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.
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.
I have a confession to make. When my mailman delivered issue 201 of Mountain Gazette to me at 3:00 pm, I did not put it down until 9:00 pm that evening. Six hours of magazine heaven. Total bliss and experience unlike any other.
I was determined to interview the experience maker behind Mountain Gazette: Mike Rogge. He is the owner and editor of the magazine and his wife Meghan Forbes Rogge is the vice president of Mountain Gazette.
The year was 2020 when Mike bought Mountain Gazette and decided to relaunch it after an eight year hiatus. As his wife likes to say, “when others were learning how to make sourdough starters and bread during the pandemic, we were learning how to make a magazine again.” And making a magazine they did with a tagline for the ages, “When in Doubt, Go Higher.”
Mike Rogge, owner and editor, with his wife Meghan Forbes Rogge, vice president, Mountain Gazette
An oversized magazine measuring a little bit less than 11 X 17 gives you the feeling that you, the reader, is a giant holding a billboard between your hands. Marvelous stories, beautiful pictures, and a great design sets Mountain Gazette apart from the competition, if there is any to be found.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Rogge, the owner and editor of Mountain Gazette, and found him to be the perfect imperfect experience maker. So please feel free to be mesmerized with this Mr. Magazine™ interview, but first the soundbites:
On the drive behind the relaunch of Mountain Gazette: “I just thought if we made something that was big and beautiful, it would work.”
On the reason he bought the magazine: “I’m a pretty community-oriented person and I really care about what we put out into the world. So I felt like outdoor culture, the outdoor community deserved a print title like this.”
On his business model: “Our business model is simple, we have subscribers, we make the magazine for our readers and nobody else.”
On his advertisers: “We always put ads in the front and in the back of the magazine. Never in the middle, ever. We’ll never do that.”
On Mountain Gazette’s audience: “We have a highly engaged, sophisticated audience that’s becoming rarer and rarer to reach on the Internet. So that’s the way we work with our partners.”
On the team producing the magazine: “Our journalists are vetted. They’re award winning. They’re what I would call exceptional people and creators.”
On the role AI plays in magazine making: “Our magazine is made by people. And I think that as good as AI is, AI has never been hurt. AI has never been in love. It can fake that. AI has never been given a cancer diagnosis. AI has never been told that they’re cancer free. AI has never watched their child be born. And above all, I believe in the human experience because it’s not clean. It’s messy. And messy looks good in our pages.”
On his journey with Mountain Gazette: “My wife describes me as a duck. I’m cool on the surface and underneath I’m paddling like crazy.”
On which role he enjoys most from all his roles: “So far, being editor has felt the most natural position for me to have.”
On the mission of the magazine: “We look at the world through an outdoor lens. We have this strong belief at the magazine that going outdoors anywhere in the world… has the ability to change your life.”
On what keeps him up at night: “That is such a timely question to me. I’m concerned about our ability to print in Canada, totally dependent on these tariffs.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Mike Rogge, owner and editor, Mountain Gazette magazine:
Samir Husni: Mike, while others were killing magazines in 2020, you bought Mountain Gazette and you were the forerunner of relaunching magazines as we are seeing this year and last year. What gives?
What gave you the idea to buy a magazine that has been dead for almost eight years and to bring it back to life in print and all the surroundings of the print that you’ve done?
Mike Rogge: Well, I have worked for magazines for a long time.
I worked for a newspaper when I was 19 and I’ve worked for blogs. I think one of the things you learn when you work for a lot of media companies is know what to do and what not to do. There’s good practices and bad practices and I thought what if we started a media company and we tried to do things the right way, knowing we would make mistakes along the way and learn from them and we’ve been pretty adamant about learning from our mistakes. I just thought if we made something that was big and beautiful, it would work.
Samir Husni: Besides being a journalist, a filmmaker, now you are also an owner and editor, what’s the drive that makes you create such a beautiful, upscale, large publication in ink on paper in this digital age?
Mike Rogge: I’m a pretty community-oriented person and I really care about what we put out into the world. So I felt like outdoor culture, the outdoor community deserved a print title like this. And I think one thing is respecting creators, respecting writers, photographers, artists, having respect for them, having respect for our readers was paramount to us being able to create something special.
So my drive is, I try to make the next issue better than the last one. This is our 10th issue that we’re putting out and it’s getting harder to do that, but we are having a good time trying to warm up ourselves up here.
Samir Husni: You wrote that the old magazine business model is dead and you are introducing a new business model.Can you expand a little bit on that?
Mike Rogge: I think the model of going out and saying to advertisers, this is how many readers we have and printing an exorbitant amount of magazines just to say that you did print an exorbitant amount of magazines and not sell them at all. Our business model is simple, we have subscribers, we make the magazine for our readers and nobody else. You can’t buy it on the newsstand.
We rarely sell single copy issues. We are doing our best just to keep this like a closed ecosystem where our readers pay us a fee per year to get two issues. In return, we protect that content from the magazine and make sure that it’s exclusive to them.
They only get it. We don’t republish online or anything like that. And that’s that.
Samir Husni: But you’re still accepting advertising? And how do you treat the advertisers in this community of Mountain Gazette?
Mike Rogge: The first thing that our subscribers and our ad partners know is that we don’t do advertorials. And I think that’s a benefit to both. Our readers are never questioning, is this an ad or is this a story? If it’s in the magazine and it’s not clearly an ad, it’s a story.
We always put ads in the front and in the back of the magazine. Never in the middle, ever. We’ll never do that.
What I think is interesting is we have a highly engaged, sophisticated audience that’s becoming rarer and rarer to reach on the Internet. So that’s the way we work with our partners. We tell them we don’t write about gear. We don’t write about jackets. We don’t rank ski resorts. So you have an opportunity to be in our magazine and tell our readers what’s great about your ski area or your jackets or your ski boots or whatnot.
They’ve found it to be really beneficial to date. We hear a lot from our ad partners. It’s the only place that they ever get compliments on their ads. They get people on the street that I saw the Solomon ad or the Fly Low ad in the last issue of Mountain Gazette. It looks really great. I think that’s because of our large format. The magazine really lends itself to great photography.
Samir Husni: You mentioned that most of what’s on the Internet and social media is trash, quote, unquote. How do you define the role of print in this digital age?
Mike Rogge: I think we have to understand that we’ve got a copy editor, a managing editor, myself, we have fact checkers. Our journalists are vetted. They’re award winning. They’re what I would call exceptional people and creators. So I think if anything, like our content, it’s curated and it’s vetted and you can’t say that about most things on the Internet.
We’re not in this to look for a fight. It’s not to say that we’re just going to let people steamroll us. But like, we do some reporting. We do some trip stuff. We do some first descent, cool stuff. We do aspirational stuff. We do inspirational stuff. We have humor. And I think that’s more reflective of how the real world actually is.
If you go on the Internet, you would think the world is falling apart every single day, every single minute. And certainly the world is not in a great place right now. But I think we can all agree that the world’s also not on fire right now, either.
The print magazine is based in reality, and that’s where we want to keep it.
Screenshot
Samir Husni: Mike, especially when it comes to photography, and you have gorgeous photography in the magazine.But now with AI, we are seeing so much fake pictures on the Internet. I can create even fake pictures saying, Samir is on Mount Everest and I’m here in Oxford, Mississippi. Do you have any fear from AI or is it a friend or foe?
Mike Rogge: I love it. I love AI.
I think it’s great. I went to college for English literature and writing. So when I have business questions, you know, I can ask AI, I want you to pretend you’re an MBA, and this is a business problem I have.
It’s just kind of bouncing ideas off it. I think it’s great for that. There’s a lot of promise for medical use.
But our magazine is made by people. And I think that as good as AI is, AI has never been hurt. AI has never been in love. It can fake that. AI has never been given a cancer diagnosis. AI has never been told that they’re cancer free. AI has never watched their child be born. And above all, I believe in the human experience because it’s not clean. It’s messy.
And messy looks good in our pages. Here’s what I know. Samir on top of Everest, that would be really, really cool. I know people that have climbed Everest. And I can tell you that what makes their Everest journey important is not getting to the top, but how they got to the top, the challenges they face in their lives. And that, to me, is part of the human experience.
I don’t know that a robot will ever be, certainly can try to fake it, right? I do say this often, though. It makes me think of the scene in the movie Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon and the late Robin Williams, are sitting on a bench. And he goes, sure, you can tell me everything about the Sistine Chapel, when it was built, when it was painted, everything.
But you can’t tell me what it feels like to be there. You can’t tell me what it smells like to be there with the woman you love. And it’s like this trip you dreamed of.
I do think that nuance is often overlooked. And on a final note on AI, don’t you think it’s so interesting that the first thing they asked AI to do, these creators, quote unquote, these people that have no artistic ability, was to try to mimic being an artist. That makes me kind of sad.
I don’t know how to tell Sam Altman this, but like, your painting is good enough, buddy. If it came from your heart, it’s good enough.
Samir Husni: Good. Tell me, has your journey with Mountain Gazette been a walk in a rose garden?
Mike Rogge: No. No. No. My wife describes me as a duck. I’m cool on the surface and underneath I’m paddling like crazy.
One thing that has been challenging is the notion that I might have all the answers because of our success. And the truth is, I have the answers for our title when we face problems or challenges because I’m deeply involved. This is what I do. This is my work. This is my life. In some senses, for better or worse, it’s part of my identity as being the editor of Mountain Gazette.
Obviously, there’s been way more good times than bad. Currently we’re printing our magazine in Canada and we’re dealing with a tariff issue and that’s a challenge. But I’m inspired by some of the athletes who do climb Everest and fail. They don’t make it to the top. And what they do the next year is they return. That’s kind of our thing, we may get punched, but we’re going to get back up.
The last five years have offered me some opportunities that I could have never dreamed of. And mostly that’s working with contributors.
Samir Husni: You wear too many hats with Mountain Gazette. Which one do you prefer? Is it the owner, the editor, the publisher?
Mike Rogge: I like a little bit of all of them. So far, being editor has felt the most natural position for me to have.
I don’t necessarily prefer being the trash guy who takes out the trash at our office, but that’s one of my hats too. But I like being the editor of Mountain Gazette. That’s by far my favorite.
I guess my favorite part of the publishing side has been trying to get to know some of the men and women and people who actually physically make our magazine. They’re craftspeople. They essentially work in a factory and they take a lot of pride in their work.
And I’m inspired by that.
Samir Husni: Is there anything you would like to add before I ask my final two personal questions?
Mike Rogge: We relaunched Mountain Gazette in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, and my wife likes to say that when others were learning how to make sourdough starters and bread during the pandemic, we were learning how to make a magazine again. So that what we did. When I bought the magazine, my original ambition for it was to try to get to a thousand subscribers.
I felt like that would be a good four or five year goal. We hit that in six months. We say this that this magazine is not for everyone, but obviously anyone can subscribe to it.
We don’t limit anyone in wanting to look at it. But we’ve certainly found people that accuse us of being too liberal or too conservative. And we don’t see it as a political act.
We see it as an artistic expression. I suppose you could view the entire world through a political lens. It’s not how we look at it.
We look at the world through an outdoor lens. We have this strong belief at the magazine that going outdoors anywhere in the world, whether it’s Missouri or Manhattan or Mount Everest or wherever, it could change your life. It has the ability to change your life.
Those are the stories that we seek. In our next issue, we have first descent of a mountain in Pakistan that no one’s ever heard of. But truly, like I think maybe 300 people in the history of the world have ever even been in its presence.
Well, and the following story is about fly fishing in the 1980s on the New Jersey coastline. I find that those stories equally tell the story of the outdoor experience. And these experiences are our mission, they allow us to have a lot of different voices in our magazine, a lot of different perspectives.
I don’t expect everyone to like every single article at the Mountain Gazette, but I can tell people that every single piece at the Mountain Gazette comes from somebody’s heart. No one is weighing up their Mountain Gazette story. They’re putting everything they have into it.
Samir Husni: So tell me Mike, if I come unannounced visiting you one evening at home, what do I catch you doing? Having a glass of wine, cooking, eating dinner?
Mike Rogge: Depending on what time, you will find me playing with our two sons that are six and two. We’ve got two dogs. We live a pretty quiet life here in Tahoe.
My wife and I tend to go out and see some outdoor films. North Lake Tahoe is sort of like Avengers Tower. If you’re into outdoor recreation, we have several first descent, first to do this in the outdoor recreational world.
We run into them in the grocery store. I’ve always joked, it’s like being a non-superhero and living in Avengers Tower and Iron Man to pass the cream, the coffee. We live a pretty quiet life.
We’re a family of four with two dogs, and we’re just really enjoying our kids being young. We go to a few fundraisers here and there, catch a movie. But we spend a lot of time outdoors.
Samir Husni: My typical last question, what keeps you up at night these days?
Mike Rogge: That is such a timely question to me. I’m concerned about our ability to print in Canada, totally dependent on these tariffs. And what upsets me is that our printing partner, Hemlock, has nothing to do with it.
The fact is a 25% tax on our print bill. We’re a sheet-fed magazine, a large format, sheet-fed. It’s 160 pages, but we’re probably using, on a standard magazine size, close to 300 pages of paper per issue.
We chose to do it that way because we wanted to offer our readers a high-quality product, and we felt like magazine stories deserved to be put in a high-quality format. I worry about it in part because, again, this is a non-political statement. It’s just fact.
The idea around these tariffs changes sometimes hourly, daily, weekly. News happens on the weekends. So I’m a little concerned about that.
I want to make sure that we can keep printing, high-quality products, whether it’s in Canada or we have to move to the U.S.
And what keeps me up at night? I worry about AI infringing on our creators’ rights, only because, we have a standard licensing agreement, and it really puts the creator front and center. And, we have this reputation. There’s a reason why we’re able to work with creators like, Harry Bliss and the comedian Steve Martin in every issue for the last two years, because we have a reputation.
I just worry about people taking advantage of that or taking advantage of our creators in an effort to try to earn a quick payday. We keep our head above water. We’re profitable, but I feel like in the magazine industry, you have to constantly be preparing for, not just rainy days, but snowy days and typhoons and everything.
It’s a medium that a lot of people have forgotten about. We obviously haven’t. And my hope is through these tariffs and everything, that some of the magazines that have arrived alongside us or after us, can also survive, because, saving for a rainy day is expensive.
To say Paul Sammon and Allison Duncan know research will be a major understatement. They live research and love it. Paul and Allison bring more than 50 years of working for major magazine research companies and magazine media, the likes of DJG Marketing, MRI, and Advanstar.
The two of them are as passionate as the clients they are working for: passionate publishers in the small to midsize magazines. Paul and Allison refer to themselves as “Data Connectors.” They are not only data collectors; they know how to analyze customers’ answers and they know how to connect those answers to the relevant and necessary needs of their clients.
All in One Insights is not afraid of AI and what it can do. The two of them are not worried about dipping their toes in AI because they know for sure that “The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is define compelling points of difference.” And delivering those points of difference is one major asset that they can provide their clients.
If you are in need for help in your magazine media research, on all the fronts of magazine making, you need to read this interview with the president and chief operating officer of the new firm All in One Insights.
And now for the lightly edited interview with Paul Sammon, president, and Allison Duncan, Chief Operating Officer, All in One Insights, but first the soundbites:
On the mission of All in One Insights: “Delivering (research) with high quality and with all the pieces of the puzzle … research, sales, marketing, editorial, consumer marketing, and making sure that it’s something they can feel good about across the whole brand footprint.”
On the clients of All in One Insights: “Passion-based publishers, where we used to call them simply vertical interests, but they can be very small.”
On what All in One Insights deliver its clients: “Making sure we give them ways to understand themselves better, whether that be editorial differences, newer readers preferring different content than longstanding readers.”
On their promise to clients: “Making sure that they understand the role we’re looking to play, again, to that data connector, not just collector, is making sure they come away with an insight across all their platforms.”
On the goal of forming All in One Insights: “Our goal in forming All in One Insights is to be the external resource, but to give them a very internal feel.”
On whether AI plays a role in All in One Insights: “I think right now that’s not quite a part of our story yet. For All in One, it’s also a matter of we’re just still connecting with our clients on a very intimate level.”
On what AI can’t deliver: “The key element there is the one thing we’re not seeing AI really very capable of doing is developing the texture and the personality side.”
More on what AI can’t deliver: “The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is define compelling points of difference.”
On their belief in print: “People are just so caught up in the reading the big headline of print is dead and it’s not. There’s a story that’s happening with it. It’s just a matter of, it’s a new print.”
On whether the research is done for the sake of marketing or journalism: . One of the things that’s changed a great deal in the past five for sure, is 90% of our survey work now incorporates the editorial team in the conversation where virtually everyone we did years ago was extremely driven by an advertising outcome.”
On what they consider their number one job: “Our first and foremost job is to listen to somebody, listen to their struggles.”
On what keeps Paul up at night: “Trying to find the unique question we can pose to clients that closes the gap for them.”
On what keeps Allison up at night: “I’ll make the joke of it. It’s plane fares. You keep seeing planes tossing and turning and I have no fear of flying. And I’m like, ooh, really?”
And now for the lightly edited interview with Paul Sammon, president, and Allison Duncan, Chief Operating Officer, All in One Insights:
Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch for All-in-One Insights.
Paul Sammon: I think the key thing that when we started crafting this, it was a matter of really being there for our clients, for what they needed, not about us, not about what we could do per se in terms of our capabilities, but just fulfilling the needs they had.
The big benefit we see that we’re presenting ourselves as “Data Connectors”, not just simply data collectors. Realistically, they can all have research from many options, and we want to be the one that’s delivering it with high quality and with all the pieces of the puzzle … research, sales, marketing, editorial, consumer marketing, and making sure that it’s something they can feel good about across the whole brand footprint.
Samir Husni: When you talk about clients, who are your clients? Define client for me.
Paul Sammon: Sure. Most of their backbone meshes well with our experience as well, is many of them are, in the vein of small, medium, independent publishers, predominantly. I would say, for lack of a better category, passion-based publishers, where we used to call them simply vertical interests, but they can be very small.
Something so full of passion, really makes our hearts sing to get the chance to work with it. I think the one other area that’s become very plain to us is the membership association publishing sector. It’s such a different model, but there is so much engagement inherent in those broader relationships that they’re needing that assistance for the insights they can get for a lot of different reasons, membership retention, acquisition, editorial.
In traditional terms, they actually rely less on the advertising side that would be more the traditional reason you do a media research study.
Samir Husni: So, if I come to you as a small publisher that have, let’s say, a city magazine, let’s say The Boca Raton Observer or Memphis, what can you tell me you can provide me to help me sustain and increase my reach?
Paul Sammon: I think the key elements are making sure we give them ways to understand themselves better, whether that be editorial differences, newer readers preferring different content than longstanding readers.
It’s particularly germane in the city regional space where you’ll have the always desperate desire to bring on new readers, but they may actually come to you for very different reasons. We’ve seen that very clearly in work we’ve done. The other side of it is making sure that they understand the role we’re looking to play, again, to that data connector, not just collector, is making sure they come away with an insight across all their platforms.
There are such graphic differences in the way that those, when we measure them, ask the same question, we will see different answers across those platforms. A newsletter reader who engages with other elements, so that’s one, it’s providing them with a lens across the full brand platform. It goes back to something I think you’ve interviewed her a number of times, you’ve been dear friends with her for a long, long time, is Bonnie Kintzer at the Digest.
Obviously, I’m an alum of it. I spent nine years there. She and I became friends, but one of the things she really put forth was making sure what you did was to deliver content wherever the reader wanted to consume it – not simply where the publisher did.
She used the word agnostic to just say success wasn’t measured by a digital platform driving someone to a print subscription, that the essence of what you were doing was just providing them the means to consume you, however they felt most comfortable. The good news for us is on a research site, we see that when there are more than one channel engaged, it absolutely makes an enormous difference. There’s more love of the brand, there’s more engagement with the brand, simple strong things like travelers traveling more, fishermen fishing more.
Allison Duncan: It’s a way to amplify the magazine media platform they start with. I think part of what we set out to do this is so many of these, as you were describing, the small to medium-sized publishers, are not able to go to the big research companies. They won’t look at them at this point simply because unless you have mid to high five figures, they’re not interested in those projects.
We saw the struggle, especially being where Paul came from. We saw that inability to connect with them, but they still need data and solutions. Our goal in forming All in One Insights is to be the external resource, but to give them a very internal feel. We want to be their external internal resource is how we sometimes put it to them. We want them to be able to feel like they can reach out to us if they have a particular question. If they have a potential advertiser and they just need something quick in the field, that’s going to be five questions just to get an RFP out the door.
We want to build that relationship with them. Of course, we want to do their bigger study for them, but we also want that feeling that they can come to us on a smaller ad hoc basis too. We had that discussion just yesterday where a seasonal circumstance, clients looking to do the full reader study, all important elements for the ad sales team, for the editorial team, membership as well, but one of the things they noted that they have a particular high point in the very early part of the year where the activity around this particular point of interest is very high, but they didn’t want to wait that long to do the research work.
It was very comfortable for us to volunteer to be there to be able to execute something that’s considerably smaller, tighter, but right within that window of time that would matter most for them. Again, that kind of flexibility is baked into the way we want to do what we’re doing.
Samir Husni: Do you see AI as the data collector and you as the data connector?
Allison Duncan: It’s interesting. Certainly something that we’ve been dipping our toes into in the sense of reaching out, understanding what some of this AI looks like in the sense of you now have panels that are basically built upon it. I think eventually it’s going to take over more. Most of our clients at this point have their own built-in respondents.
So for an affordability standpoint at this point, we’re not having clients having to reach out yet to learn about who can be their potential new target audience. We haven’t had to really do that in a little while. We’ve done that previously with other clients.
We haven’t seen that come up lately. So right now we haven’t really had to go that route, but we’ve definitely been through a couple of pitches from some of the panel companies with the AI predictability panels. And I think eventually we’re going to end up looking towards it and using it.
Paul Sammon: I think right now that’s not quite a part of our story yet. For All in One, it’s also a matter of we’re just still connecting with our clients on a very intimate level. It’s a circumstance where the conversation, what they’ll divulge to us about a challenge for example a city & regional entity told us about a conversation they’re having with a celebration that’s happening and the nature of such event.
His charge to us, as much as we’re still talking about doing a full reader study, was how can I take advantage of the fact this celebration’s occurring? It is very logical we should be a part of it. How might we become a part of it? And I think that there’s opportunity in some of the bigger learning to understand. There’s 47 different events that’ll happen around it. Maybe query AI to see which ones fit best.
Allison touched on a neat point, one of the blessings of working with indie magazine media platforms is that they do own their own sample base. Their subscriber file is something remarkably unique in the world of market research. Traditionally, you’re having to reach out to some external entity to learn.
Similarly, though, we’ve got clients who are looking to grow. And I think we’ll be looking at AI to kind of help us expand. What’s the best definition of that? If we’re looking at concentric circles and the core being as tight and good as it is, the next one they understand.
But what are those other rings? Where might we be able to expand reasonably? These tend to be clients with modest budgets to do these things. So it’s really having someone like ourselves help guide their hand and understand what’s reasonable and what’s not.
Samir Husni: If I can use AI, do I need research?
Paul Sammon: The key element there is the one thing we’re not seeing AI really very capable of doing is developing the texture and the personality side. I think it will always be useful in the realm of a hard data points. Do you do this? What are the demography elements in that? I think the key thing is that when an ad sales conversation is going well and there’s research underneath it, it helped inform better storytelling.
That’s yet the place we’re seeing AI contribute much because it’s not the emotional side of the conversation. There’s not a lot of texture to that. AI will reach to that common denominator and it can be done in an accurate manner.
The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is define compelling points of difference. An element there that really stands out, I had the experience back prior to be working with five golf magazines at the same time. They are generally the same gender, age, income, and education.
There’s very little difference. I formally worked at an automotive enthusiast title, very much the same thing. The advertiser would always ask you, well, why should I be with you instead of them? And it was really helping bring out a texture, a story, some compelling point of difference that was about an attitude.
That’s not quite yet what we’re seeing coming out of an AI conversation. It doesn’t mean it won’t be down the road. If you ask those provocative questions to a wine enthusiast magazine as to when did you first fall in love with wine? We’re really not going to get any kind of good answer out of an AI circumstance with that. I think AI will come into our lives potentially down the road when we start the idea of possibly building products to possibly bring to clients eventually.
Allison Duncan: But we’re still at the building stage. We’re still trying to, we’re getting our feet wet. And right now our main focus and goal is to really just get in the trenches with our clients and to really get an understanding because it’s such a changing landscape and it’s an exciting landscape.
People are just so caught up in the reading the big headline of print is dead and it’s not. There’s a story that’s happening with it. It’s just a matter of, it’s a new print.
It’s an evolving print, but it’s truly strong. And there’s a youthfulness happening with it too that needs to be celebrated.
Samir Husni: So Allison, with this new print is marketing more important than journalism or journalism more important than marketing? How do you balance between the two? Are we seeing more marketing than journalism taking place?
Allison Duncan: I think you have them intertwined.
In a certain way, I think you have marketing that’s looking like journalism and journalism that’s looking like marketing. That’s half of influencing is the pseudo, both of them at times, there’s a pseudo intellectualism at times that happens. And sometimes it’s a little bit of both.
There’s a provocativeness to it that makes you think, and isn’t that essentially journalism at times? And yet it drives you to look at something, buy something, do something, and that’s marketing. So I think it’s an interesting time for that. And there’s an evolution.
The younger consumers, who takes in this stuff, definitely needs something different than per se, the three of us sitting on this call.
Paul Sammon: Having grown up where I did work at Reader’s Digest, there was a literal separation of church and state. And the nature of that was never violated.
But as time passed, you could see the beginnings of a cooperative relationship and an understanding where if you valued the quality of the journalism coming into the process, you would find things like native advertising occurring with some quality attached to it, as opposed to just shilling for something. I think also too that is marketing, Alison really nailed it, was the inextricably interwoven nature is that if marketing programs are generally going to be better when they’re more well-informed, and that’s largely our role with the research, but most important is you’re going to express that outbound. And that just leads to more buyer confidence.
They see relevance in the discussion. They trust what you’re saying. I think in it all, no matter what you do, if you violate that trust, you’ve lost.
So as they’re all respectfully understanding what each other are contributing to the process, I think it’s a healthy thing. If it goes too far off in any one direction, probably not so much.
Samir Husni: So if I hire you as a client, do you help me with your research to enhance my journalism and my marketing?
Paul Sammon: Absolutely. One of the things that’s changed a great deal in the past eight years, or past five for sure, is 90% of our survey work now incorporates the editorial team in the conversation where virtually everyone we did years ago was extremely driven by an advertising outcome. Typically back then, we were looking, let’s say[PS1] , if you were fishing, we wanted to know how often, what you spent and what type you do. Functionally though now, it’s helping Editorial teams as well, delivering insights on content preferences by their various channels. Ad sales teams still get what they need – and we’re able to deliver more insights across more of the organization.
It absolutely is part of virtually every piece of work we do now. And little techniques that we’re learning along the way, which seem like simple questions about just how long have you been a reader of this magazine? That drives an amazing level of understanding that if you just didn’t ask that question, you would never know, but simply a newer reader, we were dealing with a city regional magazine that came to suddenly understand it wasn’t about “age”. It was more about “term” … have you been a reader for less than five years, simply had them looking for more entertainment, similar to kind of the elements online that would give you guidance to where to go eat, where to stay, where to visit, where to have fun.
Whereas that well, long-term reader looked for completely different things. So it was interesting to do that. Odd part for us was you’re having this discussion with the publisher, the advertising, the editorial, and all of a sudden the consumer marketing people became involved because how long have you been a reader, inform their discussions about recruitment of new readers, retentions of existing ones.
They’re trying to make more out of the investment they’re making with us. So, you respond by trying to do more for the element that they’re looking for the most.
Samir Husni: Excellent. Before I ask you my typical last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you, anything you would like me to ask, or anything you’d like to add?
Paul Sammon: I think we touched on the most important parts. The key piece for us is that Allison touched on it earlier is that we have a genuine passion for the space we occupy.
It is literally fun working with publishers. We’ve joined on with ACP, the Association of Community Publishers, the CRMA, and are sponsors of Niche Media. All of their stories are incredibly unique and different and that excites us.
Obviously, having spent elements of my career at some of the largest media brands there are, love them dearly, learned a lot, but we both really have a lot of passion for small/medium sized publishers. Those people also don’t tend to have the staffs that we represent. We’re the help they can hire to be all these years of experience, having seen all these various discussions.
Watch them wrestle with things as simple as, I’m looking at digital subscriptions, but nobody seems to be terribly excited about it. What’s the difference? Are they different people? What do I need to do to simply mechanically boost open rates so that more people take it on? I think we get the chance to be enmeshed in so much more, very broadly, very deeply though. That’s a big part of it.
Allison Duncan: One of the greatest things we get to do is, one of the things is just getting to sit, listen. That’s our first job. Our first and foremost job is to listen to somebody, listen to their struggles.
They’re struggling and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that and listening to what they’re looking for, what they’re needing. The best thing that we can do, given the years of experience we have, which is quite a few rotations around the sun, a few more than we like to admit sometimes, but to then bring in what we know.
That doesn’t mean that you force your nature upon the client, but our goal is to become that trusted advisor to them and to bring that experience and to give them even more than they even expected. Our job is to give us the Christmas list and they’re not always going to get everything on that Christmas list because we only have a certain amount of time with a respondent. Our goal is to get the most out of that respondent in the best way because that’s such a special interaction and we never take it for granted.
A respondent is a truly special thing to us and we never want to alienate anybody. We’re always very mindful of that relationship that that person has with the entity and we never want to cross a boundary. But one of the things I love is learning more from them than anybody ever expected to see, getting more data than certainly the client thought was possible, and answering more questions than they even had.
And that was kind of one of the exciting things. I know it’s something that Paul missed for his years when he stepped away from DJG was he wasn’t then able to take that data and do things with it. He’s such a storyteller and now he gets to go back to storytelling.
Samir Husni: Well, let me ask you now my two personal questions that if you read my blog, you will know what they are.Allison, if I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, having a glass of wine, cooking, watching TV?
Allison Duncan: Cooking dinner, because I love to cook. And generally there’s a ball game on. Right now it’s kind of spending time working on building a business.
Paul Sammon: I would probably also say there’s probably a ball game on. Today is a happy day in my life. The Yankees begin to play their first spring training game. So this is my official first day of spring. And given that I also umpire baseball, basically the orbit of my life is pretty much 1st of March till around Halloween. It’s a lot of fun!
Allison and I find ourself in our day kind of doing all the work of the day. And then we find the last hour or so of it kind of reflecting on what are we going to look at tomorrow about the business. But we’re having fun with it.
Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night for these days?
Paul Sammon: Trying to find the unique question we can pose to clients that closes the gap for them. We’re having a lot of great conversations. It’s about how do I help them understand that now’s the time to act? And what can we be doing right now to help you? There’s a lot. One thing we do sense in the market right now is there’s a little hesitation in things and just trying to help. Their needs are real. Those are urgent. And we just want to try and help that conversation along to good outcomes for them.
Allison Duncan: I’ll make the joke of it. It’s plane fares. You keep seeing planes tossing and turning and I have no fear of flying. And I’m like, ooh, really? Keeps me up at night. You know what? Honestly, the day is done. I’m kind of tired and I sleep. Good. And I don’t, I’m happy with that. That and occasionally your dog who decides he’s needing to occupy your side of the bed.
This is a first for me: Interviewing the same person within six months from the first interview. But, Ray Seebeck’s (28 years) love and dedication to print and magazines is unlike any I have seen among this age group, with regard to passion and zeal for the printed product.
Ray is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Magazine TM. The first issue of the magazine (to refresh your memory, I am reprinting the first interview at the end of this interview) was amazing both in size, content , and binding. The second issue promises to be a state-of-the-art curation of more than 50 writers and artists plus five in depth interviews.
Magazine TM is a testament of Ray’s desire to create a curated permanent display for artists and writers that makes flipping every page of the 230 pages second issue a walk in museum fresh with ideas and art.
So please join me in this conversation with Ray Seebeck about issue 2 of Magazine TM, but first few soundbites:
On the reason to reduce the size of the magazine: “It was just a little bulky to bring around… to bring it on a train and read on the train, and it was just too big to read.”
On why print?: “What I feel print does, print is not trying to necessarily count your views, it’s more of a read at your own pace, it is a different type of experience.”
On the goal of the second issue: ‘Something I really wanted to make sure that I kept up that excitement with the second issue.”
On the creation of issue 2: “Magazine TM has 50 artists and writers, and it was designed and curated over a two year process.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Ray Seebeck, founder, publisher and editor-in-chief, Magazine TM:
Samir Husni: From an oversized magazine to a digest size magazine. Why did you do that?
Ray Seebeck: So the reason for the change of size was mainly because of the feedback of the first issue.
One of the people who got it, who’s an artist, mentioned it was just a little bulky to bring around. She wanted to bring it on a train and read on the train, and it was just too big for her to read. That was the main reason why I made it smaller, for readability and for people to bring it places. It makes more easy to read. Another reason is the cost to print. It costs a lot to print 11 by 17.
Samir Husni: You are 28, the question begs itself, why a person your age is interested in print?
Ray Seebeck: I remember last time you asked me why print? And I don’t feel like I really had a good answer. But related to this question, why is someone my age interested in print? Just reflecting about a little more, I feel in today’s age, we have everything digital, right?
We have social media companies, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and publishing companies like The New York Times, they all monitor how long we read, how long we view videos, they try to get us to read, to watch their content for as long as possible. What I feel print does, print is not trying to necessarily count your views, it’s more of a read at your own pace, it is a different type of experience.
That’s something that I’m interested in, if that makes sense.
Samir Husni: It has been a year plus since the first issue came out. What was the reaction?
Ray Seebeck: I received a lot of very positive reactions to the first issue. People were really excited about the accordion bind, about the size of it, and just the design of it. So that was something I really wanted to make sure that I kept up that excitement with the second issue.
Despite a lot of challenges, I wanted to make sure it is as much of a success as the first one. So I’ve been trying to do a lot of things to do that. Another piece of feedback was people wanted to learn more about artists and their process.
And because of that, I did two things: One is I started interviewing artists. I interviewed five artists to provide more of an insight of their process, what they make and why they make that has gone into the magazine.
If you remember the first one, it was mostly just the artwork and poetry. It didn’t have much content from the artist. So that was one thing is interviewing people and putting that into the magazine.
Two: we started asking artists to basically write on note cards about the story behind their art process or the pieces they made, just to make it even more interesting to read. There’s probably like five or six of those note cards in the release.
Samir Husni: Is the second issue going to use accordion binding or it’s going to be perfect bound?
Ray Seebeck: It’s going to be perfect bound.
Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch for Magazine TM.
Ray Seebeck: Magazine TM has 50 artists and writers, and it was designed and curated over a two year process. It’s very thoughtfully curated, very thoughtfully designed. Magazine TM is supposed to give you more of an insight into artists and writers process and their work.
Also it tells you the story behind their art (through curator notes) because people care about the story. That’s what matters to people. The story about an art piece, not necessarily just the art piece by itself.
People want to learn more about it. And that’s what I’ve tried to put into the magazine. It is telling you how it was made, telling you the unique techniques that artists use. And hopefully, it’s a place where people can discover artists that they could collect their work.
Samir Husni: If you and I are having this conversation a year from now, what would you tell me about Magazine TM?
Ray Seebeck: I’m going back closer to the first issue format with the next one.
That’s my plan is to do accordion binding again. So I’m going to go backwards in a way, go backwards to go forwards, if that makes sense. And another way I’m looking at the magazine is I’m trying to almost make it more of an art, a document of events and conversations with artists.
Through different video content and different collaborations with artists, the magazine hopefully is going to become more like a document of those experiences. This is how I’m thinking about it now.
Samir Husni: Anything I didn’t ask you about issue two you’d like to add?
Ray Seebeck: Yes. In the last question, I was telling you I want the next one to be almost more like a an archive or a document of different events or different conversations.
I’m trying to keep up that excitement from the first issue because it was like large format, accordion bind, and it was pretty successful. I’m working on an installation with one artist named Chelsea Bighorn, who makes these really big textile pieces inspired by her Native American heritage that are canvas and really colorful. They use traditional dye techniques and have beading in them.
I went to her studio recently, and she’s making six new banners that are dyed with canvas and really beautiful with beading in them. Two really large pieces that are going to be at the release party in March. So we’re going to have her pieces there.
Our goal is selling her work. It’s like a show to sell her work and make it an exciting release party.
The two big pieces are going to be interactive. So basically, when you walk through the elevators, you’ll have her two pieces there.
You’ll actually walk through her artwork, the canvas. Hopefully that will create some excitement. Then a document of that will go into the next release.
Samir Husni: How can people get issue 2 of Magazine TM?
Ray Seebeck: It’s on my website and it’s available for sale through February 28, which is the last day to buy it.. It’s available for $35 until February 28. It has 50 artists and writers, almost 230 pages, and five interviews. To reserve yourself a copy of Magazine TM issue 2 click here.
Samir Husni: Thank you.
And for those who want to know more about Ray Seebeck and Magazine TM, here is an encore of my first interview with Ray:
Ray Seebeck , The Twenty Something Young Person* Behind The Unique Print Magazine “Magazine TM” The Mr. Magazine™ Interview
September 28, 2024
“There’s something different about holding something in your hand and looking at it to actually create that experience that we want to create.” Ray Seebeck, Founder and Editor
They say Gen Z is the digital generation, and print is their parents and grandparents’ medium. However, one twenty something young person from Chicago begs to differ from that adage. They are the founder and editor of the print “Magazine TM” which they launched last year.
The oversized, accordion bound magazine, is a beauty to view and a delight to flip through its pages. Ray wants the magazine to be an experience for artists and the audience. An experience it is. It is a very pleasant experience that ends with a series of pages that looks like a wall mural.
To say Ray is passionate about print, would be an understatement, but they are also very digitally oriented. They use online for their research and searches for anything and everything beautiful. They hope to invest in that passion to create a profitable magazine that will hopefully make a living for them and those who work with them.
So please enjoy my conversation with a print fanatic, Ray Seebeck, founder and editor of “Magazine TM,” but first the soundbites:
On the role of print in a digital age: “For me the end solution is print. Part of what I’m trying to do is make that finished product.”
On the binding method for Magazine TM: “I wanted to do something that was memorable, that was unique for the first issue. We settled at the accordion bound method.”
On the magazine audience: “Right now, it’s mostly people in the art community is who I want to reach.”
On their vision of the magazine: “It’s more an experience of actually viewing art through how it’s designed.”
On their goal for the magazine: “I’m trying to make a model where it’s positive for the artists. It’s building community for the artists.”
On their aim to help artists: “It’s really important for the artists to have their work published. It’s huge. And then just to be doing something that I love is hopefully showing people and inspiring them in a small way.”
On the TM in Magazine: “The answer is no. It’s a play on letters… it’s not actually a trademark, but what it means is TM stands for The Magazine. So it’s basically Magazine, The Magazine is what it stands for. And TM is like abbreviation.”
On what keeps them up at night: “It’s just the idea of the keeping the magazine running. That’s a big one.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Ray Seebeck, the founder and editor of Magazine TM:
Samir Husni: My first question to you is, you’re a young man in his 20s, and you launched and produced a print magazine unlike any other print magazine that I’ve seen in a long time. What’s your fascination with print?
Ray Seebeck: It probably started when I was a young kid. I did collect some magazines. I collected National Geographic, and we had Life Magazine running around the house, and Sports Illustrated.
I was a big Sports Illustrated fan, but I really got into print as an art form in college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I had some really great experiences there where I learned from teachers screen printing, lithography, and letterpress as well. So I really just developed. It was a great opportunity where I was able to chart my own education, and so I studied in the print media department at SAIC, where you were able to take the classes you want to take, and I was able to take a lot of classes related to printmaking and try to develop a lot of skills in that field.
Samir Husni: People will tell you we live in a digital age. What makes print so attractive to you? You’re so passionate about print, you produced a magazine called Magazine. What’s in you that makes you feel print is essential today as it was yesterday?
Ray Seebeck: It’s kind of a tough question to answer, but I feel print is just the answer, it’s the solution.
There’s no other solution for me. There’s no other possible route, like the end product. For me the end solution is print. Part of what I’m trying to do is make that finished product. There’s something different about holding something in your hand and looking at it to actually create that experience that we want to create. So printing is sort of a solution for that.
Samir Husni: Why did you choose this format for magazine? It opens up like an accordion and it becomes like a mural.
Ray Seebeck: I worked with, I worked with a few people to make it.
We had five meetings as we were preparing to make the magazine and as I was gathering submissions. And so one friend from New York, one of my classmates from college, and a friend’s friend from college. We had a few Zoom meetings.
My friend Christiaan, who’s a designer, the print designer, who works with me to design print, put together this like Pinterest board with different print and different binding ideas. We talked through what were the design details we wanted to have for the magazine. We discussed different binding formats.
We all kind of came to a decision together. I wanted to do something that was memorable, that was unique for the first issue. We settled at the accordion bound method. That opened up so many possibilities for the actual design of it, which was really exciting.
Then one of the people who I was working with asked what size we wanted to make it and we decided large format would also be very memorable. We went by the 11X17 size. Those are the two key elements as we decided accordion bound and large format.
Christiaan and I had some book binding skills from our college days, so we were able to figure out how to do that.
I definitely want to turn it into a business and hopefully make a living off it and help other people make a living off it.
Samir Husni: Who’s your audience? Who do you want to reach with this magazine?
Ray Seebeck: Right now, it’s mostly people in the art community is who I want to reach.
I would love to reach art collectors. It is an audience I want to grow to. Anyone who’s like interested in art and artists. So I’m hoping to expand the audience. But right now it’s mostly people in our community.
Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch the magazine?
Ray Seebeck: I would say there’s a few things that are really important: I’m really trying to create a different kind of publication, something that’s different than what most people have seen before. A magazine that’s more an art experience. It’s a simple magazine. It’s more an experience of actually viewing art through how it’s designed. That’s one huge aspect is trying to do something really creative.
The second aspect is that I’m trying to create a better experience for the artists. So there are a few art magazines they make artists pay them to get involved in their magazine. I’m trying to make a model where it’s positive for the artists. It’s building community for the artists. And it’s something that artists want to be a part of and they can themselves grow through being involved in it. So those are the two key probably aspects, I would say.
Samir Husni: Is the magazine a mirror reflection of you? Are you the magazine?
Ray Seebeck: I would say yes and no. I put so much of myself into it. So in one way, it’s a lot of the artists in the magazine are artists, that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing at art shows or events. I’m kind of reinterpreting the art that I’ve taken in through the magazine. So in that way, it’s sort of a reflection of me. And then also, I would say, being it’s not meant to be super loud. It’s not meant to be super loud and showy.
It’s meant to be reserved. Once you start looking at it, it’s kind of an amazing experience. In that way, it’s maybe a reflection of my personality maybe kind of a reach. I definitely put a lot of myself into it. But at the same time, I feel like it is something totally different. Just like an end product of a lot of hours of work.
Samir Husni: It sounds like you have a love affair with this publication. Do you ever or would you consider it to be also a business? Is your dream to make money from this or just to do a magazine and say, hey, I have a magazine?
Ray Seebeck: No, I definitely want to turn it into a business and hopefully make a living off it and help other people make a living off it.
That’s the dream. So I’m trying to take small steps every month to achieve that. So in terms of producing the magazine, I have to figure out how much each issue costs and how much I’m selling each issue.
And then packaging and mailing is a huge thing I’m working on trying to reduce the cost of. Then just trying to create more revenue by expanding to new areas such as a podcast I started, which is basically just interviews for the next issue of the magazine.
I’m trying to create new ways to maybe make money off it. I have some like possible goals for the future. But right now it’s a passion project.
So I work on it whenever I can. A lot of times late nights and things like that. But my dream is to definitely turn into business.
Samir Husni: Good luck on that.
Ray Seebeck: Thank you.
Samir Husni: What are you looking for to work in print?
Ray Seebeck: I’m really looking to just to keep the magazine going. That’s the main goal.
So if I can keep it afloat, and not losing money on it. At the end of the day, if I’m what’s most important to me, is to put something out into the world and to have it mean something to people. That’s a big part of it.
It’s really important for the artists to have their work published. It’s huge. And then just to be doing something that I love is hopefully showing people and inspiring them in a small way.
Samir Husni: So Because you have limited distribution, how can people get the magazine?
Ray Seebeck: So I did, with the first issue and also will do with the second issue coming out next March, a presale for them, probably the month of February. I’ll have a presale online and that determines how big the edition is going to be for the next issue. Basically print however many copies we sell for the limited edition.
Samir Husni: And your website is?
Ray Seebeck: It’s rayseebeck.com backslash magazine dash tm.
Samir Husni: Okay. Were you able to register magazine as a trademark?
Ray Seebeck: That’s a good question. The answer is no. It’s a play on letters. So it’s slightly misleading, which I understand because it’s not actually a trademark, but what it means is TM stands for The Magazine. So it’s basically Magazine, The Magazine is what it stands for. And TM is like abbreviation.
Samir Husni: Is there any question that I should ask you that I didn’t ask you? Or anything you would like to add.Ray Seebeck: I would say I have done a lot of market research, not necessarily market research, but read research on different publications and podcasts that has really informed me in the evolution of the magazine, the design evolution for especially for this next issue. So I could talk about that a little bit, if you wanted me to.
So have you ever heard of Esopus magazine? It’s no longer published.
There was a show at the Colby College Museum of Art about Esopus magazine. I learned about it because of that show. I actually found a copy at a bookstore in Chicago. That was really cool to see that magazine because they do a lot of similar things in terms of creatively, making creative layouts, interviewing artists, and having different formats in the magazine. That was pretty cool. It’s something to look up to.
But it’s definitely not the perfect model of what I’m trying to do. But it was cool to see. I’ve gained a lot of research by going to libraries and looking through old magazines, or print design inspirations.
I also have gotten a lot of inspiration from different art books, too. I just wanted to share that I’ve done a lot of research of looking through magazines and also art podcasts. I’ve been listening to a lot of art podcasts in the last year or so.
Samir Husni: Let me ask you my typical last questions. If I come uninvited to visit you one evening at your home or apartment, what do I catch Ray doing? Watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?
Ray Seebeck: So to be honest, most nights, what I’m doing is after I’ve done everything I need to do that day, I’m generally pretty busy.
I generally will like take a shower, change into like a comfortable t-shirt and shorts and make dinner. I will turn on the TV basically every night. I watch a lot of different television shows.
Right now I’m watching like the Great British Bake Show. And RuPaul’s Drag Race is a big show that I like. I watch a lot of TV shows. I’m currently watching Only Murders in the Building.
I like to decompress. I know the magazine is very print oriented, but I’m also a very digitally oriented person. So I do a lot of online research and look through a lot of photographs all the time. That’s generally what I’m doing at night.
Sometimes I’ll… If I have something to work on for the magazine, I will work on that at night. That’s kind of my exception is that because I love doing it. If I have like if I have a submission from an artist, I will like organize all the content or work on the design layout at night.
Samir Husni: My typical last question is what keeps you up at night these days?
Ray Seebeck: I’m worried about the magazine falling apart. I would say that keeps me up. It’s just the idea of the keeping the magazine running. That’s a big one. There’s a lot of things that goes into that. Making money for the magazine also sometimes will keep me up. And just like diversifying.
Samir Husni: Thank you and good luck.
Ray is a non-binary and they use they/them pronouns.
TOPS News is the membership magazine for TOPS Club Inc. TOPS stands for Take Off Pounds Sensibly. Its motto for the last 75 years since its inception is Real People. Real Weight Loss.
In 2025, and for the first time, the TOPS News magazine started accepting advertising on the pages of the magazine. Through an agreement with the James G. Elliott Company, Inc., the magazine opened its pages to advertising in a move that is seen to add more help to their members.
I reached out to TOPS News president Rick Danforth, editor and publisher Barry Gantenbein, and senior designer Dave Zylstra to chat about the organization and its magazine. It was sort of a roundtable about TOPS News, the magazine’s mission, and the reason they are now accepting advertising in the magazine.
Before the interview, I should note that in a recent study the magazine found out that over 90% of the members see it as the number one benefit of membership. A quarter of the membership responded, unaided, to the study in the first two days. A response rarely heard about in the magazine industry.
So without any further delay, please enjoy this round table conversation with the team at TOPS News and what is in store for the years to come.
But first the soundbites:
On TOPS News mission: “I view TOPS News as our best vehicle to keep in constant contact with our members to share success stories and give them updated information on a healthy lifestyle.” Rick Danforth.
On why they are accepting advertising: “Because things are getting more costly and it was a way of generating some revenue.” RD
On why did you add the publisher title to the editor’s title: “One of the reasons that I became publisher was just to prevent any snags in meeting our deadlines.” Barry Gantenbein
On how is TOPS News different than the rest of weight loss magazines: “I think the one thing that really separates TOPS News is the group support, from the chapter level and also from the magazine.” BG
On how to approach the design of the magazine: “Our members are basically our core demographic, trying to think and trying to tap into their minds what they want to see.” Dave Zylstra
On the hope and goal for the design of TOPS News: “Hopefully inspire them to want to keep flipping the pages and keep reading it.”
On any challenges facing him: “There’s always challenges… But no serious challenges that we couldn’t fix.” RD
On content creation : “There’s a large element of TOPS News is the member contributions. So that does definitely affect the scope of things, and the way we approach things.” BG
On the magazine being an experience: “There has to be a reason to engage with the magazine, and that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with every issue is to engage our members as fully as possible.” BG
On what he is expected to accomplish this year: “A year from now, what I would be telling you is that it would help with our revenue stream so we can provide more services to our members.” RD
And now for the lightly edited conversation with the team at TOPS News:
Screenshot
Samir Husni: Rick, can you give me the elevator pitch of TOPS News? TOPS News, not TOPS as the organization, the magazine.
Rick Danforth: I view TOPS News as our best vehicle to keep in constant contact with our members to share success stories and give them updated information on a healthy lifestyle.
Samir Husni: And why did you decide after 75 years to start taking advertising?
Rick Danforth: Well, that is because things are getting more costly and it was a way of generating some revenue.
Also, too, there was a misconception by past administrations that that wasn’t allowed by a non-profit. So it took a while to convince people that this is a legitimate concern and plus Jim (Elliott) was very instrumental in helping us with that process.
Samir Husni: Why do you think members should be interested in advertising as much as they are interested in editorial?
Rick Danforth: I think it’s another way for us to show them other information without just putting it out there in an editorial format or story to prompt them that it might catch their fancy and do a little research on their own.
Samir Husni: Barry, as an editor and publisher, you wear two hats. First, let me ask you the personal question.Which of the two hats do you prefer, editor or publisher?
Barry Gantenbein: Oh, well, that’s hard to say. I like being the publisher because then I have the final say in things. And one of the reasons that I became publisher was just to prevent any snags in meeting our deadlines.
When I had worked with publishers previously who had more than one job and did more than just be the publisher of the publication, sometimes there would be other priorities other than the magazine and I wanted to get rid of that sticking point. So that’s why I became the publisher. I like being the publisher for that reason.
But as far as the work and what I do mostly, I’m an editor and I have been doing that for a long time and I enjoy that type of work.
Samir Husni: So being the editor, let’s put the editor’s hat on. What’s the mission statement of TOPS News?
Barry Gantenbein: The one sentence is to provide our members with information and inspiration to make healthy choices.
I want to provide a variety of stories for our members. When you open up the TOC, there’s seven different headings. Those are the types of stories that we publish.
So our goal, we build a magazine on a frame and I use those seven sections to create those types of stories.
So if we have at least two in each section, then I know that we’re going to have a balanced offering for our members.
Samir Husni: Weight loss has been a topic for ages. There are so many commercial magazines and there are so many commercial drugs nowadays to help you lose weight.Where do you think you can navigate the magazine to balance between everything that’s taking place with weight loss these days?
Barry Gantenbein: I think that’s a good question. And that goes back to the start of TOPS.
We’ve always had a medical component as part of TOPS since the beginning. Our founder, Esther Manz, always wanted that component. When she started the magazine with her friends, they were all doing the same stuff and they were losing weight, and she wasn’t. So she was wondering, why is that? Why am I not losing weight? So she wanted to get a doctor involved in this so that she could better understand why they were losing weight and she wasn’t losing weight.
We don’t really take any stance on things like the different types of injectables now that are out there. We feel that if you are considering something like that, see your healthcare professional and get their advice on that.
We’re open to the shots, but that’s part of the overall health plan. And I think the one thing that really separates TOPS News is the group support, from the chapter level and also from the magazine. We try to always provide a community for our members so that they can be themselves, make healthy choices. We just really want our members to become the best version of themselves.
Samir Husni: Your last issue that I saw, the November-December, was all about bringing balance to your life. Does this balance now include the shots?
Barry Gantenbein: If it’s helpful to that particular member, because one thing that I have learned is that weight loss is a very individual thing, that what works for somebody may not work for somebody else. So that’s why we like to have a different variety of options available for people.
Samir Husni: And Dave, let me ask you about how do you take all these, I mean what Rick said, what Barry said, how do you design a publication for members as opposed to the general audience out there, or is there no difference?
Dave Zylstra: No, that’s a great question. I do definitely take into account our members. Our members are basically our core demographic, trying to think and trying to tap into their minds what they want to see.
So I actually, when I started, I sat down with my folks who are kind of a little older than our core demographic, but I sat down with them to see what magazines they’re reading, what they’re looking at, and what they want to see, and use that and glean some of that info to try to put that into the layout of the magazine. Also, using past issues, seeing what we’ve been doing, trying to update a little bit a more current design aesthetic. But really just hopefully trying to tap into what our demographic wants to see in the magazine, and hopefully inspire them to want to keep flipping the pages and keep reading it.
Screenshot
Samir Husni: Rick, hearing what Dave said about listening to the members, and you just did a survey which had a big, huge response from the members.Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Rick Danforth: I was not surprised at the response as much as Jim was, because our members are very, very engaged, and I know that because every time I would meet members out at various events, the first thing they would say is, thank you for TOPS News. And I say, that’s okay. I tell them about the staff, and how Barry and Dave put it together.
I just stay out of their way. I provide content, and I get out of their way. But they say, this is the best issue ever, and I’m thinking, yeah, you’re right. I don’t know how they’re going to top this, and each time they keep on topping the previous one. So that tells me our members are engaged on what Barry and Dave are doing. As far as Barry making decisions on what goes in the issue, and how Dave portrays it so that it’s appealing to their eyes and catches them, and they can have that, bring that magazine to a meeting to help their discussions.
Samir Husni: So has it been a walk in a rose garden? Any challenges, or it is just a walk in the rose garden?
Rick Danforth: Nothing’s perfect. There’s always challenges, for example, our Canadian members saying, how come there weren’t enough Canadian stories in this particular issue? But there’s that balance that we try to provide all the way across. Another challenge if it’s a special theme issue that we might not have a Canadian angle into it. Others probably want more than six issues a year, but that’s our program right now.
But no serious challenges that we couldn’t fix.
Samir Husni: Barry, if you look at the images, the cover, I know it’s a reflection of the members, but is it in any way, shape, or form a hindrance? For example, like entering a national magazine awards, or competing with the magazines that are out there that put a different image on their cover?
Barry Gantenbein: When Dave talked about listening to our members, we rely on them for a lot of story ideas, and also for photos.
A large element of TOPS News is the member contributions. So that does definitely affect the scope of things, and the way we approach things. As far as the covers, we again talked about balance, and we try to have a balance.
We want to have balance between basically food, which is a huge part of the magazine, obviously, and then member photos. So we try to balance that, and balance where people are from. Like Rick had mentioned, our Canadian members, we always try to have at least one Canadian member featured in every story.
And then as one way to let our Canadian friends know that they are in the magazine, we started putting a red maple leaf in the TOC next to the Canadian stories. So when people say, hey there’s no Canadian stories, we’re like, there’s three in there. I can tell you that right now just by looking at those little maple leaves that are there.
So I think balance is a good way to describe what we’re trying to accomplish, and our approach to the magazine. It’s a balancing act. And do you consider TOPS News as a pioneer in the reader-generated content? Oh, I don’t know.
Like Dave said, my main goal is to provide information and make it entertaining. It has to be interesting. Dave and I both came from newspapers, and that overriding approach to newspapers was — no boring stories. There has to be a reason to engage with the magazine, and that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with every issue is to engage our members as fully as possible.
Samir Husni: And Dave, do you think this is easier or harder? I mean, having to deal with submitted photography, having to deal with submitted articles and…
Dave Zylstra: It’s harder. It’s been a challenge because not everyone understands high resolution. Not everyone understands what makes a good photo. And then, so just like accepting photos, sometimes it is a stab to the heart a little bit, like, couldn’t you have not taken that photo with all the stuff in the background.
So, but it is what it is, you know. We don’t have the budget nor the resources to go out and have professionals take every photo we need. So we are at the mercy of our members.
So it does. Definitely it is a challenge sometimes working with what we are sent. It’s a challenge I fully accept. At first I was like, oh man, what am I going to do with this? Because coming from, like Barry said, newspaper backgrounds, we’re using nice professional photos.
So coming here, at first, it was definitely a challenge. I mean, it still is a challenge. But I can only use what I have. I try to make them look good.
Barry Gantenbein: And also Dave serves as our staff photographer. Dave is an excellent photographer. We have members come in for, workouts in the magazine. We’ll have members come in to do the workouts. And Dave will be the photographer for the workouts.
Dave also is a photographer for the food shoots, for the recipes. So, when we have our transformations issue, where we honor the members who lost the most weight, we will hire professional photographers to take their portraits. So it’s a mixture of submitted stuff and professional photographs.
Samir Husni: So, Rick, Barry and Dave came from a journalism background and newspaper. You came from a microbiology background.How do you fit in the organization, you’re the president of this company, but what led you to be part of this organization?
Rick Danforth: Well, first, I was a member. Well, this week, I’ll be a member 23 years. And as I got into the organization and saw the benefits of it, it really helped me a lot. I lost 30% of my weight and I maintained about a 15% loss because it’s a struggle and it’s a disease. So when I left the world of microbiology, a lot of my friends were surprised.
And I said, why would you be surprised? I’ve been fighting various diseases for other folks. Obesity is disease. Now I got a chance to help a lot more people to battle this dreaded disease.So it was a natural fit for me. And I was involved in town politics and other things and trainings for the laboratory works. So it was a natural fit.I love getting on the stage and talking about TOPS to our members and non-members.
Samir Husni: So if you and I are having this conversation a year from now, what would you tell me that TOPS News with the new advertising acceptance have accomplished in this 2025?
Rick Danforth: A year from now, what I would be telling you is that it would help with our revenue stream so we can provide more services to our members. And that’s the main goal.
Samir Husni: The question that I have to ask always is, is there anything I failed to ask that you would like to ask ?
Barry Gantenbein: I’m thinking I’m used to doing the interviews, not being interviewed. So this is kind of an unusual spot for me. So that you didn’t ask.
I guess what I would say about the magazine, and that we’ve tried to do, is to make it a little more informal and make it more personal. That’s one thing that our members talk about. They said, since it’s become more personal and we use their first names, it’s Paula. It’s not Mrs. Livingston or Livingston. It’s Paula. And just be, I think that helps to forge a sense of community by making it more informal and more.
And one of the things that I like to explore more themes in the magazine. One of the main themes to me is after a while people figure out what works for them, but then why don’t we do what we know is good for us? We, after a while you figure out what sort of diet and what sort of exercise program you enjoy or works for you, but then sometimes people just don’t do it. Why is that? That’s something that we continually explore.
And I think that’s what makes it interesting because that’s an individual thing.
Samir Husni: So my typical last two questions are more on the personal side. If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Watching TV, reading a book, cooking, having a glass of wine?
Rick Danforth: You’ll catch me at my desk working. And I’ve been told I’m doing that too much. They just want me to slow down a little bit. I eat with my wife.
Barry Gantenbein: I’m really lucky to have a wife who’s an excellent cook. So if you showed up in the evening, you’d probably be served pretty nice meals. I like to read and I would probably be reading later in the evening.
Samir Husni: And on paper or tablet?
Barry Gantenbein: Both. I do, I use a tablet, but there some books that I just like hard copy. If it’s got a lot of pictures, I like hard copy. If it is a novel, I can definitely read it on a tablet.
Samir Husni: Dave?
Dave Zylstra: That’s a great question. I have a lot of interests. I’m doing a lot of things, but on the average night, I’m usually cooking for my family.
I have two teenage daughters and I kind of am the house chef. So, with two teenage daughters, I feel like their childhood is fleeting and our family is fleeting. I’m trying, my wife and I are making a very concerted effort to spend as much time with them as we can right now.
So spending time in the kitchen with food and dinner. And then I do a lot of painting, so there’s a good chance I’ll be doing some painting after dinner. Maybe watching a movie with my wife. Pretty domesticated at the moment.
Samir Husni: My final typical question is, Rick, what keeps you up at night these days?
Rick Danforth: Wow. I worry a lot. So I’m always trying to figure out different scenarios where if this problem hits, I got this thing. So it’s just making sure that everybody has what they need to do their job.
And you know, the expression is lonely at the top. I got support, but it does still keep me up at night.
Barry Gantenbein: I would say just trying to figure out how to get things done. We have limited staff, so I rely on a lot of freelancers and friends of friends to do things for us. I’m always trying to figure out how we can get a story written or who can write a story for us or I joke that every single person that I know eventually ends up working for the magazine in some aspect, and that’s actually pretty true. We just signed a guy who’s a science writer, and he’s a former coworker of mine from newspaper days.
We signed a therapist to write for us, and she’s a friend of my wife. We’ve got an illustrator who went to high school with my daughter. These are the freelancers, and we’ve got just people that are friends of past staffers that believe in TOPS and work for us.
I’m always trying to figure out. I’m like a talent scout trying to figure out who can write and who can illustrate and who can help us out in any way and is willing to do it for little money. So that’s what keeps me up at night.
Samir Husni: What keeps you up at night, Barry, is TOPS.
Dave Zylstra: I love that. It’s always on Barry’s mind. This might sound bad, TOPS doesn’t keep me up at night. So that’s my answer is two teenage daughters.
You know, we recently, my older daughter is a junior in high school, so we recently started talking about college and basically financing college. It’s usually some type of money type of concerns, which I think is pretty standard, and very specifically like money for college. My younger daughter is talking about going to parochial school, so she did get some scholarship money for that, but also, so usually it’s some type of money.
And I should just say, my folks are getting up in age and their health isn’t the greatest.
“Quantity was down, but quality was up,” Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni
The aforementioned statement sums up the status of new magazine launches in 2024. Thirty-nine new launches and nine re-launches arrived on the marketplace together with more than 1,000 bookazines and mini-zines.
Leading the launches was Hiii, For People Who Partake, magazine, the brainchild of Rob Hill and Pam Patterson. Hiii floated to the top of the pack deserving the title the New Magazine Launch of the Year. It is one of the best new magazines to come to the marketplace in a long time. “Simply put, the weed genie will never be put back in the bong,” Rob wrote in the first issue’s introduction. Pam wrote, “This magazine is not just about marijuana. It’s about freedom, creativity, exploration, and supporting those who truly honor cannabis for its power and potential.” Hiii is excellent on all fronts: content, design, and photography.
Another great new magazine is Ori. The brainchild of Kade Krichko is a travel magazine from the source. Slow journalism at its best. Definitely a different, much needed, travel magazine that depends on writers and photographers from the countries it covers. “Travel is a form of connection,” reads the intro to the magazine, “not only with places and experiences, but with friends around the world.” Ori deserves to be the First Runner Up of New Magazine Launches.
The Second Runner Up of New Magazine Launches is RISE from A360 Media. The “Women in Sports” magazine adds a much needed platform for a sports platform dedicated to a large population of female sports players, led by Caitlin Clark, and spectators, both women and men. The magazine’s motto is a quote from Serena Williams, “The success of every woman should be the inspiration to another. We should raise each other up. Make sure you’re very courageous: Be strong, be extremely kind and above all, be humble.”
There are two other magazines worthy of note. New Christian Makers, a museum in a magazine, featuring the work of Christian makers from all fronts of life. “New Christian Makers is an in-print juried exhibition featuring the best in contemporary Christian making.” Highlights for Children continued its belief that children, even the under-two children, still enjoy a print magazine, thus they introduced their newest monthly mini magazine: Highlights CoComelon, “packed with all the CoComelon charm your little one adores, plus a sprinkle of extra learning fun.”
As for those magazines who opted to return to print after halting publication for few years, Field & Stream led the pack and earns the title the Re-Launch Magazine of the Year. Hands down, it is the best relaunch I have seen in my years of following and tracking the magazine industry. The magazine, established in1871 (yes, you read that right, 1871), is back in print through two “Legacy Stewards”: Country music superstars, Eric Church and Morgan Wallen. Editor-in-Chief Colin Kearns writes in the first relaunch issue, “One of the things I’ve missed most about producing a print edition of F&S has been the connection to you, our readers. Back in our print-magazine days, I’d get notes from readers all the time. But during these past few years, when there wasn’t a physical magazine, I never heard from you.”
Having said that, there were also two re-launches that were very well done, both in terms of content and design: SAVEUR and Spin. SAVEUR with its tag line, “Eat the World,” is back. “ It’s been four years since, remotely and in masks, we printed our last issue,” wrote EIC and CEO Kat Craddock in the return to print issue. She added, “But while corporate boardrooms posit print is dead,SAVEUR is one of a growing number of publications that have decided to prove them wrong.”
SPIN, “Well, it’s been a while,” writes editor Bob Guccione, Jr. in the relaunch issue, “A while since SPIN last printed an issue (12 years) and it’s then owner – I had no idea who that was, this magazine, like a haunted house, has changed hands a lot…” He added, “Then along came Jimmy Hutcheson and his Next Management Partners and they bought SPIN from its last owner, and set about revitalizing it…” This SPIN, writes Bob, is “the Phoeix-like rise from long cold magazine ashes.”
I started this blog by saying the quality was up and the aforementioned magazines are a testament for this.
Two other re-launches are worthy of note: Flow and Nylon. The Dutch import, Flow “The Magazine That Takes Its Time. Celebrating A Conscious, Slow And Creative Life,” is back on the newsstands. Nylon celebrated its 25th Anniversary by returning to print. “ I like to think of this 25th anniversary issue, our triumphant return to print…” ,” writes editor-in-chief Lauren McCarthy.
As long as there are new magazines launched and relaunched, regardless of the numbers, print is alive and well… Here’s to a healthy and wealthy print 2025. Cheers.
Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, Ph.D.
P.S.: Thinking of launching or relaunching a magazine? Be sure to send me a copy to include the crop of 2025. Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, 776 Shady Oaks Circle, Oxford, MS 38655. Thank you.
“I define marketing as an epic battle for mind space, period, end of story. And you’re competing against everything. Magazines are the same, right? We’re all competing for a little tiny place in a brain.” Drew Neisser
“There is a disturbing trend in B2B marketing that is threatening the long-term success of marketers and their businesses,” according to a recent research fielded by CMO Huddles. “The study shows an over-reliance on Demand Gen (The process of increasing awareness and demand for your product or service) and “this over-reliance on it is creating a ‘death spiral.’”
The December 2024 survey of several hundred B2B marketers found that “more than half of marketers plan to allocate more budget to Demand Gen in 2025, even though many reported lackluster outcomes from similar investments in 2024.”
The data also shows:
· “Nearly one quarter plan to increase spending on brand and reputation-building, a critical area for fostering trust and differentiation.
· Almost one third are currently hiring for demand gen roles, perpetuating a cycle of reliance on short-term tactics.
· However, investments in innovative skills like generative AI and data analytics remain very limited.”
To learn more about this study and the firm responsible for it, CMO Huddles, I reached out to its founder & Penguin in Chief, Drew Neisser, and I asked him about his title, CMO Huddles, and the recent study that CMO Huddles has fielded.
What follows is my conversation with Drew Neisser, Penguin in Chief, CMO Huddles. But first the soundbites:
On his title Penguin in Chief: “It turns out that a group of penguins is called a huddle. And that was a perfect mascot for our community, given the commonalities between penguins and CMOs.”
On CMO Huddles: “It’s a community of 450 or so marketing leaders all in business to business groups spread across primarily the U.S.”
On the business in transition: “The last two years have been about doing more with less overall, right? That has been the big theme. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to change.”
On why there will be an increase in Demand Gen although it is not working: “I only have one word for it. It’s insanity. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doubling down on the thing that didn’t work and hoping that it’s going to have better results.”
On the importance of awareness in marketing: “It’s everything. Think about it. We know anywhere between 60 to 70% of a B2B journey happens before they contact the brand.”
On how the study applies to magazines: . “I think that what consumers want increasingly are experiences. To the extent that magazines can deliver both a physical and a digital experience.”
On what keeps him up at night: “Helping marketers overcome a malaise that’s out there. And this research kind of showed it.”
And now for the lightly edited conversation with Drew Neisser, Penguin in Chief, CMO Huddles:
Samir Husni: You’re the Penguin in Chief of CMO Huddles.
Tell me a little bit about CMO Huddles and (laughing) about your title Penguin in Chief?
Drew Neisser: It turns out that a group of penguins is called a huddle. And that was a perfect mascot for our community, given the commonalities between penguins and CMOs. I mean both live in a harsh environment. They really work together successfully. They’re good communicators or good problem solvers. So this parallel was.
The reason it’s funny because I think of myself as the Penguin in Chief is actually I think of myself as, “I’m bringing these people (CMOs) together and helping them succeed.” That’s sort of my mission in life is just to help CMOs inspire B2B greatness, to get them in. It’s been a very difficult time in the last couple of years for them.
Samir Husni: Tell me a little bit about CMO Huddles before we talk about the survey that you just did.
Drew Neisser: Sure. It’s a community of 450 or so marketing leaders all in business to business groups spread across primarily the U.S., although we do have some members in Europe. We gather in small group conversations, which we call Peer Huddles.
We’ve got three Peer Huddles. We also have bonus huddles and where we bring in bestselling authors like Michael Watkins, who wrote The First 90 Days, and other authors of bestselling books and so many other big time marketing folks. So part one is the network building, and part two is the PR that we help them get. We have all sorts of exclusive properties that support their personal brands. And then we also help the folks who are in transition.
We have a small transition team of about 20 CMOs who were members then found themselves on the bench and we helped them through that.
Samir Husni: The whole business is in transition.You just did the study on Demand Gen, where do you see the marketing heading? As we move toward 2025, is the emphasis going to be on ink on paper, digital, or word of mouth? Is it online or offline or both?
Drew Neisser: So here are some things. This is, you know, my crystal ball isn’t any better than yours or anybody else’s, but I can tell you some things that I see and things that I know.
The last two years have been about doing more with less overall, right? That has been the big theme. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to change. And the forces behind that are often PI and VC firms that finance a lot of the B2B companies.
And because they’re not building businesses to last, but they’re building businesses to sell. They have created sort of this artificial marketing scenarios, right? They’re not building companies per se. So that’s not going to go away for a certain sector.
Then there’s the rest of the world, which is companies that are trying to build, establish their reputations and get pricing power. I think we’re going to see that competitive advantage is going to be to the companies in B2B that market better. If you were to look at what happened this year, more dollars went in Demand, more dollars went into digital.
It wasn’t more effective. But that’s where they went. So I think what you’re going to see is a few brands will be brave and say that shift needs back to reputation building, back to other things.
I had a conversation recently with the CMO of Gusto, who dramatically increased spending on television. Wait, what? B2B television, good old fashioned. Now, a lot of it’s linear TV and YouTube TV.
But nonetheless, they’re on sports and they’re doing what we would have called traditional media. And it’s working really, really well.
Samir Husni: Your study shows that there will be an increase on the Demand Gen,but in the same token, the results (of Demand Gen) were not that great this year.
Drew Neisser: I only have one word for it. It’s insanity. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doubling down on the thing that didn’t work and hoping that it’s going to have better results. I think these are artificial scenarios, often imposed.
So there’s what I think will happen and then what I hope will happen. What I think will happen is more companies will spend more on Demand, more on digital, more on measurable, quote, measurable things, and they’ll see diminishing returns. I expect that to happen.
And then a small group, 10 percent, 20 percent, will say, no, that’s not working. It didn’t work last year. Why do we expect? We’ll spend money differently.
There are a lot of options available for them. There’s community-led marketing, which Sixth Sense has done unbelievably well. You know, there is rising influencer marketing and B2B. I don’t want to say thought leadership because I think that’s a shallow and overused term, but there is an opportunity for a lot of brands to make the case, the business case, that they’re better at, that they can be essential parts of the purchase process for whoever they’re selling to. And that’s a key thing. What happened in 2024 was if you weren’t essential, you didn’t get to sell.
So people weren’t losing. B2B wasn’t losing to a competitor. They were losing to no decision.
Samir Husni: As a chief marketing officer, how do you ensure that your product is essential in 2025?
Drew Neisser: Well these are new things, Samir. First of all, you do it by talking to your customers and figuring out what is it that, why did they buy you? Why did they choose you? How are they getting value out of it? And you quantify that. So you can line up your customers and who will say, we’re using this and we’re getting 5x return, right? Now, very few brands can actually do that, but that’s a lot of it’s because they’re not taking the time.
If they do that work and they find they aren’t delivering that kind of value, then they have things they have to do on the product side and the service side, right?
Samir Husni: You mentioned, Gusto that invested in television?
Drew Neisser: Yes.
Samir Husni: Do you see more of those companies investing in what we call legacy media or traditional media and print?
Drew Neisser: Well, I want to caveat there because while they’re spending more on video content, again, a lot of it’s linear TV. A lot of it is YouTube. I don’t know if we call that, that’s not quite the same as buying an ad on CBS, right? I wish more brands were doing that because it works for certain types of brands. And I think it’s important B2B2C or like Gusto sells payroll services, right? And surrounding that.
Well, payroll touches everybody and they’re targeting a broad group of small businesses, which is a lot of people. When you’re targeting small businesses, you tend to see broader advertising. And so I expect that those folks with that, we’ll see, read about Gusto.
They’ll read about other brands that are having success via those channels and they go, oh, we need to do that. So yes, you still have a lot of software service brands that are going to keep trying to optimize every digital channel they can until they’ve sort of run out. Because it feels like you could measure it and it feels like a dollar in is a dollar out.
That’s the way folks want to believe. And I’m afraid a lot of CMOs have drunk the Kool-Aid of that too. You know, you’ll see that in their titles. It’ll say data-driven.
Samir Husni: So if the Demand Gen is to increase the awareness, not necessarily increase the response or increase the revenue; how important is increasing that awareness for any product?
Drew Neisser: It’s everything. Think about it. We know anywhere between 60 to 70% of a B2B journey happens before they contact the brand, which means when they finally contact the brand, they only do that if they were aware of you, that they discovered you and they have a short list where they’re coming to you now and they want to talk to, ironically, they want to talk to a product expert, not a salesperson.
So if they’re doing 60, 70% of their research on their own and you’re not out there covered by the analysts, if you’re not out there written about broadly, if you haven’t, and by the way, broadly is 10 to 15 different individuals in that company. It’s not just the one buyer. You’re not going to get on the short list. So reputation, and I’m going to use reputation as the summary of awareness and trust built over time.
Reputation is everything and great marketers find a way to get in the brain to occupy some space. And if you can occupy some space and it’s time for someone to buy whatever it is, that space you’re at, you’re going to get on the list.
Samir Husni: You know, most of my audience are magazine publishers and editor, so how can we take this Demand Gen from the B2B world and from the survey that you just did, how can we apply some of that to the consumer magazine world?
Drew Neisser: It’s so interesting. I think that what consumers want increasingly are experiences. To the extent that magazines can deliver both a physical and a digital experience that goes beyond what I see in my Apple news feed or on my Facebook feed.
Let’s face it, it’s a hard business because the younger generation did not grow up reading magazines. So I would be, if I were in the magazine business, I would be thinking about how do you resample. In the old days when you sampled a product, you would go out and it was a food product and you would put it in front of people. You’d hand it to people, say, try this.
Magazines need to reintroduce themselves to the world, to a younger generation who has no idea what that is and the joy of actually turning the page. I think that’s an interesting opportunity for them.
There are places where you still see people reading magazines in airports and in lounges and in doctor’s offices and so forth, but expanding that and then connecting the experience of reading the magazine to the digital thing. It’s so funny because barcodes initially were used by magazines to try to do that and it was a failure, but now they’re back. So there’s got to be a way for them to create a connected experience that has ongoing value. I think AI is going to play a role in this too.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last two questions is there anything you would like to add or anything I should have asked you?
Drew Neisser: At this very second, I think probably the thing for me in 2025 is the rallying cry that I want to get out there is not more with less, but more with more.
Because the notion of more with less is saying, well, whatever you did last year, you weren’t that efficient. You could be more efficient. That’s not what we need to do.
We need to be, in order to own mind space, to get in the brain, I define marketing as an epic battle for mind space, period, end of story. And you’re competing against everything. Magazines are the same, right? We’re all competing for a little tiny place in a brain.
Without it, you have no pricing power. And without it, you have no loyalty. Without it, you don’t have, you do not get recurring revenue.
So more with more says, how are you going to get more mind space? I think you’re going to do it. I think in your industry, you’re going to do it by creating new experiences that bridge physical and digital. And I know it’s been talked about for years and tried, but I think it’s going to be better.
Just imagine any magazine, they take 20 years worth of their data and create the GPT of that magazine. And then we say, I know a little bit about you, Samir. And you’re really into certain things.
I can look back at the pictures and the art and the family and so forth. I create a new digital experience for you with my GPT when you come arrive that gives you five things that you would find fascinating because it just know you based on some other things. And it could pull all that information from a massive database we already have.
Anyway, I think it’s going to be there’s some exciting opportunities for longtime publishers that they may be terrified about. I think magazines are going to end up finding that digital sales reps, that gen AI powered bots are going to play a role in marketing and conversion. Again, I go to a website now, I expect to see a bot.
But what I don’t expect to see is one that’s really, really intelligent and can actually interact with me in a way that is helpful.
Samir Husni: My typical last questions, if I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing, reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?
Drew Neisser: Let’s see. Well, it depends on exactly the time that you arrive. If it’s about between 4:30 and six o’clock, it’s me walking with my wife and our dog in Central Park. Then we come back from that. This is the Friday routine.
We then go to a wine tasting nearby. We then we catch up on the week, watch the news, kind of an old fashioned thing. And then, you know, one hour of television of some show.
That’s our main evenings. I probably listen to 20 books a year. So I do that. I probably only read, physically read 12.
Samir Husni: And what keeps Drew up at night these days?
Drew Neisser: Helping marketers overcome a malaise that’s out there. And this research kind of showed it.
The CEO of Kickstarter said, CMOs are going to have to do more with less. And that, I just I had a visceral reaction. So why are you saying that? Are you saying that’s a product? Are you saying that? And so that’s what’s keeping me up at night is how do we elevate marketing again to a place where it’s not this cost center that can be cut all the time?
Samir Husni: Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time.
What if there were a platform that lets you buy an advertising page in a magazine as easily as buying an airline ticket? Well, there is an answer in one word: Spacely.
You will ask, what is Spacely? In the words of its founder and CEO, David Coker,“Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.”
David shared the idea of Spacely with me almost a year ago and I fell in love with the idea that someone planned to create a digital platform to help magazines and billboards find, access, and place advertising pages in the magazines and on the billboards. I loved the platform so much that when David asked me to join the advisory board of Spacely I did not hesitate to say yes.
Spacely is still in its infancy but has grown in a way that even surprised its founder. “We thought we’d launch with 20 or 30 publications and grow it from there,” David told me in a recent interview, “but now we’re at over 600 media partners in more than 40 countries.”
I took the opportunity to chat with David and his COO, Beth Mach, to learn more about Spacely and provide my audience with an in-depth look at a platform that is created to help them sustain their business in these difficult times.
So, please enjoy my interview with David Coker, Founder and CEO, and Beth Mach, COO, of Spacely. But first the soundbites:
On what is Spacely: “Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.”
On why creating a platform to help print in a digital age: “We could see that the print industry was an underserved market. A lot of innovation was happening on the digital side.”
On the ease to use Spacely: “The platform is built is also very intuitive and familiar in the way that somebody would buy toothpaste or clothes or an airline ticket.”
On how Spacely works: “As Spacely is a tool for print and out-of-home, there are different mechanisms for making this possible for both. The ultimate goal is to make it transactable to the extent that it can be.”
On the early reaction to Spacely: “Early reaction is a lot of excitement. People are very excited for the opportunity to have their content discovered — easily discovered — and to be able to connect directly with media buyers.”
On the most important factor in Spacely’s platform: “We know that this industry is built on relationships, and this is truly to help encourage deeper, more valuable relationships.”
On the goals of Spacely: “We would be remiss if we didn’t say that Spacely helps everybody achieve a positive upside, whether it’s efficiency or sales, as well as create a really positive environment between both the seller and the buyer.”
On challenges facing Spacely: “Our challenge is how much do we get done in a short period of time to be truly viable and to be the product we envision for our customers and for our clients and users.”
On the role they envision Spacely plays: “Spacely certainly gives us an opportunity to play a role in the positive growth and resurgence of the print environment and print industry.”
On whether Spacely is selling content or space?: “Honestly, Spacely is not selling anything. We’re helping your sales team to do the selling. And sometimes there are advertisers who want as much space as they can get, and sometimes there are advertisers who want to be next to certain content.”
On how is Spacely different than other platforms: “Digital has become easy to buy, even programmatically bought in many cases. We’re careful to point out that Spacely is not programmatic, but our platform lends itself very nicely to other offline media.”
And now for the lightly edited interview with David Coker, founder and CEO, and Beth Mach, COO of Spacely:
Samir Husni: Tell me, what is Spacely?
David Coker: That’s the best question to start off with. Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.
Samir Husni: We live in a digital age. Why are you trying to help print?
David Coker: Number one, we believe in the value of print media, and beyond that, we believe in the value of the talents of print journalists and the necessity to continue to sell local and personal stories in print media.
We could see that the print industry was an underserved market. A lot of innovation was happening on the digital side. There are hundreds of DSPs and SSPs, and different tools for selling digital media. But those tools really had not been created yet for helping print media to be able to be sold as easily as digital media is to be sold and bought. So, it appeared to be a white space.
Candidly, I thought this was already being done. I thought, Surely this has been done, it’s been tried, and someone else is perfecting it right now. When I was at the BBC, I went to Beth and said, “Hey, does this thing exist already?”
Beth Mach: I was like, “Nope, it doesn’t. And it needs to.”
I will say, too, that bringing digital to both print and out-of-home — but in this discussion today for print — this is how people buy everything online. There shouldn’t be any reason why you couldn’t also in our industry buy these two channels online. It’s very familiar.
And the way the platform is built is also very intuitive and familiar in the way that somebody would buy toothpaste or clothes or an airline ticket, like David said.
Samir Husni: Can you briefly explain how it works?
David Coker: As Spacely is a tool for print and out-of-home, there are different mechanisms for making this possible for both. The ultimate goal is to make it transactable to the extent that it can be.
We connect directly into a publisher’s layout via proprietary technology, pulling through the issue architecture, so partners are able to see what positions are available, what positions are taken, and what the adjacent content is. So, if an advertiser wants to be next to an article on a summer concert series, or if they want to specifically find people who are writing about Harry Styles or Rihanna, they would simply search for that content on our platform and see what is upcoming.
It is not historically, “Who does typically write about pop culture,” “Who does typically write about female fashion,” but, “Who is going to be writing about New York Fashion Week in the winter,” “Who is going to be writing about a new art exhibit opening in May,” “Who is going to be writing about Harry Styles’ new album,” and knowing where that content is going to be within the magazine and being able to advertise within the proximity to it that they want to be.
Samir Husni: So, you’re working with the publishers and the advertisers?
David Coker: Yes. As a two-sided market, we’ve actively over the past year or so been recruiting partners on both the supply and the demand side.
On the demand side, we’re fortunate to have a number of early partners who we’re already working with and transacting with as the site continues to move through our launch phase.
On the supply side, we thought we’d launch with 20 or 30 publications and grow it from there. But now we’re at over 600 media partners in more than 40 countries. Some of these are really well-known titles like Nat Geo, Fortune magazine, Rolling Stone, and other major national titles.
But then, a lot of them are regional, local, and niche titles like San Diego Magazine, Hour Detroit, Cherry Bombe, and all the Edible titles. We’ve been fortunate to have had a ton of traction with our partners.
Samir Husni: How is the reception from the publishers? Are they happy with what they are getting? What’s the early reaction?
David Coker: Early reaction is a lot of excitement. People are very excited for the opportunity to have their content discovered — easily discovered — and to be able to connect directly with media buyers.
Right now, it’s often a challenge to get in front of the right media buyer at the right time. Spacely eliminates a lot of the friction points, allows you to easily be discovered, and allows your sales team to cover more ground than they would have otherwise.
We often say that the Spacely platform makes a team of five perform like a team of 15. What our platform is meant to do is create a virtuous cycle between the publishers and the buyers. So, the more the publishers use the platform, the more valuable it becomes to the buyers, and vice versa.
What our platform cannot do is make a team of zero perform like a team of five. We’re very careful to say that this is not a programmatic solution. This is not something you flip on the switch and flip off your day-to-day relationships.
The platform is meant to give your team more time for the relationships, so they spend less time doing manual work, less time doing data entry, automating the tasks that can be automated, allowing them to do higher-value work, managing relationships, and presenting high-value, high-concept ideas for proposals.
Beth Mach: The big thing that David hit on is about the relationships. We know that this industry is built on those relationships, and this is truly to help encourage deeper, more valuable relationships. And at the end of the day, people want to move a bit faster, and people want to make a little bit more money all while feeling like they are connected with people they trust.
We would be remiss if we didn’t say that Spacely helps everybody achieve a positive upside, whether it’s efficiency or sales, as well as create a really positive environment between both the seller and the buyer.
Samir Husni: What’s in it for Spacely?
David Coker: A couple things. Obviously, there is a massive financial upside and obtainable market here. Our business model is transactional, kind of like Airbnb.
There’s a small transaction fee on both sides — the supply side and the demand side — but it’s not an overstatement to say that we certainly have a goal of enabling and creating sustainable business models for local, regional, and niche publications. We think that’s important.
We believe that the erosion of local journalism imperils our overall national discourse, so supporting local journalism — making local journalism a sustainable business model — was very much at the core of our intentions.
Beth Mach: I will also say, we would be remiss, again, if we didn’t mention that we want to build something that helps create an environment of economic stability for the print side, but we’re also not a charity. We do want to make sure we’re creating a positive upside for everyone involved.
Yes, there is an exit plan at some point, but we’ll know what that looks like over the course of time. We’re here to drive positive economic growth for the print industry.
Samir Husni: Are you working with media agencies, ad agencies, or you’re working directly with advertisers?
David Coker: Primarily with the ad agencies. We do have some relationships with advertisers directly. Mostly those have been advisory relationships. We have an advisory relationship with LVMH. We have an advisory relationship with Marriott International, as well as L’Oréal.
Then, we have a handful of other brands that we have friendly relationships with, and they don’t have agencies. So, we’re happy to work with either, but the agencies are really a key part of our overall focus. We want to help the agencies be efficient in their media buys, have transparency in their media buys, and be able to service their clients.
Beth Mach: We also found a new cohort of agencies, meaning digital agencies who don’t have this capability in-house.
There are a lot of advertisers who want the capability of a really smart digital-first agency, but also have print and out-of-home needs, and don’t want to have to go to multiple agencies to be able to do this work.
We’ve found that there’s a bit of a niche of some of the digital agencies coming to us, where they are now with their current business, and with Spacely’s help, have the capability to go in market for existing clients as well as win new business.
Samir Husni: Since the inception of the concept of Spacely and then the actual platform itself, has it been a walk in a rose garden, or have you had some challenges?
David Coker: Like any start-up, there are challenges.
I come from a start-up background, so I’m not unfamiliar with the high highs and the low lows, which is a pretty common story across the founders Beth and I speak with all the time. I tell people, every week is a net positive, and we’re really blessed to have a product that has had such really incredible traction.
I can say in modesty, it’s rare that we hear someone say, “No, this isn’t for us.” It just simply doesn’t happen. Are there things to figure out? Certainly, but almost uniformly, people are excited to use our platform.
People see the promise of Spacely, and we move pretty quickly to an agreement. But candidly, every week is five steps forward and three steps back. We just don’t know from one week to the next what the next challenge is going to be.
Beth Mach: We have a really incredible team, honestly, and that’s been crucial to being able to navigate any challenges.
Every morning, we get together with the leadership team, which I call the Core Four, and our dev team. We debate internally. We debate with the dev team and our business analysts about what should be done, how it should be done. We ask for outside counsel from folks who are in our cohort.
There are challenges. Timing is a challenge. Investment is a challenge. But like David said, we’ve had such a great response. I don’t think we can move fast enough. Our challenge is how much do we get done in a short period of time to be truly viable and to be the product we envision for our customers and for our clients and users.
Samir Husni: What would you consider the major stumbling block, if there is any?
David Coker: We’ve been fortunate to raise a nice round among our friends and family, and right now, we’re in the middle of an angel raise, and that’s tricky. A lot of VCs we speak to like us, but we’re too early on in our traction to have a case for VCs to fit their theses.
Almost always, we end up going back to angel investors, who, for us, are former agency leadership, former global publishing house leadership, and people who are within out-of-home currently.
Continuing to raise, finding the right people, finding the right timing, all in the right balance — that’s been a challenge.
I would also say, there’s not just one major stumbling block. It’s a two-sided market. The phrase herding cats gets overused, but what we’ve created is an extremely complicated piece of software. It would not make sense for any one publisher to build it for themselves. It would hardly make sense for one global publishing house to build it for only their titles.
We often compare our platform to Kayak, like the travel booking engine. While it certainly makes sense for Delta Airlines to have its own booking engine on its own site, there’s still need for a third party that sees across the market. We’re that third party that gives macro-market data across the industry, both print and out-of-home.
Our ambitions, let’s say, are grand. Our vision for the product is robust. Getting there, I think our Spacely:Transact product is far more advanced than what we even expected an MVP would be.
We’re very happy with the work. We’re constantly surprised every day at the level of complexity that we can achieve and that we can solve for. That’s quite frankly essential.
Samir Husni: Does it make a difference — working with a large company, large magazine publisher, or an individual local niche magazine?
David Coker: To an extent, it does. I think both have different wants out of Spacely, and we’re able to accommodate both.
A large publisher has existing relationships and they want to maintain those relationships; they want to make the process of working with them efficient, and they want to support their print products.
The local companies, sometimes their print product is their main source of revenue and they want to find incremental revenue. They want to be able to be discovered by Pepsi or Chevrolet, which would normally have a lot of trouble even finding out that they existed, let alone that the content they’re writing is the perfect content for the upcoming Chevrolet campaign. Discoverability is a major factor for the local publishers.
The national publishers, I don’t think they feel like they have to be discovered. To an extent, they do though, because a sales team can only make so many calls and have so much reach, but they don’t feel like that discoverability is a major problem for them. Efficiency is what they are constantly striving for.
Beth, would you say that sounds right?
Beth Mach: Yes, and uniformity.
As David mentioned earlier, our platform gives a team of five the ability to work as a team of 15. You have to have process, you have to have some level of uniformity in the process, but then also in how people are trained.
Using our tool gives them the ability to do that without a ton of training, without a ton of preparation. They can start using Spacely almost immediately.
Samir Husni: So, are you in the business of selling content or filling space?
David Coker: What an interesting way to phrase that question. I would actually say both.
I say that because everybody’s approaching this — each advertiser and each seller is approaching this a little bit differently. If we said we were selling only space, we would be overlooking the benefit of what print brings to a reader.
We would also not be looking at a business in a way that content creates more readership, that it attracts more advertisers, and again, creates that goodwill and the opportunity for us to help stabilize an industry.
Again, I say “help” — it’s not that we’re coming to save the day, but Spacely certainly gives us an opportunity to play a role in the positive growth and resurgence of the print environment and print industry. I would say, the number one bit of feedback we get is, “Why doesn’t this exist already?” We get it from the demand side; we get it from the supply side.
Beth Mach: You asked, “Are we selling content or space?”
Honestly, Spacely is not selling anything. We’re helping your sales team to do the selling. And sometimes there are advertisers who want as much space as they can get, and sometimes there are advertisers who want to be next to certain content.
I think we’re all surprised that a solution that seems as simple and intuitive as what we’re creating has not really existed yet in the way that we’ve built it out.
Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical personal questions, is there any question that I failed to ask you or anything you would like to add?
David Coker: We touched briefly on out-of-home as part of our business. We often refer to Spacely as the Kayak for offline media — offline being print and out-of-home media. But there are other products on our road map, products that are shown to be necessary by our conversations and discovery with our agency partners — anything that’s necessarily not digital.
Digital has become easy to buy, even programmatically bought in many cases. We’re careful to point out that Spacely is not programmatic, but our platform lends itself very nicely to other offline media, and you’ll see some of that coming to the fore in the not-too-distant future.
One other thing I always like to touch on is this, it’s important to know that while we have products, Spacely is a machine-learning platform. Our system works 24-7, understanding the demand-side patterns and supply-side behavior of our users.
Some of our products include inventory management products, as well as the transaction product, Spacely:Transact itself. But I always consider — and I think Beth would agree — that our number one product is our culture. It’s the culture of our team, and how we work with each other, and how we work with our partners that we’re proudest of.
We really rely on two core values, and those are curiosity and kindness. And valuing disagreement is a key part of our everyday process. So, I always like to call out that who we are as a company is very much a product of wonderful people, and not just the products that we’re creating.
Beth Mach: Well said. Thank you.
Samir Husni: So, Beth, tell me, if I come uninvited one evening to your home, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking?
Beth Mach: My husband is the chef of the house, and I am a great sous-chef. So, a little bit of cooking, but lots of conversation and hanging out with my husband.
We don’t see each other all that much, because we both travel quite a bit. So, an evening of cooking and drinking a nice bottle of wine is always welcome. And we always welcome strangers and friends to our homes for dinner. It’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of a bit of our love language here.
Samir Husni: And David?
David Coker: So, any night of the week, you’ll definitely find me working late.
If you walked in, you’d see me lounging with my cats, playing chess, and answering emails. My wife will have something on the TV. She’s an entertainment writer and editor, so she’ll have two or three different things on various screens and a movie playing on the main TV here.
So, cats, chess, and cranking out correspondence almost with 100% certainty. That’s my routine.
Samir Husni: Beth, what keeps you up at night these days?
Beth Mach: Well, I would actually like to reframe that a little bit. I like to talk about what gets me up in the morning.
I think what energizes me — and we talked about it a little bit — no two days are the same in start-up land, right? You’re faced with something different every day. That is very exciting to me.
And I know this sounds a little Pollyanna, but figuring out how to make the world of advertising exciting and enjoyable, and figuring out ways to create more space and time and deep opportunities to think beyond what’s in front of you — Spacely gives me that opportunity. I just look forward to it.
I’m also part of some other start-ups and roundtables, and getting energy from each one of those and applying it in ways that make the world a little bit more enjoyable is super fun to me.
Samir Husni: And David?
David Coker: Caffeine, full stop. That’s what keeps me up at night.
Mr. Magazine 
