggregate and cleanse the industry’s data, but also to make the best possible use of that data. To understand what this means, it’s important to show people hands-on how much they can affect their own profitability and efficiency. We believe in the tools we’ve built and we want people to have the opportunity to see just how powerful the information can be in today’s day and age. We estimate that the industry wastes more than $144 million annually on PPD (Print, Paper, Distribution) on products that are going to accounts that generate $0 in sales. But there is still much we can do as an industry to properly manage this distribution if we use the right tools.

SH: What is in it for the publishers, distributors, etc.?
JG: This lab is really about education. It’s meant to give everyone an opportunity to learn, to inquire, to look under the covers as it relates to the MagNet systems and take them for a test drive. We want the industry to understand just how much they control of their own newsstand destiny, We have built the industry’s premiere Centralized Distribution Management tool in AIMS, and a world class reporting and analytic engine, nicknamed NIRC. We want to give people the opportunity to experience just how powerful these systems can be, and how they can help in our everyday business.

SH: How are the MagNet tools helping the industry or better yet, how do you see MagNet helping the entire print industry?
JG: MagNet is in a very unique position, simply based on our relationships and interconnectedness to members of this supply chain. It’s part of our mission to provide the best data available, make it actionable to all, and provide value to this industry. It’s our intention to use our expertise in newsstand, data and technology, and to curate solutions that are applicable to everyone within this ecosystem. One of the steps required for doing this is to let people experience these systems for themselves, which is why we have created the MagNet Training Day on 10/24.

Interested in attending MagNet training day, click here to register.

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With a tag line Man At His Best, Esquire magazine enters its 9th decade of life with much deserved fanfare. The printed magazine is having one of its best years, the Esquire Weekly has dawned on the tablets, the Esquire Black Book is a must have for men, and last but not least the new Esquire Network that launched on September 23. Esquire, was, is and still continues to cater to Man At His Best, but this year it sure is Esquire At Its Best.

And who knows more about Esquire At Its Best then the man behind the magazine and the brand: David Granger, Esquire’s editor in chief and one of the top advocates of the power of print at the same time that he enjoys having all kinds of fun with all the digital devices at our disposal in today’s magazine and magazine media marketplace.

I met David at the Esquire’s office on the 27th Floor of the Hearst Tower on the eve of the launch The Esquire Network. My interview with him is in two parts. First the Mr. Magazine™ Minute with David Granger followed by an in-depth interview about the magazine, the digital world, the future and of course, what keeps him up at night.

So first, here is the Mr. Magazine™ Minute with David Granger (followed by the transcript of the video)…

And here is the transcript of the above video…
Samir Husni: Today (September 23) you launch the Esquire Network. Esquire is man at its best — is this moment Esquire at its best?

David Granger: That’s such a hard question. I think this is one of the best moments in Esquire’s existence right now. We just have access to so many forms of expression and we’re trying to use them to the best of our ability. It’s not just the fact that we have a television network that uses our name and some of our ideas but it’s that we get to express ourselves in print primarily — and possibly most gratifyingly. But then we get to do like funny things for the iPad and do funny things on Esquire.com and comment on things in real time and bring to bear all our writers’ and editors’ knowledge in real time for Esquire.com and then give this moment in time just a little bit of thought for Esquire Weekly. We just have so many options when it comes to seeing the world through an Esquire lense that I think it has to be about the best time in the history of Esquire.

SH: You’ve been known to be a great advocate of print, yet you’re everywhere. You recognize that we live in a digital age but how do you differentiate print? What’s the value of print in this digital age?

DG: We live in a time when everything is so ephemeral. It comes and it goes. And lately I’ve been thinking about how I consume things in a new way. There are things that I consume qualitatively and there are things that I consume quantitatively. Quantitative is just all the stuff that gets referred to me. It gets referred to me by the 35 people that work with me. It gets referred to me by my writers. It gets referred to be by Digg or any of the other referral entities. And those things they just kind of bounce on and off of you and go on their way. But I try to make time for the qualitative things. I try to make time — 45 minutes at least — to read The New York Times. I try to take time to read the few magazines that I read. I make a lot of time for fiction, for reading novels because it makes me use my mind in a different way. So anyway, I think the value of print is that print encourages the production of qualitative experiences and I think that’s going to be the value that moves print forward and makes it become even more of a thing to be cherished.

And now for The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with David Granger, editor in chief, Esquire.

First the Sound-bites:

On how the role of editor has changed over the years: I think the editor’s role changed in a lot of ways so that I became a referee and an enabler. I had to coordinate our efforts in three realms for the benefit of all of those.

On whether brand expansion is possible to imagine without the print entity of Esquire: No, because we still and always will I think, create things for print Esquire that isn’t created for purely digital media.

On the power of print: The power of magazine design is something that people truly underestimate. I think that’s one of the true strengths of print magazines, is that we can do and package things in such a beautiful way.

On whether digital technology is helping or hurting journalism today: It hurts in one way that so many websites are just about reprocessing somebody else’s story by putting a headline or a slight spin on it rather than going out to do original thinking or original reporting.

On what keeps him up at night: Everything. I wake every morning between 2:30 and three worrying about absolutely everything. Whether it’s budgetary things or why haven’t I plotted out an editorial plan for 2013 or what am I going to wear in the morning.

And now the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ Interview with David Granger – Esquire Magazine…

Samir Husni: How has the role of the editor of a major magazine changed in the last five to 10 years?

David Granger: I was fortunate enough to demand change from my staff and my writers by saying eight years ago, when everybody was talking about how, of course, new media was going to destroy traditional media — of course everything was going digital — we deliberately set out to prove that print and particularly the magazine medium was the most exciting medium ever created. That led us to do crazy things.

First, we did this with the basics of our medium — paper, ink, photos, words and designs. We started messing with those combinations. Whether it was using the margins of the magazines differently or whether that was doing Origami with our covers. Or whether it was new kinds of fiction. We did reported fiction and we did fiction on napkins. We did all sorts of crazy things. We just tried to mess with our medium to call attention to it and prove to people that it was the most exciting medium that had ever been created.

That led us into experimenting with a digital cover, the first cover of print magazine where the words and images moved. That led us to augmented reality. And we were the first magazine that had an iPhone app. We were so ready to leap into all these other opportunities that have come our way that it seemed kind of natural and easy.

All of a sudden we were redesigning and reimagining the print magazine for the iPad. Before too long, we created Esquire weekly just to enhance our timeliness and give our iPad subscribers more. And then early on in the days of digital and websites, there was this inherent tension between the web operation and the print operation. That was because of the thought that one was going to eat and destroy the other.

But as soon as the iPad came along and there were three it became almost immediately apparent that we could use each other’s resources and use each other’s creative imagination for the benefit of all three and so it wasn’t like a push and pull and a struggle between two forms of media anymore. It became this combined effort on the part of all three and so I think the editor’s role changed in a lot of ways so that I became a referee and an enabler. I had to coordinate our efforts in three realms for the benefit of all of those.

So, I think the main thing that is required of an editor in the 21st century is just enthusiasm. You have to see opportunities and you have to find entertaining ways to take advantage of them.

SH: Without the print entity of Esquire, is it possible to imagine this brand expansion to the iPad weekly, to the network?

DG: No, because we still and always will I think, create things for print Esquire that isn’t created for purely digital media. I mean, everyone lionizes the idea of long-form journalism and lots of people read it on their devices. But most of the best of it is not created for a digital platform. It’s still created for first books and then for the 50 or 60 magazines that still care deeply about it.

I think there are more good feature writers in magazines than there’s ever been. So there are so many things we do in Esquire that are done because they are for a magazine. This thing we did for the 80th anniversary, The Life of Man, where we tried to create a portrait of the American man now — 80 photographs — one each of a man born every year of Esquire’s existence all by the same photographer. That was like a massive, ambitious project that I’m not sure somebody who works for a purely digital publication would think “We’re immediately going to get the traffic return” because it’s all about traffic.” With magazines there is still an appreciation on the part of both readers and advertisers for doing something great and I’m not sure that the purely digital media have matured to that degree yet.

SH: When I received the 80th anniversary issue, the first thing that came to my mind was that it won’t feel the same even on their own iPad edition. It won’t have the same collector’s value. It’s not something I could display on my coffee table and tell folks to take a look.

DG: One of the reasons for that is not just the heft of it and the tangibility of it — but it’s also design. When you’re flipping through that magazine and all of a sudden you come onto the spread of Bill Murray and Robin Williams next to each other or the spread of Dr. Dre and Steven Colbert next to each other or you see the weird combination of people of like Merle Haggard and Tom Brokaw and Senator Harry Reid and it’s just none of that was able to be caught in any of our digital expressions.

The power of magazine design is something that people truly underestimate. I think that’s one of the true strengths of print magazines, is that we can do and package things in such a beautiful way. I mean, we’ve been practicing it for hundreds of years, so we’ve gotten really good at making great magazine designs. I just think that’s the power of getting Esquire’s 80th anniversary issue in your hands. It’s a more satisfying experience.

You know, I have complete faith that we’ll get there and there are certain things with our digital expressions but we’re not quite there yet —though there are lots of fun things that we do on the iPad that we can’t do as effectively with paper.

SH: You’ve been known to say that the fundamentals of journalism have not changed. You need good reporters, good writers and good editors. Do you think digital technology is helping or hurting this?

DG: That’s a good question. Again, I think it’s a matter of maturation to some degree. It hurts in one way that so many websites are just about reprocessing somebody else’s story by putting a headline or a slight spin on it rather than going out to do original thinking or original reporting.

I’ve been talking lately to my writers and other groups about the thing that I think journalism needs more than anything right now and that’s to be more presumptuous. I mean I think there’s a reason that we’re called the Fourth Estate.

The reason that journalism is the Fourth Estate is because we are supposed to affect the course of events as much as the president, or the congress or the senate or anybody else in the United States of America. And I think we, as we’ve gone into the digital age, especially as journalism has gone into the digital age, has been trading access even more readily and giving away the ability to be skeptical and the ability to be critical. They’ve gained access but they’ve traded away influence and that’s something that I think we need to grab back. My hope is that — I mean The New York Times is still a miracle of journalism — and my hope is that with greater funding for institutions like the Washington Post and other bastions of great journalism we’ll be able to grab some of that presumption back.

SH: That’s an excellent point. It feels like journalism was much more powerful and had much more, say pre-digital.

DG: I mean imagine if Politico actually decided that they wanted to be a player. They squander too much of their capital by sort of putting out press releases on the behalf of politicians. When they decide they want to become a player, they’ll become massively influential.

SH: One of the things people like to say is that in this digital age that we’re living in you have to integrate print. And you’re a prime example of that.

DG: We didn’t do it because we had to — we did it because we wanted to.

SH: And because of the fun of it… Do you see a day when people will enjoy just sitting down and reading without interruption, without having to put my iPhone on the page, without having to do this or that?

DG: I still think that’s how most people read the magazine. I mean we created this Netpage app so you can experience some of the extras that we created for the iPad or for Esquire.com while you’re reading the print magazine.

But you know all the evidence is that most people are completely satisfied by the experience of sitting there and reading the print magazine and the same with our iPad edition. You don’t have to touch play at any point, but I do think people enjoy some of the fun things we do. Yeah, that’s why people read books. Everybody was talking about how books were going to become these highly interactive things — through the Kindle, you’d be able to touch and do all these things — but I think even when people are using their Kindle or iPad, they’re reading the book. So, I think there’s a great value, I hope, in immersing yourself in a great piece of writing and thinking.

SH: I noticed the covers of Esquire Weekly are sometimes a little more daring or different. Do you envision a different cover if it’s for print or a different cover if it’s for the iPad? Do you have more liberty with the iPad cover?

DG: With our iPad covers from the beginning we created something unique, which are these moving covers where the person who’s on the cover welcomes you to Esquire and they’ve become more elaborate as time has gone on.

But now in order to read it on the iPad you’ve got this library of all the Esquires you’ve bought. And first we wanted to differentiate the look of monthly Esquire from weekly Esquire. We also wanted weekly Esquire to like shout a little bit more. It’s like “Hey, hey we’re over here. You don’t know what we are, but here we are.” And so we try to be a little more different like the new one, which is based on a story from Syria. It’s a really dramatic cover — we took a big step forward with that cover. The design department just wanted to call attention to the things that we do.

With the weekly, we are going to shout a little bit. That was the whole idea with the monthly as well, especially on the actual newsstand. We’ve been doing the wall of type for like seven or eight years, where we’ve literally been trying to kind of yell at people a little bit. “Hey, we’re over here. Buy us!”

SH: My typical last question, what keeps David up at night?

DG: Everything. I wake every morning between 2:30 and three worrying about absolutely everything. Whether it’s budgetary things or why haven’t I plotted out an editorial plan for 2013 or what am I going to wear in the morning.

The greatest motivator for me is fear and as long as the fear doesn’t overwhelm you, but merely causes you to be impatient with what you’re doing so that you’re eager to change what it is you do, and then it’s a good thing. Worry and fear haven’t lapsed over into crippling paranoia, and when they do I should probably quit.

SH: Thank you.

Knee-jerk reactions to the onset of digital have been a problem to print publishers since the dawn of cyberspace. The cries of ink-on-paper being swallowed up by the “Digital Black Hole” could, and still can be heard resoundingly throughout the media world. But rather than reacting to the uncertainty of the moment, Manuel Yáñez Herrero, Director General of the Asociación Mexicana de Revistas, A.C., believes that magazine publishers should be creators of change, not Chicken Little running from the Digital sky that is about to fall upon their heads. And while content is vital to the success of your magazine; the engagement of that content is nothing without passion and emotion motivating each and every facet of the publication, from design to writing, to the ads placed within the pages.

Last week I was honored to be asked by the Revistas Mexico to be the keynote speaker at their annual breakfast meeting in Mexico City. I seized the opportunity to ask Mr. Herrero some questions about the magazine market in Mexico and the challenges that our neighbors south of the border are facing. His detailed answers to my questions are below in the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Manuel Yáñez Herrero… and get ready to be inspired!

Samir Husni: What do you think are the major problems facing the magazine industry in Mexico? Single copy sales? Advertising? Move to digital?

Manuel Yáñez Herrero: Mexicans have been, for centuries, very creative people; we love color, music and having fun. This means we have a bunch of young creative people putting out great magazines.

So in this field we really do not see a threat. We have strong traditional titles and we continue to launch new ones. BUT, and as you can see it is a big but, it’s our distribution.

As you experienced, Mexico City is a huge, quite complicated place and for the past 80 years or so we have been distributing magazines the same way. We, via our printers, send allotment of our titles to the old part of the city located, as in every city, in the center. Then we have a Union. This Union controls newsstands. If you want to own one you must be part of the Union. These newsstands are hereditary.

So the Union there delivers our magazines to a ¨Despacho,” which is mainly a small warehouse. Then another part of the Union that owns a smaller warehouse called an “expendio,” which is a sort of wholesaler, goes to a Despacho (there are 4 of them) and takes the magazines. Then every day at 5 in the morning the voceadores (owners of newsstands) buy the magazines they think will sell. Some of them have credit so they take a bigger allotment, but some do not, so they just take what they can afford.

You know what this means, it, off course, limits sales tremendously and dooms new launches. Then they take the magazine to the newsstand to sell and after display time concludes, depending on frequency, weeklies, fortnightly, monthly etc., they take the ones that didn’t sell back. This also means that monthlies and bimonthlies suffer because they very seldom are displayed for the whole 30 or 60 days.

We give credit to the Union, so we get sales info and payment 8 days after closing date. Ten years ago this channel used to account for up to 60% of sales now it is only around 15%.

What has happened is there are more and more convenience stores (7 elevens and such) and there is a chain called oxxo that owns almost 12,000 convenience stores around the country. So now these stores account for around 25% of sales.

Then there were, for the past 40 years, three National Distributors: DIMSA (owned by an American, Brian Weiner), CITEM (owned by the biggest drugstore medicine distributor in the country), and Intermex (owned by editorial Televisa).

It’s the usual terrible system; we deliver allotment, they make bundles depending on volume for each state or retailer (Wal-Mart and such), then they truck every bundle to its destination. We get sales info and payment 90 days later. They keep, on average, 40% of the cover price, with which they cover every expense: delivery returns, the cost of renting space in retail stores, etc., and as you can imagine they were losing money a lot of money. Payments were on average after 140 days instead of 90 and just last month CITEM folded and stopped payments all together.

So for starters, with this business model distribution was never the way it should have been due to lack of cash flow; distributors just took our titles to places where they could make money. Titles that did not sell, no one cared about, as long as they sold advertising, distribution was free! And successful magazines covered the costs of lousy ones.

As you can see, the future looks gloomy. We, in Revistas Mexico, are trying to take control of distribution. In the meantime, we are losing readership and exhibit space. We are almost there; we already negotiated with retailers and agents in every state (newsstand and convenience store local distributors), but our cash flow has been affected immensely. We are also working very closely with Intermex Editorial Televisa’s distribution arm to consolidate all our titles and work together in getting info and having just a group of supervisors (there used to be three groups, one per each National Distributor, and maybe one from at least 3 editors groups).

It’s an interesting problem to have. I know that in England, France and Spain they’ve had similar problems and similar solutions, with different results, none of them that successful. I would like to design a better business model.

Sorry for the long answer, but this is a big problem.

As far as Ad sales, we currently represent 4% of adspend pay. We know we should at least grow a couple of percentage points and that is an objective.

Samir Husni: What is the role of Revistas Mexico?

Manuel Yáñez Herrero: Due to all of the above, three years ago the industry’s bigger players decided to work together. In the past we worked with the Mexican Chamber of the Editorial Industry (CANIEM: Camara Nacional de la Industria Editorial Mexicana), which grouped Book Editors, Newspaper editors, Magazine editors together.

After hundreds of hours, finally, on October 2011, we came to an agreement and legally formed the Mexican Association of Magazine Editors (AMER: Asociacion Mexicana de Editores de Revistas) with the Revistas Mexico brand.

We have 4 objectives:

1.- To promote the intimate relationship we have with our audience
2.- To make more transparent the way we measure our industry
3.- To have more and better distribution and exhibition spaces
4.- To promote editorial professionalism

For the first time we are working with PWC sharing industry information, very basic, but hard information:

· Jobs generated
· Single Copy Sales
· Ad Page sales
· Readership segmentation by age, geography and economic status
· Advertisers: who they are, how much do they invest and which gives us our Top 10 group.

We have this information per Quarter and we are sharing it with Industry players, Brands Agencies, and such.

We work with a government sector that supervises magazine contents and covers. They are in charge of giving title and content certificates for every magazine. They see that no child porn exists, that if a crime is committed by a minor there is no disclosure of any information about him/her and things like that. We also help make sure that there is no censorship regarding any publication.

We work also with the education side of the government with a program designed to professionalize every economic sector. In our case we focus on Editorial Industry. We are currently describing what we do, how we do it and who does what. Then we describe each job and so forth. We will then have a certificate which will help design courses for the betterment of people working in Editorial. We are working closely with Colleges and Universities to revise and design courses, Masters Degrees and even a specific career in Magazine Editorial.

We at Revistas Mexico are working with CEOs of our affiliates to solve the distribution problem.

We are working to promote creativity in magazine advertising (there is none!) so we are developing Lynx Awards for creativity in magazine advertising. Right Now TV ads are created and then maybe there is a still photo with a caption that turns into the magazine ad. We know specific design ads are by far more effective.

Samir Husni: You have such a marvelous magazine reading campaign. Tell me a little bit about the power of print and reading campaign?

Manuel Yáñez Herrero: Talking to friends and family, I realized that most people do not comprehend how many magazines they actually read. Very commonly their answer to the question: do you read magazines were a flat NO. Then talking a bit more they came to the realization that they read all the time. We started the statement, You Read Us When…and then we added…when you want to know about business, when you want to know about celebrities, when you are planning your wedding, when you get pregnant, when you have a baby, on the plane, at the dentist, at the checkout, even when you go to the restroom. Like you, more than 60 million people read us.

We invested more than 30 million pesos on a print campaign in our titles, some out of home and a couple of TV ads. You can see all of it on our page www.revistasmexico.org .

Speaking of which, we developed a web site where our advertisers can find which magazines are better for their specific target audience. You fill out sex, age and socio-economic status and we display all our magazines that cover that specific readership.

We are present on FB, Twitter and Linkedin @revistasmexico

Finally we are about to launch a Revistas Mexico Kiosk, http://www.revistasmexico.net

Samir Husni: How do you see the future?

Manuel Yáñez Herrero: The future is quite interesting. We stopped reacting to digital buzz and readership changes and are working on being the creators of change. We know that not only is content important, but what that content means to our audience. Engagement is nothing without passion and emotion.

Also, every media is different. Our brands should speak differently in each one, same message, same brand identity, but different ways to be read or heard or viewed.

It’s a complicated, but bright future.

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