A former journalism professor of Dave Leathers once told him journalism is not for him (Dave), he better choose another career for his future. Fifty years later, Dave is a very successful journalist, publisher and CEO of Showcase Publishing, Inc. based in Kansas City. After dropping out of college, Dave started working for his father’s weekly newspaper in 1974 and enjoyed the work in what were “the great days” for weekly newspapers. In 1984, he saw the signs of what was happening in the newspaper world, and being the “drop-out” kid from college, he opted to head into magazines, “niche” magazines to be more specific.
His first magazine Kansas City Homes and Gardens made money from its very first issue. What started as a one title grew into many specialized publications dealing with niche topics from shelter titles to relocating titles to help their audience find their ways in a new location.
Showcase Publishing Inc. now publishes three main titles: Cabo Living, Lake of the Ozarks Second Home Living, and Lake Relo.
In addition to the aforementioned titles the company publishes many other special issues and one shots dealing with shelter and relocation topics.
When I asked Dave about his secret for thriving over the last 40 years, his answer was one word, “Passion.” And this passionate man has proven without any doubt that following your passion, identifying the correct market, and knowing your competition will lead to success. A firm believer in ink on paper, Dave Leathers is a joy to chat with and to learn from.
So without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Dave Leathers, CEO and Publisher at Showcase Publishing, Inc., but first for the sound bites:
On his secret for success: “Well, I would say passion.”
More on his secret for success: “I learned hard work and persistence from my father. I did not graduate from college.”
On his publishing team: “I do not have an employee working for me that has not been with me at least 15 years. So we don’t have turnover.”
On how he chooses his publications’ markets: “Just felt that they were a ripe market that was underserved, basically.”
On his advice to someone wanting to start a new magazine: “I would say the first thing would be what market, what are the competitors and what is your background?”
On the role of print in a digital age: “When you pick up a niche magazine… and you’re looking through it, the last thing on your mind is fake news. It’s there in front of you.”
On his 40 years marker: “I still enjoy every day and I enjoy the people I work with.”
On what keeps him up at night: “The environment we’re living in today and the future for our children.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Dave Leathers, CEO and Publisher at Showcase Publishing, Inc.
Samir Husni: My first question to you, you’ve been at this for 40 years. You never gave up on print and you still publish several magazines on a regular basis in ink on paper. What’s your secret? What’s your affinity to print and how did you survive all those 40 years?
Dave Leathers: Well, I would say passion. I’ll never forget a seminar at Folio in New York City.
It was probably 15 years ago and those were pretty big deals at the time. A New York Times speaker declared that within the next two years, print would be obsolete and gone.
I don’t know where that speaker is today. He’s probably gone. But, so many people declare so many things.
The newspaper business has been drastically affected. And so is the national magazines.
You go to the magazine racks in the airport now, you can barely find a magazine. So there are certain ones that have.
I decided that I’d get into the magazine in 1985. I was working for my father from 1974 to 1984. He had a weekly newspaper and weeklies back then were going very well. I believed in a niche market that continues to stay relevant and I believed a niche magazine will be successful. The fact that, you know, Ryan Dohrn had 370 publishers at The Niche Media Conference in Las Vegas last week really says it all.
The niche magazines here in Kansas City today, there’s probably 12 to 15 magazines just in the Kansas City metro market, which is, 3 to 4 million people. And so are all of them doing well? I’d say they’re all doing good. Some are doing very well.
And a lot of them are ex-employees. I learned hard work and persistence from my father. I did not graduate from college.
Actually, my reporting teacher at Kansas State, my journalism year, told me that I would never make it in journalism and find another career. So, I found a career and continue to believe in it. And the people that I work with, I do not have an employee working for me that has not been with me at least 15 years. So we don’t have turnover.
Samir Husni: So tell me, how do you pick the markets where you publish?
Dave Leathers: Well, when we started, we started a magazine called Kansas City Homes and Gardens in 1985.
I was in a Delta Crown room in Atlanta and I saw Austin Homes and Gardens. And I said, you know what, I think Kansas City could do that as well. So I called the publisher, Hazel Gulley, and she said, come on down and see me.
So my wife and I drove. She loaded my car up with three boxes of her magazines. Spent two days with her and came back to Kansas City and used her magazine as the template for what I said I would do.
And so I did that. We were profitable from day one. First magazine was profitable.
And so we were in Kansas City. We did a relocating magazine, a visitor guide to ancillary publications. And from there, decided that we could do other markets.
And so we did St. Louis. We did Vail, Colorado. We did Las Vegas.
We felt that those markets could use a publication. Most of those were relocation magazines. People that were moving to there, they did not have a magazine that we thought was appropriate.
How did we choose those? Just felt that they were a ripe market that was underserved, basically. Cabo Living Magazine was started because a graduate from Kansas University came to me for a job. She spoke fluent Spanish. I had been to Cabo 96 and she said she thought it would be a good market.
So we started that one in Mexico. That’s a whole other podcast about doing business in Mexico. And so we started that and found a publisher in Los Angeles who’s still with us today.
He just turned 80 years old. And same crew, same people, all from Los Angeles are still working on Cabo Living Magazine.
Samir Husni: So you were doing remote publishing before remote publishing was in vogue?
Dave Leathers: I would say yes.
It’s kind of interesting, Samir. The City & Regional Magazine Association (CRMA), which is a great organization, when we first got into it in the late 80s, we were the ugly stepchild.
They didn’t really think we were real. Philadelphia, Boston Magazine, Washingtonian, they were the kings. So they let us hang around.
And then all of a sudden they discovered in the 90s that everybody wanted a magazine that had to do with shelter. It had to do with the home and the garden. Then they started a subsidiary of CRMA called the Regional Shelter Magazine Association.
Myself and Gina Schreiber from Atlanta and some other people, we were kind of the original people. Norm Tomlinson Jr. from New Jersey. That became a huge part of their business model and still is today.
D Magazine, was another one that had a home and garden magazine. That changed quite a bit. But today it’s still a very, very solid market.
Samir Husni: You’re a great believer in ink on paper for those titles. If somebody comes to you and said, Mr. Leathers, I want to start a new magazine, what would you tell them?
Dave Leathers: Well, I would say the first thing would be what market, what are the competitors and what is your background? Those basically would be the first three things that I would ask them. Does money factor into it? To some degree.
But I would say that’s basically it. It’s kind of interesting. I was in the Scottsdale, Phoenix area a few weeks ago. There are a couple of magazines, and I looked at who the owners were. It was a lady who I met at one of the first CRMA back in the 80s that said they were looking to start a magazine in that area. And so I helped them.
She’s still plowing forward. But what they had back then was an incredible market. They had a great background, and they were certainly passionate about what they were going to do. So, if you don’t have the work ethic, I think you need not apply.
Samir Husni: How do you define the role of print in this digital age?
Dave Leathers: Well, I would say first thing is, print today, especially this year, we’re barraged with fake news.
I think it’s kind of gone full circle. When you pick up a niche magazine, I guess not any magazine, but you pick it up and you’re looking through it, the last thing on your mind is fake news. It’s there in front of you.
The story has been done, written. It’s been edited, probably looked over by several people. And it’s believable.
We’ve always tried to edit to female readership, specifically upscale female readership. And today, whether it’s my daughter at 35 or my wife who’s 65, they loves magazines. They love the quality.
We’ve seen, and you know better than anyone, we’ve seen people try to cut back on the quality of their publication. And many times that is not going to go well. We have never cut back, even through the financial crisis, which was, you know, awful for all of us.
We never cut back or thought about it. And I said, if I have to, it’s not a product I’m proud of. And so it’s that feel of the publication, whether it’s on the coffee table or wherever it is, still today is relevant.
People like to continue to sing the praises of it, it’s inspiring. It really is.
Samir Husni: Is there any question that I should ask you, I did not ask you?
Dave Leathers: Well, no, not really. I would say, you know, as far as our 40 years, it’s gone by quick, actually.
And do I still enjoy it today? Yeah, I do still enjoy it today. Inflation, you know, the cost of production, obviously, has continued to spiral upward. And that has made it harder.
It’s not like we’re Target or Whole Foods or wherever that is. If we get a price increase, we can’t add it on to the cost of goods or, negotiate a tremendous deal. We work with printers and they’ve been a great partner.
But the cost of doing business, it wears on you. But I still enjoy every day and I enjoy the people I work with. And so, as long as my health holds out, I have no interest in, you know, going to Florida and playing golf five days a week and jump aboard the other two days.
So I’m just going to stay here and do my thing.
Samir Husni: So here are my last two typical questions. If I come uninvited to your house one evening, what do I catch Dave doing? Reading a book, watching TV, having a glass of wine? What do you do to unwind at the end of the day?
Dave Leathers: Well, my wife and I would be listening to jazz. I would be drinking tequila, Topo Chico with a lime.
And she would have a glass of wine. That would be our typical end of the day.
Samir Husni: And what keeps Dave up at night these days?
Dave Leathers: I really would prefer not to get political. So just the environment we’re living in today and the future for our children. I think about it a lot. But I’m going to stay positive and hoping for the best, Samir. Hoping for the best.
We’ve been blessed and I’m thankful to have people like you around that support our industry. Because without that, you know, we couldn’t pay the bills.
Samir Husni: Thank you.
Michael Simon, of Publishers Press fame, is on a new mission in life: make AI companies pay for the content that their LLMs (large language models) scrape from the digital sphere and breach the copyrights of the original magazine content creators. He refers to those creations as “ink-worthy” content and he hopes to “amalgamate hundreds of magazines, small magazines, in order to address the breach of copyright that the AI companies have done.”
The Magazine Coalition is the name of the new adventure he co-founded with Gavin Gillis, the former CEO of Michael’s earlier adventure, The Magazine Channel. While Michael assumes the role of chairman, Gavin assumes the role of CEO of the new venture. The two of them have assembled a great team devoted to this mission and are more than prepared to launch this new venture.
Michael presented The Magazine Coalition to the audience of the Niche Media Conference in Las Vegas (more than 375 magazine publishers and editors) where I was in attendance to deliver a keynote speech about the future of print in a digital age. I was so impressed by the idea, the mission, and the vision of The Magazine Coalition that I added a slide to my presentation to give them an additional plug.
And I was able to sit with Michael for a Mr. Magazine™ interview for the blog. So please sit back, relax and enjoy this wonderful new venture that aims to help magazine publishers enhance and increase their revenues from their “ink-worthy” content.
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Michael Simon, Chairman and Co-Founder of The Magazine Coalition:
But first the soundbites:
On the mission of The Magazine Coalition: “We are going to amalgamate hundreds of magazines, small magazines, in order to address the breach of copyright that the AI companies have done, as well as license content moving into the future.”
On the significance of ink on paper magazines: “The great thing about magazines, especially niche publications and special interest publications, business to business publications, scientific medical publications, is that before you can put ink on paper, because that’s permanent, you can’t backspace that away.”
On the morphing of The Magazine Channel into The Magazine Coalition: “If we had The Magazine Channel today with a thousand magazines underneath that umbrella, the AI companies would be very interested in talking to us about licensing that content to them so that their LLMs, (large language models), could learn from that ink-worthy content that was printable.”
On whether AI is a friend or foe of the publishing industry: “I don’t know if it’s an either or, I do think the AI companies are responsible for copyright breach. And I do think that they owe the publishing industry and the content creators compensation for what they’ve learned.”
On his fears from AI companies: “I don’t have any fears of the AI companies. I think we solve a problem for the AI companies. I don’t think that they like being viewed as thieves.”
On where he sees The Magazine Coalition a year from now: “I think we’ll have a thousand magazines in the coalition by the end of this year. And that represents a significant volume of content that the AI companies will be forced to pay attention to as we represent that thousand titles.”
On what he does to unwind at the end of the day: “I like reading. I like reading books, and I like reading older books.”
On what keeps him up at night: “Michael sleeps very well. I do read at night. My last reading is The Good Book, and in the evening, right before I go to sleep, I’ll get 15 to 20 minutes of the Bible in. I sleep very soundly.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Michael Simon, Chairman and Co-Founder of The Magazine Coalition:
Samir Husni: What’s your elevator pitch about The Magazine Coalition?
Michael Simon: We are going to amalgamate hundreds of magazines, small magazines, in order to address the breach of copyright that the AI companies have done, as well as license content moving into the future.
Samir Husni: What gave you the idea?
Michael Simon: So about 15 years ago, I was looking at a workflow on a whiteboard. I just put a spigot on the workflow and said, we want it. We can exhaust all of this content. We were printing a thousand magazines a month.
And I said, what if we exhausted out the digital content besides going to a printing plate to print? What if we just exhausted it into a format which we could put on phones and iPads and computers? And we developed some flip technology. We had text mining. We did a lot of tagging.
We were indexing magazine articles with tags for the purpose of search. And the idea was to have a grand umbrella of special interest publications, very vertical, vertically deep content across a broad spectrum of topics. So that one could perform a search and come up with very specific content that had been written and edited by humans.
And it had been fact checked. We I’ve always discovered that what’s on Google, not everything is factual. It’s not been edited. It’s not been fact checked. The great thing about magazines, especially niche publications and special interest publications, business to business publications, scientific medical publications, is that before you can put ink on paper, because that’s permanent, you can’t backspace that away.
So the benefit to the general population, I thought, would have been to have a subset, really not necessarily a competitor of Google, but to have a separate, The Magazine Channel is what we called it. And it was all edited. It was ink worthy.
It was everything that you searched for and discovered out of The Magazine Channel was ink worthy, meaning it had been edited. It had been fact checked. And there was no question as to whether or not what you were reading was true.
15 years ago, you go on Google and find a lot of things that weren’t true. Hopefully, that maybe less now, but it’s still. I thought it was going to be a nice companion to other search tools was to have The Magazine Channel available to the general population. And then I was going to sell advertising to that and share that revenue back with the publishers.
Samir Husni: And how did the idea of The Magazine Channel morphed into The Magazine Coalition?
Michael Simon: My son, Jackson, was working at The Magazine Channel. I’m a fifth generation printer. Both of my sons were in at Publishers Press when we unfortunately had to sell in 2017.
My older son, Michael, was working much closer to the press room. And Jackson was very interested in the digital side of things. And he went to work for The Magazine Channel.
When I separated that out of Publishers Press, I hired a different CEO. We had it down in Austin. We had a group of programmers in Austin that were developing the programs around The Magazine Channel.
Jackson was down in Austin working with Gavin Gillis, the new CEO of The Magazine Coalition, who is the former CEO of The Magazine Channel. Late last year, my son Jackson started reminding me that if we had The Magazine Channel today with a thousand magazines underneath that umbrella, the AI companies would be very interested in talking to us about licensing that content to them so that their LLMs, (large language models), could learn from that ink-worthy content that was printable. It was not just information that someone puts out with their opinion, but it had gone through an editor.
It’s gone through a thought checker. And it’s finally ink on paper, which is very permanent.
Samir Husni: So do you think AI is a friend or a foe?
Michael Simon: I think I can hold both thoughts in my head at the same time.
It’s very obvious and evident that the magazine publishing industry can and is using artificial intelligence tools to aid and assist them in producing good content. At the same time, artificial intelligence LLMs, maybe because there wasn’t a mechanism by which they could amalgamate magazine publishing into one funnel, which is what we hope to provide, and nobody told them they couldn’t search the web for everything that they’ve done until recently. And people started saying, you’re using my content without attribution, you’re using my content without compensation.
So I look at it as really, I don’t know if it’s an either or, I do think the AI companies are responsible for copyright breach. And I do think that they owe the publishing industry and the content creators compensation for what they’ve learned. And I do think it would be appropriate that we license our content from publishing industry to AI companies for them to continue to learn and learn correctly and to give proper citation and proper attribution and proper remuneration for that content.
Samir Husni: So if I am a magazine publisher, how do I join the magazine coalition?
Michael Simon: Actually, you just go to magazinecoalition.com, you sign up, and we will get you the information. We will enter into a licensing agreement that is non-exclusive, and it’s voidable. It’s exclusive only in terms of my right to use that content . It is only for the purpose of dealing with the AI companies.
So I need the archives in order to do research on what, how much, how often, with what frequency that the LLMs have touched that content. Every time they touched it, there needs to be some compensation afforded that. Also, I want to license that content moving forward with the AI companies.
So if you just visit magazinecoalition.com, all the information is available for you to sign up and for us to get back in touch with you.
Samir Husni: And what’s in it for me as a magazine publisher?
Michael Simon: Oh, as a magazine publisher, it really provides a very nice opportunity to bring in additional revenue, obviously. There’s cases and settlements and deals that have already been created and settled.
Several big companies, large publishing companies have settled with AI companies to the tune of significant money on an annual ongoing basis to license that content. We feel like if we can bring hundreds, maybe a thousand or more magazines to the table, that we can settle on copyright breach for a pretty significant sum. And we can also entice them to pay a reasonable fee moving forward with licensing arrangements.
51% of all the net revenue that comes into The Magazine Coalition will be redistributed back to our licensors. We guarantee the majority of the money will go back to the publishing community.
Samir Husni: Are you going to accept or get into deals with only ink on paper magazines or also the so-called digital publications?
Michael Simon: We would certainly be open arms with publications which are only just in digital format.
We feel like they’re presenting content. Their content has been scrapped. They’ve been touched by the LLMs and they’re still producing good original content moving forward, which could be licensed to the AI companies.
Samir Husni: And Michael, what’s your biggest fear from AI companies?
Michael Simon: I don’t have any fears of the AI companies. I think we solve a problem for the AI companies. I don’t think that they like being viewed as thieves.
We can provide them with a single portal for magazines by which they can legally, and following copyright laws, have access to a wealth of archives and guaranteed fresh content moving forward. Our premise is win-win-win all the way around. We think the AI companies will embrace rather than resist our overtures at settlement and having a deal moving forward.
The AI companies, I think, are anxious to put this. They have the resources by which they can pay for having searched the archives and they have the resources to pay for the licensing moving forward. I personally hope that this will be a collaborative effort.
Although we have hired a substantial, significant law firm, Goodwin Proctor, and we’ve also got a company called Sim IP that has assured us of $10 to $20 million in funds to litigate, if necessary. This case, we hope to have one grand case that we’re going to bring to the AI companies, of which there’s 8 or 10, so we’ll have to sit down with each of them individually and work out an arrangement that’s amenable to our publishers and to the AI companies.
Samir Husni: So you and I are having the same conversation a year from now. What would you tell me The Magazine Coalition accomplished in 2025?
Michael Simon: I think we’ll have a thousand magazines in the coalition by the end of this year. And that represents a significant volume of content that the AI companies will be forced to pay attention to as we represent that thousand titles. I don’t know that we’ll have settlements within 12 months.
I think that could occur over 15, 24, maybe even 36 months. I’m not sure. I’m hoping it’s sooner. I hope it doesn’t take years and years. I hope it doesn’t get to litigation. I’d much rather it not be litigated, but if that’s what it comes to, we’re prepared for that battle.
We have the right attorneys. We have the right funds to move forward aggressively, if need be. But in a year’s time, this time next year, I hope we’ve got some deals already settled with one or two AI companies.
There may be one or two cases of litigation filed by that time as well.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there anything I should have asked you I did not ask you?
Michael Simon: I’ve got a really good team that I’ve put together. We’ve got the background of asking for licenses for the purpose of data distribution.
It used to be in a consumer-facing product. Now it’s in a data brokerage arrangement with fighting AI companies for copyright breach and licensing. No, I think we’ve covered the waterfront pretty well.
Samir Husni: Excellent. If I come uninvited one evening to your house, what do I catch Michael doing? Reading a book, watching TV, having a glass of wine? What do you do to unwind at the end of the day?
Michael Simon: I like reading. I like reading books, and I like reading older books.
I prefer to read first editions from 1800s, early 1900s. Right now I’m reading a first edition T.S. Lawrence, 7 Pillars of Wisdom, and it’s a first edition, leather-bound. I love the beauty of a book, especially a sample that’s 100 years old, that’s been very, very well taken care of.
I like actually reading that, and I like to pass those on to my children.
Samir Husni: What keeps Michael up at night this year?
Michael Simon: Michael sleeps very well. I do read at night.
My last reading is The Good Book, and in the evening, right before I go to sleep, I’ll get 15 to 20 minutes of the Bible in. I sleep very soundly. I have had an extremely, exceedingly blessed life, and so every day I’ll look at it as a blessing, and it’s a bonus.
I’m very, very blessed in so many ways that I try not to have any worries or concerns. To me, life’s too short to have that, so I don’t allow anything. Maybe a little concern for one kid or another at some time or another, but for the most part, even that, that’s life, letting it have its due, and nothing’s perfect, so I sleep very soundly.
Samir Husni: Thank you very much, and I wish you all the best in your new venture.
Michael Simon: Thank you. I appreciate it.
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Envoy magazine, you easily can. One of the smartest covers that I have seen in a long time, Envoy magazine’s first issue cover tells it all. “What we don’t know is blurry for all of us…” says the major cover line that is accompanied by a blurry picture of a dove. Once you open the cover a stunning and clear picture of the dove welcomes you to the inside of the magazine and the back of the cover declares, “…everything becomes clearer as we learn.”
The brainchild of Razi Canikligil and a group of United Nations based journalists, Envoy magazine was launched in the Spring of 2024. In the first issue Mr. Canikligil writes, “Enovy is more than just a publication; it is a platform for dialogue, engagement, and advocacy. Through our pages, we seek to illuminate the vital work of the United Nations and its agencies, shedding light on the efforts to address climate change, promote peace and security, and advance sustainable development goals.”
Envoy is published by UNEMAG, a non-profit 501 (C) (3) organization and is headquartered in the United Nations in New York City. Razi Canikligil is the founder and president of the organization and is the managing editor of Envoy magazine.
I had the pleasure to interview Mr. Canikligil and to talk about the birth of a new magazine celebrating its first anniversary this Spring. The conversation was as lovely and intriguing as the magazine itself. So without any further ado, please enjoy this lively conversation with Razi Canikligil, managing editor, Envoy magazine:
But first the soundbites…
On why Envoy magazine: “To give opportunity to NGOs to be seen. Give opportunity to UN reports to be published in detail in a magazine. And not just UN, also international affairs, but mostly related to UN issues.”
On the mission of the magazine: “We are creating a new style of current affairs magazine. I might say it’s like a mix of current Foreign Affairs and National Geographic magazines.”
On the magazine’s drive: “We are trying to put the good things happening, positive things, like when we cover the oceans or climate change. We are focusing on the things and process, things that are trying to be done, focus on this, in a positive mode.”
On the current status of the magazine: “We are selling good now. And the ads started to come in. We are happy, very excited.”
On what if Envoy became a huge success: “If we are really doing good, then we will sponsor and support the journalist. We will help, we will give fellowships, we will send reporters to cover all the international issues around the world.”
On what keeps him up at night: “When we start preparing the pages, I’m nervous. I focus on every detail. And sometimes we can’t decide how to cover one issue or what to put on the cover.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Razi Canikligil, managing editor, Envoy magazine:
Samir Husni: Why Envoy?
Razi Canikligil: Let me tell you briefly, we are a group of journalists at the United Nations headquarters in New York. And we thought that we should create a non-profit organization and publish a magazine.
The reason behind this is we used to have almost 600 journalists covering the United Nations, UN correspondents. Now they are down to 200. The reason behind this is big media corporations, they can’t support correspondents anymore, they can’t pay in full.
They rather like to work on a freelance basis. CNN just retired its correspondent and CBS did the same. The New York Times shut down its office at the UN.
Voice of America recently shut down its operations. And big newspapers, from the British, The Times, and The Guardian, to Turkey’s Hürriyet newspaper or the French Le Monde, they don’t have full-time reporters at the UN anymore. Most of our colleagues are laid off and they are having trouble finding a job.
They are freelancers now and their income is low. The UN is now mostly one person wire news agencies, most of the time. They can’t cover the UN fully. UN is not just Security Council. UN has a lot of other stuff. There is a lot of stuff happening at the UN. There are many agencies. There are 11,000 NGOs, registered NGOs to the UN. They come and do some events at the UN. But nobody is covering them. They want the coverage. But the few remaining journalists don’t have time.
We don’t have manpower. As individual journalists, most of us, cover the Security Council meetings. But the UN has provided a lot of content. They release reports every day on every agenda.
So we thought, why don’t we create this foundation and publish a magazine and a website so we can create a new platform for the resident journalists. They can have new income, and they can cover the UN in detail.
Most issues we cover only up to 300 words or 500 words, like a short article. We thought that we should go in-depth. We should cover deep interviews, deep analysis of these reports. And NGOs.
So that’s what we do now.
Samir Husni: And is that the reason you decided on an ink on paper magazine? To provide that in-depth coverage? In-depth coverage of the UN…
Razi Canikligil: … And give opportunity to NGOs to be seen. Give opportunity to UN reports to be published in detail in a magazine. And not just UN, also international affairs, but mostly related to UN issues.
From climate change, sustainable development goals, diplomacy, human rights, the oceans, AI, immigration, those things. And we also give a new platform to the young journalists. Because when I go to the bookstores to see the magazines, to check the magazines and Barnes & Noble or Hudson News, I see beautiful interior decoration magazines, beautiful women’s magazines, health or car, the garden magazines.
But when I look at the current affairs section, they are almost the same we’ve seen past 50 years. Same magazines. They are afraid to change their style, their coverage, because they have existing readers.
They don’t want to lose them, so they want to do something new, but they are afraid that they don’t want to lose their current readers. But we said, okay, we are beginning, we are new, so we can start new. But most of our colleagues are well-experienced journalists.
We thought that we should mix it with the young journalists. We give chance to all the young journalists coming in from Columbia University, from journalism schools, or international affairs schools, from around the country and the world, not necessarily from New York city only. They contribute, they write for us, and we will give fellowships to these people.
We’re going to mix the real professional journalists and the young journalists. We are creating a new style of current affairs magazine. I might say it’s like a mix of current Foreign Affairs and National Geographic magazines.
There’s a lot of pictures, data, graphics, and maps, along with long articles. It’s very well done.
Samir Husni: Tell me, you just published Issue 4. Has your journey with Envoy, since you were the founding publisher and the one that came up with this idea, has your journey with Envoy been a trip in a rose garden, or you had quite a few stumbling blocks, and how did you overcome them?
Razi Canikligil: It was difficult. The reason is that: most people were asking, who’s behind this? Who’s paying for this? The permanent missions of countries and the UN agencies, wanted to see what you publish, and see what you do.
At the beginning, they were shy to give us interviews. We told them, look, we are not politicized, we are focused on the positive things, good things happening. We are not looking to expose things.
We are trying to put the good things happening, positive things, like when we cover the oceans or climate change. We are focusing on the things and process, things that are trying to be done, focus on this, in a positive mode. We needed to get, of course, donations from NGOs and foundations, and they were shy at the beginning.
But now, the donations are coming in. Ads are coming in. We didn’t have any database, any profile or a media kit. We created the first issue, and we thought that we should just give it away for free. We gave the first issue of the magazine to the UN missions, the NGOs, and the delegates at the United Nations. We printed 5,000 copies and the people loved the magazine so much.
They said, why don’t you just sell this magazine, try to distribute. And we said, okay, let’s try. Many people turned us down.
But one big national distributor, Disticor, said they loved the magazine, they want to distribute it, and they talked with Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble loved the magazine, and they started selling it all across the country, and Canadians loved it. So we started distributing in Chapters and in Nego in Canada.
They loved it. And then the third issue came, and Hudson News started distributing it. Hudson News is a big one, because Hudson News, has the train stations and airports.
They are a big seller, and they love the magazine. They distributed the third and fourth issues of our magazine. They placed it as a hot read among all the other magazines.
We are selling good now. And the ads started to come in. We are happy, very excited.
Last night we celebrated our first anniversary, with the fourth issue release. It was good.
More journalists will contribute to us, not just from the UN. We are open to all the freelance journalists around the world, also young journalists who are passionate about our issues. They give us ideas, they send us some pictures, they think they can write about this, and we talk with them. And we give them a chance.
So far, we are happy with the results.
Samir Husni: Excellent. If you and I are having this conversation a year from now, as you celebrate your second anniversary, what can you tell me you’ve accomplished in 2025?
Razi Canikligil: We started subscription now, we started taking subscriptions.
We want to reach out to a high number of subscribers. It’s a challenge for us because we don’t know how to publish, we don’t know how to market. We are all journalists.
We never published a magazine before, but we are getting a lot of help. We are all investigators, we understand, we talk, we learn.
Another issue is half of our journalists corresponds at UN are TV reporters, broadcasters. We should have a YouTube channel on the web for webcasts, Podcasts, etc. I think we’re going to start this because many of our journalists are having difficulty because they don’t write, they just do TV stuff. More TV, the webcasts will be available, I think, next year when we talk.
Also, next year, the next summer issue will be distributed in Europe.
We have a great distributor in London. They will put us in London, Geneva, Brussels, and Vienna. And then hopefully by fall, we’ll go to other capitals in Europe, Paris, and Istanbul and other places.
Then maybe next year we’ll be in Asia. Envoy is not an American magazine; it’s an international global magazine.
Samir Husni: So, Razi, tell me, is there any question I should ask you I did not ask you?
Razi Canikligil: Well, what happens if this magazine becomes big and you guys make enough money?
If we are really doing good, then we will sponsor and support the journalist. We will help, we will give fellowships, we will send reporters to cover all the international issues around the world. We will have a powerful group to support journalists around the world to have really excellent coverage. Expert journalists, experts diplomats, and UN people.
We don’t go into the country’s political issues. We are just going into how it affects all the other countries.
If something is happening in America or other countries, how it affects, side effects.
Samir Husni: My typical last two questions that I ask always in my interviews. If I come to your home unannounced one evening, what do I catch Razi doing to unwind from a busy day? Reading a book, watching TV?
Razi Canikligil: Trying to sleep. I go to bed early and get up like 5 a.m. in the morning because the time difference. I don’t have much of an evening. I go to bed 9 p.m. and get up like 5 or 4:30 a.m. in the morning. Do a lot of reading about publishing, marketing, it’s a new field for us. We are learning about AI. How can we use AI to help us or how can we teach AI to our colleagues? Because everything is expensive in the publishing. And we are trying to find out ways. This magazine really doesn’t cost that much.
Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?
Razi Canikligil: When we start preparing the pages, I’m nervous. I focus on every detail. And sometimes we can’t decide how to cover one issue or what to put on the cover.
Of the magazine, I get stressed out. They prepare a lot of graphics for us, a lot of alternatives. It’s hard. And I think the cover, it’s hard to choose the cover. We have a lot of ideas, and we get conflict among us which cover should be best for the magazine. At the end, I make the final decision.
That’s very difficult for me. But I think this fourth cover, this new cover, I think we all like it. We were on the same page with this cover.
We had confusion with other covers in the past. But this cover, everybody loved it. Nobody had any other idea, had other options, everyone loved this cover.
So that’s a first. Because the cover tells the reader who we are.
We are a new magazine.
It’s important, especially in the first couple of years. It was a little bit political cover also. It gave us some stress, but so far everybody loved it.
Samir Husni: Thank you very much and congratulations on your first anniversary.
Culturs magazine, and yes it is not a typo, Culturs (intentionally without the e) is the print component of Culturs Global Media that is the brain child of Elleyne (Doni) Aldine.
Aldine is on a mission and so is her team, company, and all the media and products they produce. Her audience is a reflection of herself. In her new ad campaign, she defines her intend for Culturs’ audience. She writes, “My intent for my audience is that they don’t feel defined by what the world says that they should be, that they understand who they are, and they fully embrace and immerse themselves in that, and defy what society tells them they should be, and just be themselves.”
Transformation is the word that defines her current world today. Everything is in the state of transformation, personally, as well as all the media and products related to the Culturs Global Media: from the magazine, to the podcasts, video, website, and last but not least the immersive experience she is providing her audience, now her members.
So, join me on this Culturs journey as I revisit Ms. Aldine and discover all the progress that she was able to achieve since she started Culturs eight years ago.
So without any further ado, here is the lightly edited conversation with Elleyne Aldine, founder, publisher, and CEO of Culturs Global Media:
But first the soundbites:
On 2025 for her and Culturs: “It is the year of transformation for me personally and for the magazine.”
On the meaning of transformation: “The transformation is the way we do things, which ironically, is the way we’ve always wanted to do things. And so many publishers are starting to do it the way that we’ve envisioned since the beginning.”
On exploring all the media and products for her VIP members: “Of course, we have the magazine that has the destination, the history, the story of the place. In addition, we have the podcast and the videos, and then a playlist for that destination. So fully immersive sensory experience.”
On why print?: “To me, print had its place. It is your luxury experience. It is being grounded.”
More on why print: “It is sitting and spending time for self-care with yourself with a cup of tea or in the tub or out in nature or laying on the couch, really experiencing what you’re doing instead of rushing through a million pieces of content on your phone.”
On the misspelling of Culturs: “It’s so funny, actually, now that you say that. People haven’t done that recently. In the beginning, they would always try to add the E, or even when I would spell it, I wouldn’t say the name. I’d spell it first, and I’d say, no E, Culturs with no E.”
On Culturs audience: “The world may try to define you. But, you know better. Culturs is the place where culturally fluid people who crew up meaningfully experiencing different countries or cultures can feel seen, heard and understood.”
On her intend for her audience: “My intent for my audience is that they don’t feel defined by what the world says that they should be, that they understand who they are, and they fully embrace and immerse themselves in that, and defy what society tells them they should be, and just be themselves.”
On why she changed her name: “I received a certification in Kabalarian philosophy, I knew the philosophy of names are important, it depends on when you’re born, and the energy of the name, and how it affects you.”
On what keeps her up at night: “Doing right by my team and my community.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Elleyne Aldine, founder, publisher, and CEO of Culturs Global Media:
Samir Husni: As you start your eighth year with Culturs, a lot has changed in the magazine, in your life, and in the digital. You said this is the year of transformation. Tell me about it.
Elleyne Aldine: It is the year of transformation for me personally and for the magazine. I definitely don’t want to do things the way we’ve done it in the past. It’s time. As organizations and as people grow, you should do things differently, right? If you want to continue growing, you can’t do it the same as you have.
One of the biggest lessons I learned in having this magazine, at each stage, I had to let go of people who weren’t going to work for the next stage. And I remember that was the one of the hardest things for me when I started. Because when I started and we were a philanthropic organization.
We didn’t really turn into a company until a couple of years ago. It was really about getting this message out to the people, and I funded it myself. We had a lot of supporters, but everybody worked for free. You can imagine the guilt when we were getting to the next stage, and I was going to have to let go of some of those people.
Because my pitch to them was, imagine being able to do this into the future and be part of this. And then, not even two years later, I’m like, I don’t think this is working. I don’t think I said it to them like that.
But in my head, that’s what it felt like. So I had to get over that. And of course, I’ve done that two or three times since then. As we get to the next level, certain people aren’t going to be appropriate for the next level you’re going to, and so on and so on.
My team right now is amazing. And I am changing how we work as a team. If the team cannot work that way, they won’t be able to go to the next stage with me.
Samir Husni: What are the practical steps you are doing with this transformation?
Elleyne Aldine: I was considering going back into stores. So we were in stores until two years ago. Two years ago, we had a lot of things go wrong.
We had a severe bot attack on our website. It ate up our email list, which had half a million people on it. In the end, we had to scrap the whole site, everything we did, every cyber company we worked with, the site never got clean.
So we had to just trash it all and start over. And we’ve never quite recovered from that. But it’s taken a long time.
We’re just now launching the new version of the site. And at that same time, we stopped being on newsstands. We’d pay to be at the front of the newsstand. We’d pay to be in a premium position. And I would get all these calls and emails from people, we can’t find the magazine.
I went to this store and this store and this store, because we had a list on our website. And it wasn’t there, or they said it was sold out, or they didn’t know what I was talking about. So I thought I’m tired of wasting all this money. We pulled out of stores.
I was told that the newsstands are not the gold standard, but I think the reason I was thinking of it, you know, we had, as you saw, the writer producer of Captain America Malcolm Spellman, CEO Emil Pinnock, and Jimmy Chris on this last cover, and they expected us to be in stores. And I’m like we’re in some stores, but we’re not widely distributed in stores. I think the public still expects that’s what’s profitable, or that’s what’s means you’ve made it.
The transformation is the way we do things, which ironically, is the way we’ve always wanted to do things. And so many publishers are starting to do it the way that we’ve envisioned since the beginning.
Which is, we have a membership with three packages. They’re all we call them our Insider, Platinum, and VIP packages.
The Insider package is all media.
Members have access to our new podcast, our beautiful video channel, our digital experience, our print magazine, and our web experience. So this year, part of that transformation is every single one of those experiences is different.
You go to read the same story, but you have a different experience on every platform. The photos might tell the story on one platform. And the story angle may be different on the web. On digital, it might be an immersive experience. But each one of those for the same story is very different. So we have our Insider package.
Our second package is our Platinum package, which is media and products. Every quarter our members get a physical package to their door to immerse their senses in global culture.
So every single issue, we have a destination that we focus on. The next one is Jordan. And I’m super excited about that. In that package, we have an award winning dinner party kit. In every location, we work with professional chefs, we just had Michelin star chefs out here in Colorado in December for one of our experiences. We work with the chefs and create a dinner party kit that gives you the invitations, thank you notes, the menus, the recipes, everything to throw a dinner party for five people, except for the food.
Then we create a sense of global bath and body that emulates the location that we went to. So it’s reminiscent, if I were there, this is what it would smell like. And we do a set of greeting cards for that location.
Of course, we have the magazine that has the destination, the history, the story of the place. In addition, we have the podcast and the videos, and then a playlist for that destination. So fully immersive sensory experience.
That’s the media and the products. That’s the Platinum membership.
When you get to our VIP plus experience, which is the third package, it actually pays for itself. It’s our most expensive memberships, the packages go from around $350 to almost $1,000 a year.
The VIP plus members get the media, get the products, and they get our experiences. So for each quarter, we go to a new destination that will be featured in the next year magazines. We invite up to 10 of our audience to come with us.
And in the VIP plus package, you get a 10% discount off of those experiences. So one trip could pay for it for your entire subscription. So now all through the year, you get to experience every single destination.
You might just go to one or to multiple experiences. This year will be in Fiji, Morocco, and South Africa. We’re doing three this year.
So yes, those are part of the transformation. It’s how we deliver what we do. It’s how we talk about what we do.
And then internally, it’s how the team views what we do. You know, I just had a team meeting yesterday. And I said to them, you do social to bring more people into our community. You do design to bring more people into our community. You do editing and storytelling to make sure people feel one in our community.
Instead of focusing on the tasks that people do daily, it’s really about the key performance indicators (KPIs) and what are they delivering? Because if we don’t deliver for our community, and if we don’t make sure our community stays vibrant, and continue to bring in members, then we won’t be able to design or do social or video or writing. So that’s part those are all parts of the transformation.
Samir Husni: Excellent. So tell me, let me go back eight years ago, when everybody was falling in love with digital, you decided to produce an ink on paper magazine. Why?
Elleyne Aldine: For the same reason as what people are seeing now. I got to tell you, it’s been very, very satisfying to see that what I was trying to say to people then, they’re starting to realize now? It’s the same as these packages I’m telling you about.
This has been the vision from the beginning. The only thing that’s added is the podcast. I didn’t think of podcasts back then. We’ve always been about the products. We’ve always been about the places. Same with print.
To me, print had its place. It is your luxury experience. It is being grounded.
It is sitting and spending time for self-care with yourself with a cup of tea or in the tub or out in nature or laying on the couch, really experiencing what you’re doing instead of rushing through a million pieces of content on your phone. People are starting to realize that. As you know, at the time I was teaching at university, and I’m sure you saw as well, Gen Z and now Gen Alpha, they were embracing print.
It was funny. I thought, okay, I’ll go to digital. We’ll do all the syllabi and everything in digital. Every semester the students will say, are you going to give us a copy? Give me a copy, please. Or we went to a digital book, and they went to the store to buy the print, right?
I had firsthand experience, my own lived experience in this is a tactile sensory grounding experience that you can’t get with digital. Digital will overload your nervous system. It will give you more content than your brain really can consume, add to anxiety instead of remove it. Print was a no brainer for me. I love paper.
To this day, we just had our launch in Beverly Hills for the last issue, and there was a printer there. We launched the magazine, and we only had a few copies of the magazine that we gave out to specific people. This gentleman walked up and he said, may I feel your magazine? I said, you must be a paper person.
He said, I’m a printer. I said, well, I’ll warn you, everyone says this is glorious when they put it in their hands. He put it in his hands, and he felt it, and he said, is this coated? I said, yes, it is.
He said, is this UV coating? I said, yes, it is. He really enjoyed it, but what’s interesting is he’s a connoisseur, but the everyday public has the same experience. They may not know the terms.
They may not know how we did the printing, but they have the same reaction he had, and that’s why I did print back in the day.
Samir Husni: So how important is the quality of printing and paper?
Elleyne Aldine: I won’t say the name of the magazine. It’s something that I enjoyed when I was a child, and I was disappointed at the quality of the paper, the quality of the design. Of course, the writing is still excellent, but there’s some magazines I subscribe to, that I still love, but how they squish the editorial into these little spaces, and so there’s really not that experience for the beautiful design and the airy feel that actually helps your brain be more open and relaxed, right? So, and it’s a big name, I was disappointed to see that that’s how it is now.
Samir Husni: You’re transforming, and a year from now, you and I are having this conversation. How would you tell me this transformation have gone?
Elleyne Aldine: Ayear from now, I will tell you. Okay, so our goal is to add 100,000 new print subscribers this year.
I will say that we have surpassed that goal, and I will say that we have more people thriving in our community than ever, meeting up in person, going on these experiences. I had mentioned experiences. It’s not only the travel, but it’s the launch that we had in Beverly Hills where 200 people came to a theater and listened to a fireside chat with the cover stars, where we had our celebrity global ambassador, Yara Shahidi, where we introduced her to the public, where we announced the Alchemist Awards, which will be the cross-cultural awards.
There’s nothing else like it, and we gave our first three awards to launch the awards, which will actually happen in November in Colorado. I will tell you that because of experiences like that in our cooking experiences and our travel experiences, that people are coming together more than ever, that they are understanding other people more than ever. It’s a good thing.
I was reading a recent article in The New York Times about five fashion magazines that are indies and thriving. Three out of the five have similar content to Culturs. They’re talking about fashion, which is a piece of what we do, but one of them had an African bent to it, and another one had an international bent, and I said, well, look at this. So, in a year, I’ll say that even more people understand the value of why what we do is so important.
Samir Husni: Did anybody ever tell you misspelled Culturs?
Elleyne Aldine: It’s so funny, actually, now that you say that. People haven’t done that recently. In the beginning, they would always try to add the E, or even when I would spell it, I wouldn’t say the name.
I’d spell it first, and I’d say, no E, Culturs with no E, and their brains couldn’t, it was like, what? And even as they typed it, and I’d say, no, it doesn’t have an E, and they’d say, I didn’t put one, and then I’d look and say, oh, okay, and they’d take it back out. So, in the beginning, yes, but no, I haven’t had anyone say that recently.
Samir Husni: With this new transformation, with this new membership opportunities that are out there, whom are you trying to reach?
Elleyne Aldine: As we continue in the process of transformation, we have a new ad campaign that focuses on our intended audience. As you can read on the back cover of the magazine and in the inside front cover, we define our audience as, “The world may try to define you.
But, you know better. Culturs is the place where culturally fluid people who crew up meaningfully experiencing different countries or cultures can feel seen, heard and understood.” That in short is our audience. Those are our people, that’s who we’re trying to reach.
Samir Husni: Is there any question I should ask you, I didn’t ask you, you would like me to ask?
Elleyne Aldine: What’s your intent for your audience with my story?
Samir Husni: Okay, what’s your intent for your audience with your story?
Elleyne Aldine: My intent for my audience is that they don’t feel defined by what the world says that they should be, that they understand who they are, and they fully embrace and immerse themselves in that, and defy what society tells them they should be, and just be themselves.
Samir Husni: So tell me, being yourself, you changed your name. Why?
Elleyne Aldine: There’s a couple of practical reasons, one being that another person with a similar name doesn’t have great credit, and I got tired of getting intertwined with them. But also in 2000 I discovered the Kabalarian philosophy, and it talks about the energy of names.
When I got married, which was that time, that’s why I discovered it, I changed my name two years later, and instantly felt the effect of it, and didn’t like the effect that I felt. And then I remembered back when I was young, my name changed when my mom, after my parents were divorced, and I had a similar experience where my life changed overnight. In that time, it changed for the better.
In my married time, it changed for the worse. Once I received a certification in Kabalarian philosophy, I knew the philosophy of names are important, it depends on when you’re born, and the energy of the name, and how it affects you. But it took me until now to really lean in and say, I’m tired of… Actually, it’s similar to what I’m saying about Culturs.
I don’t want to be defined anymore by what society says. I got tired of people mispronouncing my real name, messing up my old name, telling me what my name should be, because people would shorten my name all the time. I absolutely loved my birth name, but everyone would shorten it.
So eventually, I went by Doni, because I thought, okay, they’re going to shorten it to D-O-N-N-Y. I will shorten it to something that’s a little more exotic that I love. So I went with D-O-N-I.
But I’ve never liked that name. I can’t stand that name. So I decided I would have a name that I love, and if anyone didn’t like it, they could kick rocks.
Samir Husni: My typical last two questions are, one, if I come to visit you unannounced, what do I catch you doing to unwind at the end of the day?
Elleyne Aldine: To unwind at the end of the day? You catch me studying Spanish.
You catch me leafing through a magazine. You catch me meditating or sitting on the bed or on the couch and staring at the fire or staring at the wall.
Samir Husni: And my last question is, what keeps you up at night these days?
Elleyne Aldine: You know, nothing ever keeps me up.
No problem sleeping. That’s what happens when you run really fast. What keeps me up? Actually, doing right by my team and my community.
I really wanted to fill a space for people who didn’t have anyone paying attention to them. So I want to make sure that we keep our promises.
Samir Husni: Well, you’re doing a great job and you are keeping your promises. Thank you.
If you would have told Andrea Barbalich, editorial director of The Week Junior, when the magazine was launched in 2020, that the magazine will become the fastest growing magazine in the United States, she probably would have responded, “you are out of your mind.”
Launched on the outset of a pandemic that shut down the country and most of the world, followed by social unrest, worldwide demonstrations, two very contentious general elections, a war in Ukraine, and a war in the Middle East, most observers will have given the magazine no chance of surviving. Under normal circumstances the average survival rate for new magazines is less than 20% after four years of publishing.
What are the odds of swimming against the trends, celebrating five years of publishing, and being named the fastest growing magazine in the United States. Notice how I did not say fastest growing children’s magazine, I said, fastest growing magazine followed by The Atlantic and New York magazines in the second and third places respectively.
So, what is the secret for the success of The Week Junior and why is it one of two newsweeklies (the other being The Week) still published weekly year-round? To answer this question and others about the secret sauce used to make The Week Junior successful, I reached out to Andrea Barbalich, the editorial director of The Week Junior, looking for answers.
The enthusiast and passionate editorial director answered my questions and more cheerfully. Without any further ado, here is the lightly edited conversation with Andrea Barbalich, editorial director of The Week Junior magazine.
But first the soundbites:
On The Week Junior’s success: “The quality is outstanding in terms of the editorial and the visuals and its appeal to children and the trust it’s generated among adults.”
On what makes the magazine special: “To have a news magazine coming into the home every week that is timely and topical and based on the news that happened that week, engaging and age-appropriate and fun, is something special.”
On the children as her audience: “So they’re really a dream audience and they really respond to the fact that it’s print.”
On the content of the magazine: “The most important thing of all is that we create something that’s interesting and it’s exciting to read.”
More on the content of the magazine: “The kids want to read it and there’s a really special editorial mix and really magical quality to this magazine that kids respond to.”
On the importance of the trust factor: “We’ve worked very hard over the years to build that trust with parents and show them that we can be a non-partisan, unbiased resource for their kids that helps break stories down into a format that children can understand and that helps them form their own opinion about it.”
On why they survived as a new weekly where others didn’t: “It’s because of the way we present the news and the fact that our business model is based on subscriptions.”
On why the magazine resonates with its audience: “The Week Junior is created in such a careful, thoughtful, exciting, and fun way that really is engaging.”
On being the number one fastest growing magazine in the U.S.A.: “The number two and number three magazines in terms of growth are The Atlantic and New York. So we’re delighted to be in such excellent company.”
On the usage of AI: “We have not used AI very much at all. We don’t use it at all in our editing or our writing or even our research. It’s all done by the talented staff that we have.”
On the creation of the weekly magazine: “It’s created by human beings who really care to create the best quality product that they can every single week. And it’s read by an audience of children who really care. So it’s an absolutely wonderful proposition.”
On being a community: “Because in addition to publishing a magazine, we really see ourselves as building a community. We’ve built something very powerful with this brand that I hope will continue to evolve.
On children spending more time on the screen and less on magazines: “Maybe we’ve proven that theory wrong. Children who read this magazine really do feel that they’re part of a community of like-minded children. We went into this launch believing in the power of Generation Alpha and believing that this was a really incredible generation of kids who care about the world and are curious and knowledgeable and want to make a difference and want to have their voices heard.
On her hope for the future: “It’s vital for children to have this sense of hope and strength and I hope the Week Junior can continue to help with that.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Andrea Barbalich, editorial director of The Week Junior magazine.
Samir Husni: Congratulations on surviving five years. Less than 20 percent of new magazines survive four years, let alone five. Tell me, what’s your secret?
Andrea Barbalich: Well, first I’d like to say thank you for inviting me to talk to you.
I looked back on our interview from four years ago and remembered that great conversation that we had. So you’re checking in with us really at an exciting moment for The Week Junior. As you said, we just passed our fifth anniversary. We’re also currently the fastest growing magazine in America.
We have a devoted readership of amazing children across the country who absolutely love this magazine. We’ve launched some very successful brand franchises and had some amazing PR successes since we last spoke. I think we’ve really changed the whole concept of creating news for children in this country.
So we’re really thrilled with where we are. As to our secret, I think there are so many reasons why this magazine is resonating. One is that the quality is outstanding in terms of the editorial and the visuals and its appeal to children and the trust it’s generated among adults.
In our business model, the core product really comes first always above everything else. It’s a business model primarily based on subscriptions. We charge a decent price and the purchasers repeatedly tell us in surveys that we’ve conducted, that they feel it’s a fair price and a good value.
So the magazine has to deliver on this value proposition every single week and it does. Our renewal rates are very high and our mailbox is overflowing with letters from kids and parents telling us how much they love it. Another factor is the magazine is doing something no one has ever done in the United States and parents and children have recognized how positive that is not only for the children reading it but for the whole family.
To have a news magazine coming into the home every week that is timely and topical and based on the news that happened that week, engaging and age-appropriate and fun, is something special. Children are truly engaged in reading it and what parent doesn’t want that? They don’t just read it, they love reading it, they can’t wait to read it. Then it sparks conversations around the dinner table and in the car and so it’s a benefit for the whole family.
My team is so brilliant and they make my job a joy. But also to have the opportunity of a lifetime to speak to this incredible generation of children every week.
Also to have the opportunity of a lifetime to speak to this incredible generation of children every week. They love The Week Junior, it helps them feel informed and confident and happy. It’s incredibly rewarding work for me and they are such amazing people and they give me hope for the future.
Samir Husni: So when people tell you that the screen agers, i.e. the children, spend eight or nine hours on an average on a screen while they spend few minutes on a magazine. Why are you the exception?
Andrea Barbalich: Before we launched the magazine (in 2020) we were told exactly what you just said, that children are not interested in the news for one thing and also that children only care about screens and they don’t want to read on paper. We believe that that was wrong and it turned out that we were right. When we launched this magazine, if you think back to that time and our launch date was in March 17, 2020, precisely when the world was shutting down from the pandemic, children’s entire world was on a screen.
They were going to school on a screen, they were meeting with their friends and their family on a screen and so the magazine came in as a nice alternative to that and that’s still the case. There is really something special about having a product that you can hold in your hand that comes into the home, it has the child’s name on it, it feels special, it feels like a gift, it’s not homework.
Kids read it, they take it into their treehouse, they read it upside down on the monkey bars, they read it to their pet chicken and their baby brother and they take it on vacation. They have their favorite covers and they save their copies and refer back to them. So they’re really a dream audience and they really respond to the fact that it’s print.
We do have a subscription option where people can purchase both a print and a digital edition as a bundle and some people do take advantage of that, mainly the digital subscription is read by someone outside the home, such as a grandparent who wants to read along with the child, but overwhelmingly the subscriptions are print and I think that the medium is important for the reasons I just cited, that the children love having it. I also think that the most important thing of all is that we create something that’s interesting and it’s exciting to read. The kids want to read it and there’s a really special editorial mix and really magical quality to this magazine that kids respond to.
Samir Husni: You launched back in March of 2020, the world shut down that month, so my question to you, after that major obstacle, has your journey been a walk in a rose garden in those five years or you had other major obstacles and how did you overcome them?
Andrea Barbalich: Well, as you said, there really were some obstacles in the beginning.
We couldn’t have some of the in-person events that we wanted and we had to completely rethink our school strategy because school wasn’t taking place. But as of the year after that, kids were back in school and we could resume some of those plans. Producing a news magazine every week is its own challenge.
It’s a demanding schedule and a demanding pace and the news itself poses a challenge every week. The news environment itself is both a great challenge as well as a great opportunity. It’s very challenging for all of us right now, including adults, and it has been that way since our launch in 2020.
So much of the news is worrisome, frightening, it changes at a rapid pace. The biggest news story in the first thing in the morning is not always the biggest news story at the end of the day. Many parents are struggling to address current events with their kids.
Children are seeing the news, they’re hearing about the news, they’re exposed to it in school and from their friends and from social media. The Week Junior provides a real service in explaining the news in a calm, factual way that kids can understand and is age-appropriate. We’ve worked very hard over the years to build that trust with parents and show them that we can be a non-partisan, unbiased resource for their kids that helps break stories down into a format that children can understand and that helps them form their own opinion about it.
And in terms of the greatest challenges, I would say some of the biggest challenges have been some of the actual news stories themselves. If you think back on the past five years, we’ve had a pandemic. We had the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, two months after we launched, and worldwide demonstrations after that, two very contentious general elections, a war in Ukraine, a war in the Middle East.
Those are difficult events to explain and to understand. But it actually turns out for us that they wind up being our greatest opportunities because we’re able to, because of the way that we address the news, gain the trust of children and their parents. And we really become an incredible resource.
And we’ve also established our authority within the media beyond The Week Junior as an authority on this generation of children. And we’ve been interviewed many times on the topics of how to explain difficult news events to children. That has also helped with our growth.
Samir Husni: The Week Junior and The Week are the only two news magazines published weekly in the United States on a year round basis? All the other news weeklies have become 17 times a year, 20 times a year, but nothing left as a news weekly. Why do you think that’s the case?
Andrea Barbalich: It’s because of the way we present the news and the fact that our business model is based on subscriptions.
We do, of course, accept advertising and we’re grateful for our advertisers, but the business model is based on creating a quality product and delivering on the promise. We found with The Week Junior, and the same with The Week before us, people want to read what we’re publishing. The Week Junior is created in such a careful, thoughtful, exciting, and fun way that really is engaging.
And that resonates. We’re very fortunate with The Week Junior that it’s a gift title. So it’s always a gift because it’s not the child who’s paying for it, so it’s either a gift from the parent or from someone outside the home, a grandparent or an aunt or an uncle or a friend.
We found that as time has gone on, The Week Junior has become a very in-demand gift. We see sometimes that a grandparent will subscribe for all of their grandchildren or an aunt or uncle will subscribe for all of their nieces and nephews or the parent will give The Week Junior subscription as a gift for all of the birthday parties that the child attends during that year. That’s another way that we’ve grown and that the magazine has been able to develop quite a strong word of mouth following.
Samir Husni: Can you give me a percentage why you said The Week, Junior is the fastest growing magazine in America?
Andrea Barbalich: We had a 23% increase in circulation for the second half of 2024, as measured by the Alliance for Audited Media. But then if you measure the growth year over year, instead of just for that six-month period, the percentage is even higher. We just had our highest ever subscription month just this past January, just a few months ago.
The number two and number three magazines in terms of growth are The Atlantic and New York. So we’re delighted to be in such excellent company.
Samir Husni: Everybody is talking these days about AI. Is AI a friend or a foe to The Week Junior?
Andrea Barbalich: We have not used AI very much at all. We don’t use it at all in our editing or our writing or even our research. It’s all done by the talented staff that we have.
We have used it in a limited way in our art department. There are some capabilities in terms of Photoshop, for example, that have enhanced their work. But for right now, we’re being very cautious and judicious and we’re taking a wait-and-see approach.
Samir Husni: So in an age of AI and digital, print has no backspace, has no delete. It’s permanent. Right?
Andrea Barbalich: And it’s created by human beings who really care to create the best quality product that they can every single week. And it’s read by an audience of children who really care. So it’s an absolutely wonderful proposition.
Samir Husni: In the midst of all this digital land, if you and I are having the same conversation a year from now, what would you tell me The Week Junior accomplished in 2025?
Andrea Barbalich: I would hope is that our ambition, our editorial excellence, our subscriptions, and revenue growth have continued to climb. I want as many children as possible to have the opportunity to read this magazine and be part of our community. We have some creative ideas for growth that I hope we can make happen.
And they really center on finding new ways to connect with our audience and having them connect with one another. Because in addition to publishing a magazine, we really see ourselves as building a community. We’ve built something very powerful with this brand that I hope will continue to evolve.
Samir Husni: Why do you think we’ve allowed digital to steal the word community from magazines? You said The Week Junior is building a community. We don’t hear that much in the magazine world anymore. It’s like all the communities are on the digital sphere?
Andrea Barbalich: Maybe we’ve proven that theory wrong. Children who read this magazine really do feel that they’re part of a community of like-minded children. We went into this launch believing in the power of Generation Alpha and believing that this was a really incredible generation of kids who care about the world and are curious and knowledgeable and want to make a difference and want to have their voices heard.
We believe in those kids. Those kids believe in themselves, and we believe in them. That’s what creates the community.
We have also created a brand extension called Junior Council, which is 12 children who are chosen every year to be part of the council. They spend four months with us learning from our editors and guest speakers that we bring in. Then they choose a cause that they’re interested in, and they research and write stories that are then published in the magazine.
When they graduate from Junior Council, they become what we call junior journalists. They have opportunities to cover stories for us and have their work published. They’ve done everything from attending red carpet premieres to interviewing prominent people such as Michelle Obama and the head of the FDA.
They’ve been featured on NBC Nightly News Kids Edition with Lester Holt. They’ve done all that, but then they’ve also done things in their own individual schools and communities. That spark was ignited in them during their time on the Junior Council.
We’ve heard from so many children and parents about how this program has changed their life. I think there’s a sense of that community and strength and hope and optimism running through the whole magazine every week, not on Junior Council, but also on the magazine itself.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I should have asked you and I did not, or anything you would like to add?
Andrea Barbalich: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the amazing PR successes that we’ve had over the past five years.
Just in the past 12 months, we’ve had significant partnerships with the Today Show and the Drew Barrymore Show and NBC Nightly News Kids Edition with Lester Holt that have really helped raise awareness of the brand and elevate our authority and our excellence. So that’s a big part of our growth also, that’s a significant part of our growth.
In terms of anything else I’d like to add, really just how grateful I feel to be leading this magazine at this moment in time.
First, to have such an incredible team working beside me at a company that values our work. Every person who ever dreams of becoming an editor-in-chief has a dream team list in the back of their head of who they would want to assemble if they ever got the chance, and I was lucky enough to have that opportunity. There’s something very special about launching a magazine as opposed to relaunching or refreshing or reinventing.
When you go through that experience together, it’s very powerful for everyone. My team is so brilliant and they make my job a joy.
Also to have the opportunity of a lifetime to speak to this incredible generation of children every week. They love The Week Junior, it helps them feel informed and confident and happy. It’s incredibly rewarding work for me and they are such amazing people and they give me hope for the future.
Samir Husni: Excellent. So if I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you reading a book, having a glass of wine, watching TV?
Andrea Barbalich: First of all, Samir, you’re welcome to stop by anytime. I love to cook and I would certainly make something special for you. I also have a wonderful family and a close-knit group of friends and so maybe you would walk in on an interesting conversation or some healthy and respectful debate and a lot of laughter.
Samir Husni: And what’s keeping Andrea up at night these days?
Andrea Barbalich: Many things actually. But at the top of the list for me would be that our nation is extremely divided right now and amid all the challenges that we face, I want children to be able to hold on to their optimism and their hope, to maintain their desire to be engaged with the world no matter what happens, to learn to be critical thinkers and form their own opinion, to continue to care as they do very much right now, to realize their view and their voice matters.
It’s very easy for all of this to get drowned out, but it’s vital for children to have this sense of hope and strength and I hope the Week Junior can continue to help with that.
Samir Husni: Thank you very much.
Teneshia Carr was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth. A daughter of a father who owned and operated two delis and a mother who was a roving nurse. Her parents were her inspiration to be an entrepreneur and not seek a job with a paycheck at the end of the month. She wanted to own the space she occupies. Ms. Carr learned that, “there is nothing else but working for yourself.”
And work for herself she did. She launched Blanc magazine in 2011. Born from a sense of frustration when she started, “it was the typical angry story, just out of frustration.” Blanc, which means white in the French language, was in her words, “The irony of a black woman from Philadelphia owning a magazine called Blanc is on purpose.”
To say that Teneshia has succeeded with Blanc as the magazine that, “is a creative platform that presents a diverse and underrepresented perspective of the fashion, art and music world,” will be a major understatement.
A talented editor, photographer and now co-founder of a content agency, Teneshia still have time to rewind at home journaling “mindless writings.” The passionate magazine founder and I had a very pleasant, fun, and educational conversation via Zoom.
So without any further ado, here is my the lightly edited interview with Teneshia Carr, owner and editor in chief of Blanc magazine:
But first the soundbites:
On the reason she named the magazine Blanc: “I thought if I could figure out how to make a Trojan horse for people who look like me to sneak into the side door of fashion that just wasn’t letting us in, was something that I wanted to do.”
On the secret of a good publishing model: “You need to figure out how to do something that’s relevant, do something that matters to your readers and to advertisers to allow them to keep supporting you.”
On why Blanc survived and thrived where others failed: “I think Blanc has stuck around because we work with a wide array of creatives, and those creatives go on to work with some of the biggest stars, the biggest talents, and the biggest magazines in the world.”
On sticking to print: “They say, do that digital, girl, but they are adamant at the legacy that comes with the advertising that they create lasting forever in a print publication.”
On Surviving as an independent magazine: “In order to survive as an independent or a niche magazine, you have to understand that circulation isn’t going to save you. Nothing is going to save you. You need to figure out how to do something that’s relevant, do something that matters to your readers and to advertisers to allow them to keep supporting you.”
On the creation of BabyRobot agency: “There’s other ways that while for the past 15 years, I’ve built this community, I have to really figure out how to create experiences that, connect to them as individuals and connect to them as my audience. So that’s how you rule the world, diversifying. But leave your lighthouse untouched.”
On Blanc and its influence: “It’s not built to be necessarily the influence. It is the lighthouse to shine on the influencers themselves.”
On being an entrepreneur: “I grew up with the entire idea of being an entrepreneur… I was taught that there is nothing else but working for yourself.”
On her journey those past 15 years: “The entire journey for me has been Rose Garden because it’s full of the beauty and full of the thorns.”
On Artificial Intelligence and its role: “It’s amazing. You didn’t think about a tool as something to fear. You thought about it as a tool to enhance the thing that you’re doing.”
On the impact of AI and other digital platforms: “We’re heading to the land of the falseness. That’s going to make Blanc and other niche magazines who are doing really cool things still interesting.”
On how she rewinds at the end of her day: “I do a lot of journaling, just mindless writing in the evening. And that really helps me relax from the day.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Teneshia Carr, owner and editor in chief of Blanc magazine:
Samir Husni: My first question to you is, 15 years ago, you embarked on a mission that manifested itself with Blanc magazine. Can you tell me what that mission is, and why did you choose an ink on paper magazine to manifest that mission?
Teneshia Carr: First of all, the irony of a black woman from Philadelphia owning a magazine called Blanc is on purpose. I thought if I could figure out how to make a Trojan horse for people who look like me to sneak into the side door of fashion that just wasn’t letting us in, was something that I wanted to do.
I wanted to figure out how to tell stories with people that look like me, with creatives from around the world to share that one perspective, to share their different perspectives on what luxury is, what beauty is, what fashion is, what culture is. So, when I started, it was the typical angry story, just out of frustration. I wanted to be the next Anna Wintour.
I wanted to be the next, not just fashion editor, but the next great fashion storyteller. And I knew from the constant rejections that it just wasn’t going to happen until I figured out how to build my own space. And that’s what I did.
Samir Husni: And then 2020 happened.
Teneshia Carr: And then 2020 happened. There were quite a few Black-owned magazines that were popping up around that time.
They didn’t really have a luxury advertising, but they still had a really strong point of view. There was Fashion Fair, Crown Magazine, and New Knew was another one. It was just like a renaissance that was happening around publications, Black editors, Black designers, and Black magazine owners.
It started bubbling up around 2018, 2019, when all these little cool magazines started popping up. When I first started Blanc (2011), years before, there weren’t any Black-owned, Black female-owned, the advertisers just didn’t publish with us. Essence didn’t have luxury, fashion advertising.
When 2020 happened, the whole thing stopped a little. You would think that because of what was happening with the streets and the social revolution and all the Black calls on Instagram, that all of this money would start pouring our way, and that just wasn’t the case.
I think Blanc has stuck around because we work with a wide array of creatives, and those creatives go on to work with some of the biggest stars, the biggest talents, and the biggest magazines in the world.
We are, quite frankly, to pat my own back, just consistently good. We are consistently telling really good stories. So, 2020, to imagine, I couldn’t get my issue from London.
I print in the UK. I couldn’t get my issue anywhere. So, I lost the print run. I couldn’t distribute it, and I had to fulfill my obligations to the advertisers. I had to fulfill what I needed to do for my advertisers. But everything just stopped.
The world stopped. It was really hard to pivot to something else, because we’re so old-school print. Digital’s fine and digital’s cool, but I don’t really care about that. No advertisers, I care about it. But, like, print is the thing. It’s the thing.
It’s smelling the copy and and knowing the difference between a digital print and a real print and, feeling the paper and the weight and all of that. It still means something, and it still meant something, but I couldn’t, it was impossible for six months or eight months to do anything. I think the only reason why I survived is because of my advertising partners.
I don’t have very many, but the ones I have are really dedicated to the way I tell stories. They really are wanting to see us grow, but it’s hard because there are only so many partners that are willing, unfortunately, to support in a real way.
The pandemic stopped things, but then it restarted. We got a boost, and that boost quickly died out. We got a boost of advertising, and that quickly died out and we went back to our regular partners. I think we’ll keep going because every time I meet a client, they go on and on about how valuable what I do is, how valuable the magazine is still for them and their business, how important it is.
They always get on me about getting more digital now. They say, do that digital, girl, but they are adamant at the legacy that comes with the advertising that they create lasting forever in a print publication.
Samir Husni: Back in 2011 everybody was into digital and social media. Did somebody say, Ms. Carr, are you out of your mind? You’re doing an ink on paper magazine?
Teneshia Carr: Well, people still say that, and they keep saying it to me.
People were saying it, but the thing is because I don’t know how many other people could have started the thing that I did in a way that I did it without any investment, without having any contacts or any connections. I focused on having the creative network first, and then I figured out everything else. Like, I knew that I wanted to make a magazine.
I had no idea how the business of magazine was run. I don’t need to know that stuff. That stuff is fine.
I just need to know how to make a magazine. So, imagine me focusing on creating the work and then figuring out how to build a magazine business. I had to do those two things.
I could not figure out then how to build the concept of Blanc digitally. That just wasn’t my focus. I just wanted something eternal.
I wanted to create a perfect coffee table magazine that you can put on your coffee table, and whether it’s from 10 years ago or four years ago or from last season, it’s still relevant and still feels relevant. And that’s what I wanted to make. I didn’t want to make a beautiful website that no one cares about.
I wanted to make something that was forever.
Samir Husni: Excellent. So, tell me, as you are climbing every mountain, so to say, do you really want to rule the world as your issue 28?
Teneshia Carr: Yes.
Yes. So, my theme of the Rule The World issue, and the other issue themes are based on song titles.
“Rule The World” is a nod to Beyonce or “Pieces Of You,” which is one of my favorite issues. That’s a Jewel song. So the themes are always rooted in music, mainly sad British music.
In order to survive as an independent or a niche magazine, you have to understand that circulation isn’t going to save you. Nothing is going to save you. You need to figure out how to do something that’s relevant, do something that matters to your readers and to advertisers to allow them to keep supporting you.
And you have to diversify. I can’t just print Blanc because that’s just not enough space for the stories I want to tell and the things that I want to make. I had to do what everybody else is doing.
That is the reason why I felt like I had to build an agency. I built an agency called BabyRobot Studios, with my partner, Scott Omelianuk (former editor in chief of Inc. and This Old House magazines). I built it because that’s only one piece of a touchpoint to the community. How else can I connect? How else can I engage? How else can I, with my partners, with my advertising partners, how can we engage and connect authentically in other ways? But the magazine, that’s the lighthouse, baby.
You don’t touch that. It’s perfect.
But there’s other ways that while for the past 15 years, I’ve built this community, I have to really figure out how to create experiences that, connect to them as individuals and connect to them as my audience. So that’s how you rule the world, diversifying. But leave your lighthouse untouched.
Leave it pure, leave it beautiful. It’s going to last forever and the advertisers will love you. But figure out other ways to build a brand, touch your community, and engage in your community.
And that can be digital for you. I’m working on it. I’m going to build it. It’s going to be amazing. It could be social, but for me, it’s going to be real life experiences when I partner with my advertisers and connect with my audience. So that’s how I’m going to rule the world.
Samir Husni: It has been said magazines were the original influencers. What has been the influence of Blanc?
Teneshia Carr: I think we’re influenced by the idea of finding the people who are creating culture genuinely.
Magazines were the original influencers. That’s absolutely correct. And then fashion designers and fashion editors were the other first influencers.
But for us, it’s the community. It’s the people who we research and find, those next big artists, and those next big musicians. Like, Blanc is the other part of it, which is, it’s a clean slate.
It has nothing to do with the editors. It has nothing to do with my team. It’s about the contributors page, which changes every single issue.
We work with hundreds of new teams, every single issue on purpose, because that is who matters, the contributors, not necessarily the masthead. It’s about figuring out how to find those people who are on the precipice of becoming, and allowing their light to shine as influencers of culture. That’s what Blanc is built on.
It’s not built to be necessarily the influence. It is the lighthouse to shine on the influencers themselves.
Samir Husni: You’re so passionate about the magazine. Does this mean that your last 15 years have been a trip in a rose garden?
Teneshia Carr: I grew up with the entire idea of being an entrepreneur. My mother was a nurse, and she was essentially a freelance nurse who went around, she had certain clients, and she moved from client to client.
My father, without a high school diploma, he started two cheesesteak stores in Philadelphia. One was called Carr’s Deli, and one was called Sandwich Masters. The point is that I was taught that there is nothing else but working for yourself.
There is no such thing as going to some job and getting some paycheck, and living life. That was never a part of my DNA. Whatever I was going to do in this world, I was going to sit inside whatever that thing is.
I was going to own the thing that I sit inside. There have been years of struggle and years of drinking champagne, and that’s the journey of being an entrepreneur. Every successful entrepreneur can tell you a dozen moments that they have been unsuccessful and they have failed.
For me, the entire journey has been worth it because I can’t do anything else. Now, at this point, can I maybe go and work for someone else? Maybe, but I could never do that before. It just wasn’t even in my DNA to think that way.
The entire journey for me has been Rose Garden because it’s full of the beauty and full of the thorns.
Samir Husni: Dealing with all the creative world, from music, to art, to fashion, do you have any fear from AI?
Teneshia Carr: No. I think I’m aging myself, I remember when Photoshop didn’t exist and you didn’t fear Photoshop. You were like, oh my God, I can get rid of all these pimples off this girl’s face.
It’s amazing. You didn’t think about a tool as something to fear. You thought about it as a tool to enhance the thing that you’re doing.
Now, if you aren’t talented and you use this tool in this way, I think that’s no different than people who used to over-process their photos in the eighties and nineties. And you used to say, oh my God, look that’s so heavily Photoshopped.
In Blanc, most of our photos are shot in film still, by the way.
Most people don’t know that, but we encourage so many of our photographers to shoot on film. They don’t charge us the same rates. We tell them this is the theme, go explore.
It’s like testing ground to be experimental, to be different. And most of them say oh wow, a lot of people don’t let us use film. And I’m like, dude, go use film, go do it.
It’s a bit more expensive, but the print quality like this is (holding in her hands issue 28 of Blanc), this is shot in film. The difference you can tell in the whole story, you could tell them the stories that we shoot on film.
So I understand that people are afraid, but there are a lot of AI artists doing a lot of really cool things, there are a lot of photographers, a lot of creatives that don’t use anything that are doing some real cool things too. I mean, it’s okay.
All of it’s okay.
Samir Husni: I’m seeing so much like fake art, fake pictures…
Teneshia Carr: When they pass it as a real art, that’s the thing that’s scary, but I just think there isn’t anything we can do about that.
Like the moment that we started accepting images that were, literally wastes were reduced by seven inches, that people look completely different from retouching. When we were starting to accept that in advertising and in print as facts, we were already coming here anyway. We were already coming to the land of the fakeness anyway.
As if it just got here and now everybody’s scared, but we’ve been moving here. If you look at some images again from the nineties and the early two thousands that were so over processed that the people were unrecognizable. That’s where we were heading.
We’re heading to the land of the falseness. That’s going to make Blanc and other niche magazines who are doing really cool things still interesting. It’s going to make us interesting in a couple of years because people get exhausted with not knowing if something that they’re seeing is real or not.
And they know that when they pick up Blanc, they see the film edges. They know that that was shot on film and that was just printed and that’s it. There’s nothing else.
So I think it’s going to be more important to have those kind of bastions of purity, like print, like people who still shoot film, people who still accept film for print, because I know how rare that is.
It’s going to be all the more important to keep figuring out how to publish this stuff, these creatives, they need this platform, they need publications that are still going to be accepting this kind of work.
Samir Husni: If somebody comes to you and says, Ms. Carr, I want to publish a magazine today, ink on paper magazine, do you tell them you’re out of your mind or you give them a different advice?
Teneshia Carr: I would say you are 50 years too late. If you’re still hearing that and crazy enough to keep going, then you just might have the juice to come out with a couple issues.
I would say it takes a certain type of person to look down the barrel in the face of this impossible thing and say, yeah, I still want to do that. That person can’t be persuaded to do anything else because I’m one of those people. You couldn’t tell me 15 years ago to not do a magazine.
You couldn’t tell me today to not do a magazine. I would do it.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my personal question, is there anything you would like to add, a question you would like me to ask I didn’t ask you?
Teneshia Carr: No, I think that was pretty good. I think it was pretty fun.
Samir Husni: So my first personal question, I could not but notice the spider tattoo on your hand. What’s the significance of the spider tattoo?
Teneshia Carr: So this is Anansi, Anansi the spider. He’s a trickster spider.
He has seven sons. My husband has a deep affinity for spiders. And so instead of a wedding band, I got this Anansi.
And this is me, who is Djibouti the turtle. Also a trickster turtle. This is the trickster turtle and this trickster spider.
They’re based on folklore. This is the African folklore.
They’re little tricksters who trick the other animals in the forest into doing what they want.
Samir Husni: If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch Teneshia doing to rewind from day reading a book, watching TV, cooking?
Teneshia Carr: I do a lot of journaling in the evening. For a long time, I didn’t unwind at all. I didn’t know how to relax, or I was always thinking about work or always checking emails, the worst thing in the world that has happened to us is the fact that we have constant access to our phones and people have constant access to us.
I turn off all the notifications on my phone so it doesn’t even light up because I would be checking it all the time. I do a lot of journaling, just mindless writing in the evening. And that really helps me relax from the day.
Samir Husni: and my typical last question, what keeps you up at night these days?
Teneshia Carr: I think trying to juggle between two businesses, building the agency, BabyRobot Studios and the magazine together. They’re separate, right? They’re sisters, but they have their separate purposes. They’re totally different: one is an agency and one is media.
It keeps me up at night. Realizing that I have to put a lot of all the things that I’ve learned over the past 15 years into my business. I’m having to learn all over again about a new business that I didn’t anticipate. So it just means that I have to get in a frame of mind. It’s a new challenge that I didn’t expect to run.
It’s just content, right? I make this content for print. I can make this content for white label and give it to the same client and charge an agency rate. It’s this totally different business, totally different self. It’s a totally different set of clients.
It’s totally different. And you just don’t anticipate it until you actually are going to set up an agency. It’s going to be totally fine.
So that’s what keeps me up at night.
Samir Husni: Thank you.
I am holding in my hands a copy of Life magazine from March 26, 1925. Yes, you read that right, a copy of a magazine published 100 years ago. The magazine feels, looks, and reads like many magazines published today. A nice cover, good content, plenty of illustrations, and a promise for the future, “While there is Life There’s Hope.” And hope is what I see and feel every time I pick up a copy of a magazine from a century or two ago.
Print is permanent. A magazine, once printed, is permanent. You can’t change a thing, not even a comma. There is no backspace or delete button. What you see is what you get: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. You can own it and you can proudly say it is mine. That sense of ownership satisfies the human need in all of us to own things, lots of things (Just look at your house or apartment and see how many things you have, even those you do not need).
Flipping through the pages of this issue of Life, I am transformed to a simpler, calmer world where, I can “select colors and upholstery,” for my “custom Cadillac,” or enjoy my Wrigley’s chewing gum “after every meal.”
I am also reading the prize winner’s answer to the question, “Is Democracy a Success?” H.W. Davis won the $50 prize for the following answer: “ Democracy is a rip-roaring success. If you don’t believe so, say out loud that it isn’t – and run for your life. Democracy pats the greatest number of people on the back and makes the most promises. Of course it seldom delivers. But what of that? We live and are made happy by promise, not performance.
And happiness is success, for all that anybody has been able to prove to the contrary. Ergo, democracy is a success.
There! The pup has his tail in his teeth.”
So, here you have it. I am reading and flipping the pages of a magazine from 100 years ago, exactly like I read and flip the pages of a magazine from March 26, 2025. I wonder if I can say the same thing about any of my digital devices? Heck, I can’t even use my camcorder from 20 years ago, yet I can look at my printed pictures from 50 years ago.
Long live print and long live permeance. Print will be here long after I am gone, the same it was here long before I was born.
One final note, there is nothing permanent about digital, even a PDF can be changed and altered. You can’t do that to a magazine. It is permanent.
Enough of that, I have some reading to do…the first issue of Art Lovers magazine from January 1925…To be continued.
PS: If you want to journey through thousands of magazines from yesteryears, check The Samir Husni’s Magazine Collection at my Alma Mater The University of Missouri-Columbia here.
When Brian Clarke, who uses the pseudonym name Les Toil, decided to major in art at the beginning of the 90s, he did not know he is majoring in a lost art. His love for art and his talents in illustrations were enough to provide him with a decent income to provide a good living.
However that decent income started to dry up and go south as the 90s progressed. Photography became cheaper to use and digital art started to be on the rise. Then artificial intelligence (AI) appeared on the scene, and like a thief in the night, art and illustrations became a lost art.
So how can a magazine illustrator make a living in this digital age, and how are hand-created ink on paper illustrations and paintings differ from those created by AI? These questions and more were the center piece of my conversation with an artist who spends his evenings, “doing warmup drawings, just keeping my hand busy, doing sketches from photographs…”
Brian Clarke is not only fun to chat with but also a passionate artist of the art of illustrations and paintings. The “proliferation of AI art,” is what keeps him up at night, but he and his global network of art friends are searching for ways to stop AI from stealing their creative work.
I hope you will enjoy this Mr. Magazine™ interview with Brian Clarke, better known as Les Toil, as much as I enjoyed conducting this interview.
But first the soundbites:
On the origin of the pseudonym name Les Toil: “I got that name by looking at an old issue of National Lampoon, an issue called National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook Parody… and I saw the name Les Toil, which means less work, and I thought that’s a great name, because the style that I’m doing now, pen and ink, is a lot less effort, a lot less toil than an elaborate oil painting.”
On the value of ink on paper art: “You can pick up a magazine anytime. You can grab that magazine and go straight to that art, and Samir, it’s also like when albums went from LPs, went from big albums to little cassettes. As an illustrator, that broke my heart.”
On art and AI: “AI is actually replacing artists. I’m not happy about that. The way that we’re battling, us artists are battling AI art is by putting up restrictions for these AI applications or companies to start harvesting our art, to stop stealing our art.”
On the value of illustrations in today’s marketplace: “I think that importance has diminished a bit unfortunately. Even with AI art, as far as editorial journalism, I’m not really sure if illustration plays a big part as it did in the past.”
On original pieces of art: “I think for the simple fact that if you have a printed piece of art, or if you have your original art, I think just the fact that you have it, the original art in your hand, that kind of makes it art.”
On the reasons art and illustrations have declined: “Because, to be honest, art is not as valued as it once was. The process of photography is a lot easier to attain than it was before.”
On his favorite art magazine: “It’s called Illustration Magazine. Each issue, the editors highlight about three or four classic illustrators from the past, illustrators from all countries.”
On the benefits of art to him: “So there’d be all these different assignments, just hundreds of assignments of subjects that I wasn’t familiar with…I go to the library… I read up on it. And so that was a benefit. I got a good education through doing magazine art.”
On whether art and illustrations are a lost art: “Unfortunately, it is. It is.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Brian Clarke, better known as Les Toil:
Samir Husni: So, tell me, Brian, my first question is, why the pseudonym name Les Toil?
Brian Clarke: Samir, the name Les Toil came about in the early 1990s, and that is because I was working under my real name, Brian Clarke, ever since I graduated from art school. I went to California College of Arts and Crafts for two years, and then I went to the Academy of Art in San Francisco, which is where I graduated in 1991.
Right after I graduated from art school, art directors, clients, stopped using illustrators for things like magazines and whatever, the type of work that I was getting after art school. I was working for any type of industry that hired illustrators. Again, that included periodicals, it included the film industry, it included the gaming industry, it included advertising art, just any industry that hired illustrators.
I was fortunate enough after art school to get work. So, for a good three or four year period, I was doing fine, and then the whole world of illustration went south, and art directors started to use photographers, they started to use clip art, which is previously done artwork that can be recycled over and over again. So, I wasn’t getting much work after three years of a thriving career as an illustrator in the early 90s, and so a friend of mine, an illustrator friend of mine, started to do rock and roll posters.
He started to do these little mini posters for music shows around the Bay Area. We were young, and we were going to all these different rock and roll shows. He started to do these posters, and he had a friend that was printing these posters in his office, and they were beautiful color posters. Back in the early 90s, having your art printed in color, beautiful color, was fantastic, because all we had were those crappy color Xerox machines. So I started to do some of these rock and roll posters that were being posted all over San Francisco and the Bay Area, and I wanted to have a different name for myself, because back in the 60s, there were all these rock and roll posters for rock bands that were happening, the burgeoning rock and roll scene in the mid-60s, and those artists had cool names, so I wanted to have a cool name for this new style of art that I was doing, and I was also getting into my artwork being colored on the computer.
So for my three-year career as an illustrator, since art school, I was doing these elaborate oil paintings, because all the people that I admired as illustrators when I was going to art school, they all worked in traditional paint, oil, acrylic, gouache, so that’s what I was doing. But then when I started to do the rock and roll art, I switched to an easier style, which was pen and ink, pencil, drawing it in pencil, and then inking the pencil lines, so it kind of looked like comic book art, basically line art, and then I would scan it on a computer and color it with Photoshop, which my friend taught me.
I got an Apple computer, and I started to learn to color my pen and ink art on Photoshop, and so I changed my name to Les Toil, because I thought that was a cool name, and Samir, I got that name by looking at an old issue of National Lampoon, an issue called National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook Parody, and in that issue, they had all these class of 1957 photographs of all the students that were graduating, and they had all these goofy names, like Lindsay Doyle, Jason Rainbows, just all these hilarious names, and I saw the name Les Toil, which means less work, and I thought that’s a great name, because the style that I’m doing now, pen and ink, is a lot less effort, a lot less toil than an elaborate oil painting, so I started to sign those rock and roll posters, Les Toil, with basically a stamp. I wasn’t even signing them, I just put a stamp saying Les Toil. I started to make a name for myself doing this rock and roll art. I started doing rock and roll CD covers, album covers, posters, and I was being interviewed in magazines for the rock and roll art that I was doing under the name Les Toil, so I just kept that name from like 1993 up until now, and nobody knows who the hell Brian Clarke is, but that’s where that name comes from. Sorry for the long story.
Samir Husni: When you look at the art that you create, where’s the value of the ink on paper compared to the digital sphere that we live in, especially that you graduated at the beginning of the digital revolution?
Brian Clarke: I say there’s a value for your art in a printed magazine because you’re not restricted to looking at it on a screen. You don’t have to be at a particular place looking at a particular image to enjoy it. You don’t have to look at a small screen to enjoy that art.
You can pick up a magazine anytime. You can grab that magazine and go straight to that art, and Samir, it’s also like when albums went from LPs, went from big albums to little cassettes. As an illustrator, that broke my heart.
I was a kid when it happened, but you had that big beautiful artwork to look at as you were listening to the music, and I think the same applies to magazines. You have that beautiful illustration to look at that gives you reference to the article that you’re reading or the interview that you’re reading. It gives you reference if you’re reading a fiction story, a short story in a magazine.
You can constantly look at that, and you’re not restricted to having to come into your studio or to look at a computer.
Samir Husni: What role does illustrations play in today’s marketplace?
Brian Clarke: I think that importance has diminished a bit unfortunately. Even with AI art, as far as editorial journalism, I’m not really sure if illustration plays a big part as it did in the past.
People are more than happy with using photographs, even if it’s a fiction story. People seem to be just as happy with a photograph of a man and a woman sitting on a park bench for a short love story. But what the benefits of illustrations in a printed platform is that they’re exposing the reader to art.
Periodicals quite often are the average citizen’s primary exposure to popular culture. When I was going to art school, I discovered so much about art based upon the illustrations that were being printed in magazines throughout the years. I was learning about so many different things including cultures of different countries. You’re not getting that now if you’re not seeing art, original hand-created art in periodicals.
Samir Husni: I’ve seen so much fake art generated by AI on Facebook and other social media platforms. How can you protect the authentic art from the madness of fake AI-generated art?
Brain Clarke: Well, Samir, as you can imagine, I’m very much in social media.
I expose my art through social media, and all of my art friends are just up in arms about AI. We’re very unhappy about that. And people that use AI give the excuse that AI art is only a tool to help real artists, but I don’t believe that’s true because I’m seeing finished pieces of art that were completely created by artificial intelligence.
So AI is actually replacing artists. I’m not happy about that. The way that we’re battling, us artists are battling AI art is by putting up restrictions for these AI applications or companies to start harvesting our art, to stop stealing our art.
There’s now applications that will put stamps or watermarks on our hand-created art in which an AI platform or company can’t steal it. And that’s the only way artificial intelligence art is created is by stealing real artists’ work and then manipulating it. So that’s the only thing we can do to battle the proliferation of AI art now, is to prevent them from stealing our art.
Samir Husni: So tell me, because I think you and I share this love for print. If I have a piece of art in my hands, let’s say the Mona Lisa, if I own the Mona Lisa, or if I see it on my computer screen, which one, does that ownership gives me a different feeling, a different sense of ownership, of showmanship?
Brian Clarke: I think for the simple fact that if you have a printed piece of art, or if you have your original art, I think just the fact that you have it, the original art in your hand, that kind of makes it art. That kind of makes it so you can now frame it and hang it on your wall.
Again, you can’t do that with AI art. When AI art is displayed in art galleries, which I’m starting to see, unfortunately, now, it’s just prints, low resolution prints for that matter.
So, in my opinion, just to hold it, and to be able to display it, and be able to make large, whatever, reprints of original art, I think that’s the benefit. It’s created by a human being with human spirit.
Samir Husni: Why do you think, a hundred years ago, we used to have a lot of art magazines. Why do you think we don’t have as many art magazines, as they used to be a century ago?
Brian Clarke: Because, to be honest, art is not as valued as it once was. Because the process of photography is a lot easier to attain than it was before.
We can pull out our phones and take a photograph. In the past, in the 1920s, the 30s, the 40s, illustration was the official way to embellish a story, to embellish anything, to convey something, because photography just wasn’t all that easy back then. I read your interview with Marianne Howatson on your blog and I completely agree with what she said. You held up an art magazine just now, and I believe, niche type magazines, periodicals, will always thrive. I pay good money for a number of art-related magazines, such as Illustration Magazine and Artist’s Magazine.
These are beautiful, glossy magazines that come out once every six months. They have just stunning prints of old illustrations by great masters of art. I think if I were to start my own magazine, it will be with the type of art that’s always inspired me.
So in that sense, a niche publication, I do believe would thrive. If you believe there’s an audience for what you love, then I think that type of printed material will keep going on.
Samir Husni: What’s your favorite art magazine, if you can?
Brian Clarke: It’s called Illustration Magazine. Each issue, the editors highlight about three or four classic illustrators from the past, illustrators from all countries. The editors get their hands on photographs and scans of some of these classic illustrations that were printed in Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Newsweek, Time, all those magazines from the 30s, 40s, 50s.
They have beautiful scans of these slides of these pieces. And that’s why I like Illustrator magazine specifically.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I failed to ask you and you would like me to ask?
Brian Clarke: I’d like to tell you why I had such a fantastic time as an editorial magazine illustrator. And the reason I had such a good time, and it was about a good six years that I was earning a living doing magazine illustrations. The reason why I loved it so much is because almost every assignment was a new exposure to some subject.
I remember getting an assignment to do an illustration for a story on King Henry VIII. I went into the library and I did all my research on King Henry VIII. I gathered all that material, how they were dressed, the structures, the architecture back then. I created an illustration based upon what I studied about that period. Then there’ll be some other assignment that has to do with whatever science fiction, life on Mars.
I’d go to the library and I’d study up on that and I’d see photographs and I’d look at other illustrators interpretation of Mars. So there’d be all these different assignments, just hundreds of assignments of subjects that I wasn’t familiar with. I read up on it.
And so that was a benefit. I got a good education through doing magazine art.
Samir Husni: Let me ask you my typical last two questions. If I come unannounced to your home one day, what do I catch you doing? Painting, drawing, a glass of wine, cooking?
Brian Clarke: You would catch me doing warmup drawings, just keeping my hand busy, doing sketches from photographs. Or if my fiancé is here, I sketch her sitting right over there in front of my table.
I’m always sketching if I don’t have an assignment to do. So just honing my craft with my pencils and my paintbrushes is pretty much what you’ll catch me doing. Or I’ll be looking at an old movie or a new movie after my work day is over.
And that’s pretty much it.
Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?
Brian Clarke: What keeps me up at night is the proliferation of AI art. Pretty much that.
And also because the economy is not doing so well now, what keeps me up at night is worrying about where my next assignment is going to come from. And right now I’ve been paying my bills and staying busy by doing portraits of people and portraits of their pets. And classic pin-up art portraits of women.
And a lot of husbands and boyfriends will contact me and say, you know, my girlfriend wants to look like a 1950s glamour queen, calendar queen. I’ll do it like a classic pin-up portrait of a person’s wife or whoever wants to hire me to do that.
So that’s how I stay busy.
Samir Husni: So can we say then art and illustration are a lost art?
Brian Clarke: Unfortunately, it is. It is.
But me and my art friends across the globe, we’re trying our best to keep it alive.
Samir Husni: I wish you all the best. Thank you.
Don’t you dare tell Marianne Howatson that the magazine advertising model is dead. The CEO and Publication Director of the C&G Media Group disagrees completely with you. Her magazines are doing well, very well indeed, thankfully to the advertising driven magazine publishing model. Her mission, “to deliver the finest design media to the residents of America’s most prestigious communities.”
Ms. Howatson, the former publisher of Self and Travel & Leisure magazines, jumped into the fury of magazine ownership when she bought the Collages and Gardens titles in 2009. Yes, you read that correctly 2009: It was a depressing year for magazines and the economy as a whole. But she took a big chance on those titles, and her gamble paid off and it continues to do so.
In fact she added to the three titles, Hamptons Cottages and Gardens, Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, & New York Cottages and Gardens, her newest title Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens that the former owner of the magazines ceased its publication in 2008. The first issue is a beauty to behold and is loaded with what you expect to see similar to the rest of the magazines in the family of Cottages and Gardens.
Ms Howatson is very optimistic about the future of the new title and the rest of the publications that she owns. Her only worry is, “Are we going to keep doing as well as we’re doing?” she told me when I asked her what keeps her up at night these days.
She is a firm believer in magazines and their future, as long you have a niche audience that is not reached by any other medium or platform, a community spirit, and you are involved in all the major events in the area.
So, without any further ado, here is my lightly edited conversation with Marianne Howatson, CEO and publication Director of C&G Media Group.
But first the soundbites:
On the reason she bought the magazines: “I thought to myself, if the day comes in the United States that we don’t have wealthy people building beautiful houses, we probably won’t even have a planet.”
On if her gamble paid off: “Yes, yes.”
On why Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens now: “When I came on in 2009, hasn’t a week gone by without someone saying, when are you going back to Palm Beach? And it’s only taken us 16 years.”
On the future of print in a digital age: “I think that the future of print in the digital age is very niche groups of people.”
On her favorite magazine in her company: “And so each time we launched a new magazine, it’s like children, you just love them all.”
On her advice for someone starting a new magazine: “I would ask them to make sure that they have a niche audience that very few other people have, and be prepared to just live in the marketplace, work with your readers, work with the advertisers.”
On the magazine publishing advertising driven model: “I think that advertising revenue will be here to stay. It’s very difficult for magazines to only make money on their circulation.”
On what she does at home in the evenings: “We publish 30 editions a year, and that’s more than any other group, it’s an enormous amount of editorial. So I’m doing 30 columns a year, editing, it just keeps going on. But I absolutely love it.”
And now for my lightly edited conversation with Marianne Howatson, CEO and publication director of C&G Media Group:
Samir Husni: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me. My first question to you is an easy one. Back in 2009, when everybody was folding magazines and the country was going into a recession, you bought the Cottages and Gardens publications. What were you thinking?
Marianne Howatson: Several things. One is Connecticut Cottages and Gardens was one of my favorite magazines, and I was in New York City all week working in publishing, and I’d come up to Connecticut on the weekend and I would love the magazine. Then I heard it was for sale. At that point that we were in a major recession.
I thought to myself, if the day comes in the United States that we don’t have wealthy people building beautiful houses, we probably won’t even have a planet. I also thought the designers and these people want to look at big, glossy pages so that their work is shown, the photographers love it. So, those were the reasons.
Samir Husni: Did your gamble pay off?
Marianne Howatson: Yes, yes. I closed it in October 2009. And within the next few months, we started going up, because obviously the company had been impacted by the recession at that point until I bought it, and then we started to climb out.
Samir Husni: It seems that you continue this drive to bring luxury publications to the most luxurious communities. I mean, that’s one of your goals.
Marianne Howatson: Yes.
Samir Husni: So, tell me about the recent launch of the Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens.
Marianne Howatson: Actually, Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens was published between 2004 and 2008 with the old company and the old owner. They had folded that because of the recession, and Palm Beach was very badly hit during that recession.
So, they had stopped publishing it. And when I came on in 2009, hasn’t a week gone by without someone saying, when are you going back to Palm Beach? And it’s only taken us 16 years. But for the last few years, a lot of our clients and our advertisers and designers have come down to Florida, and they’re saying, why don’t you come with us? Come with us.
So we eventually decided that last year we were going to do it.
Samir Husni: I know you’re a luxury publications publisher and CEO. Do you think this is the future of print in this digital age, luxury?
Marianne Howatson: I think that the future of print in the digital age is very niche groups of people.
It may not just be wealthy home design. There could be others. And I think that having a really niche audience, which can’t be reached by anyone else, would be very good for the magazine industry.
Samir Husni: Do you think your magazine media journey has been a walk in a rose garden?
Marianne Howatson: No, I think that I’m used to say that my days were filled with a mixture of horror and elation. And I’ve been trying to change that ratio to have less horror and more elation as I’ve moved on.
Samir Husni: That’s good. Can recount for me what was the biggest stumbling block since you acquired the magazines and how did you overcome it?
Marianne Howatson: Not sure that we had a stumbling block. I think that we’ve been really very fortunate. And one of the things that I think we did was that we isolated very early on.
When I first came on, I saw in research that 95% of our readers worked with design professionals, as architects, designers, builders. And our research showed that 40% of our readers were design professionals. When we recognized that and zeroed in on that, I think it made a big difference because we’re one of the few magazines that has a mixture like that, so that we have lots of architects and designers who advertise with us, as well as, of course, wonderful products.
Samir Husni: Do you have a favorite among the four magazines now?
Marianne Howatson: I love them all. Well, I still love Connecticut as well. But, you know, the Hamptons was the first magazine.
I remember when it was launched in 2002, it was really very well received. It was spectacular. It was very different in the Hamptons.
And so each time we launched a new magazine, it’s like children, you just love them all.
Samir Husni: Well, let me ask you, your magazines are still advertising driven. Yes. And we hear a lot about that the advertising driven model is dead. How come you’re surviving?
Marianne Howatson: Well, I don’t think the advertising driven model is dead, because, well, A, it’s a major revenue stream. And we did not fall into the challenges of having subscriptions.
Most magazines are not able to make money on their subscriptions. And that would have been a drag on the company. We have a very select way of reaching our readers.
So I think that advertising revenue will be here to stay. It’s very difficult for magazines to only make money on their circulation.
Samir Husni: If you look like at the new launch, the first issue of the Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens, how do you compare this relaunch experience after the magazine ceased publication in 2008? What was your message?
Marianne Howatson: The message was that we’re coming back. And a lot of people in the market remembered us.
We told everyone we’re following that same pattern we decided for our magazines. They have the same format, the same size, and the same type of photography, etc. We told everyone we’re following that same pattern. And because their knowledge of Hamptons, Connecticut and New York, they responded to it.
Samir Husni: I hear a lot from people that magazines in Florida can flourish, but magazines in California will not. Is that the reason all your magazines are on the East Coast?
Marianne Howatson: I haven’t heard that. Florida, it’s very concentrated. It’s really exciting. I think California has a lot of space.
It’s a different market. Here, we have an exodus of people coming down here. Also the real estate group Related Ross has 24 buildings going up in West Palm Beach, right now over the next few years. So that is an awful lot of units for people to live in.
And they’re going to need to have them decorated. Does they need the magazines? Yes.
Samir Husni: With all the experience under your belt, if somebody comes to you and said, I want to publish a new magazine, what advice do you give them?
Marianne Howatson: I would ask them to make sure that they have a niche audience that very few other people have, and be prepared to just live in the marketplace, work with your readers, work with the advertisers. We have very much of a community spirit, and we are involved in all the major events and the areas that we’re in.
We support the charities, we’ve launched quite a few of them. So I would say that don’t go into it if you’re going to be an absentee manager. You really need to have that passion, and that’s what your community will respond to.
Samir Husni: Good advice. In addition to your magazines, you publish a lot of special publications, can tell me a little bit more about that.
Marianne Howatson: Yes, we have the New York Design Guide, the Connecticut Design Guide, and the Hamptons Design Guide, and because of this relationship between design professionals and our readers, we felt that there was so much information that they wanted, so we created these design guides, and they’re smaller than our big magazines. They’re made of paper that would last all year, and the idea is anyone who lives in these towns, if they want to find an architect, or they want to look for some wallpaper, it should be in that design guide.
So it’s a very different publication.
Samir Husni: Excellent, and before I ask you my typical last two personal questions, is there any question I failed to ask you you’d like me to ask, and or you’d like to add?
Marianne Howatson: No, I think you did terrifically.
Samir Husni: So if I come uninvited one evening to your house, what do I catch Marianne doing? Cooking, watching TV, having a glass of wine?
Marianne Howatson: Sad to say, I would probably be reading the dummy of one of our issues.
We publish 30 editions a year, and that’s more than any other group, it’s an enormous amount of editorial. So I’m doing 30 columns a year, editing, it just keeps going on. But I absolutely love it.
You probably find me doing that or just relaxing in the house. And if I’m outside, I’m looking at shops and looking at antique shops and design shops.
Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?
Marianne Howatson: Worrying about, are we going to keep doing as well as we’re doing? Exactly the question you asked me.
Samir Husni: Thank you.
Mr. Magazine 