Mr. Magazine

Hearst Magazines’ Success Kicks Print Into High Gear & Proves This Is No Time To Stop Believing In Ink On Paper – The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With David Carey, President, Hearst Magazines.

“The print is dead movement was, I think, largely led by newspaper journalists who were maybe feeling in their own newsrooms what was going on and they were extending it to any traditional form. I think what’s happened is every sector of media, literally every sector, is in a period of enormous disruption and I think that has put the magazine industry in context, and I guess that we look at disruption as opportunity. People will succeed and make money from disruption and people will find themselves challenged and we want to obviously be in the former.” David Carey

On a recent trip to New York to present Mr. Magazine’s™ and min’s 30 Hottest Magazine Launches of the Past 30 Years, David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, took a few minutes out of his busy day to talk to me about the company’s continued belief and success in print and the accomplishments they’ve achieved with combined partnerships with other media platforms and businesses. I met David at his office on the 43rd floor of the Hearst Tower in New York City.

David is a man who runs Hearst Magazines with a clear focus and gives all credit to the spectacular teams that he works with and their creative ideas and executions. From the recent partnership with Verizon, which he gives total credit to Neeraj Khemlani, who is co-president of Hearst’s entertainment division, to the first-ever joint venture with Snapchat, which David praises Joanna Coles for leading, he knows the value of a great partnership, and great teams.

While other companies are trimming and stifling new print magazine launches, Hearst is putting their best print foot forward and proving that ink on paper can not only survive in this digital age, but flourish as well. And along with Hearst’s outstanding digital platforms, the company intertwines print and pixels in a way that promotes and propels both platforms successfully into the future.

So, I hope you enjoy this extremely positive and interesting interview with a man who has proven that he knows how to lead with strength and vision in an age where print and pixels merge and the power of both are celebrated; the Mr. Magazine™ interview with David Carey, President, Hearst Magazines.

But first, the Mr. Magazine™ Video Minute with David Carey followed by the sound-bites:

And now for the sound-bites:

On Hearst’s secret sauce that keeps them growing and flourishing with new launches and bigger and better-quality magazines: Well, the credit goes to the team. One of the lines that I use with the team is if you don’t like change; you’ll like relevance even less. The industry continues to need to evolve what it does and how it accomplishes its goals. And the Hearst team does a great job with that. And then on our digital operations to figure out that scale has to be our friend, that we have too much self-inflicted complexity, that the only way to make digital work is to have a giant, global content ecosystem, where content gets to travel across brand and across geography without permission, friction or cost.

On Hearst’s partnerships and whether they’re still a viable opinion: Yes, we’re talking about partners all of the time. We generally prefer the partnership model, because we do believe when two companies contribute financial resources and management talent, promotional platforms that you can use and significantly boost your chances of success. So, partnership is out preferred course.

On why he thinks it took the magazine and magazine media world seven years to discover that print was neither dead nor dying: The print is dead movement was, I think, largely led by newspaper journalists who were maybe feeling in their own newsrooms what was going on and they were extending it to any traditional form. I think what’s happened is every sector of media, literally every sector, is in a period of enormous disruption and I think that has put the magazine industry in context, and I guess that we look at disruption as opportunity. People will succeed and make money from disruption and people will find themselves challenged and we want to obviously be in the former.

On whether he ever envisioned that Hearst Magazines would be where it is today when he assumed the position of president: I knew going in that we had things that were uniquely suited to Hearst; we have a parent company of remarkable strength. The corporation, because of what Frank Bennack built and now his transition to Steve Swartz, you have a company, unlike other media companies that perhaps you could imagine threats to their existence; Hearst is the opposite of that. From our entertainment division assets, to our business media assets, to 30 local TV stations, which do exceedingly well in political years; and our newspaper division that has seen growth and profits now four years in a row, there’s that can-do spirit that’s part of what we do as well as the financial ability to invest.

On Hearst’s partnerships with entities such as Complex and Vice: Those are with our entertainment division as you know. This news relationship with Verizon that we have is a very important one. We’ve formed this Verizon relationship that’s going to be programming content for the Go90 platform and then Verizon came into our Awesomeness business, not just ours; it’s owned 51% by DreamWorks and 49% between Hearst and Verizon, so for Hearst to now have this relationship with Verizon is fantastic, given their power. The credit goes to Neeraj Khemlani, who is co-president of our entertainment division and did a brilliant job on that. We haven’t worked so closely with Complex yet, but we’ve had ideas with Vice and have been discussing different things that we can do together.

On how he decides which partnerships to accept: We take everything seriously. But there are a couple of important considerations. The first is; we do spend a lot of time early on in a chemistry check, because we know these partnerships ideally last for a very long time and the signing of the deal is the easiest, least stressful piece, right? We do spend a fair amount of time making sure that it feels like we have a good relationship with the partner, because that’s just like the people who are your closest associates in the world. So, there’s a good chemistry period.

On the hardest decision he’s made since becoming president of Hearst Magazines: We make a lot of decisions; we’re always rethinking flows and structures and what people do and how they do it. And you deal with human beings and some are great with change and others are not so good with it. And we’re a culture that’s sensitive to people and we balance implementing, at times, disruptive actions with respect for the individual.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly at his home one evening: I spend a lot of time reading our magazines; there are all sorts of interesting and thoughtful analyses of trends across the world. I do very much believe in interdisciplinary thinking, that the answers to some business problems are found by looking at other industries, not just our own. So, I like to consume as much as I can.

On the next big thing coming up with Hearst Magazines: I think that we’re at it every day. We run in spurts as I mentioned to you. We have big initiatives and they all come in kind of when they’re ready. But our teams are thinking about how to advance and evolve other businesses every day.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with David Carey, President of Hearst Magazines.

Samir Husni: What is your secret recipe when it comes to Hearst magazines? You’re still launching new magazines; you’re not firing people en masse; you’ve upsized all of your magazines; almost every magazine in the portfolio is bigger and on better paper. What is the secret sauce that other companies aren’t finding?

David Carey: It’s simple. A: we step on no cracks when we walk down the street and we sleep under a pyramid at night. (Laughs) People have not realized the mystical powers of these forces.

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

David Carey: Well, the credit goes to the team. One of the lines that I use with the team is if you don’t like change; you’ll like relevance even less. The industry continues to need to evolve what it does and how it accomplishes its goals. And the Hearst team does a great job with that. So, whether we are looking at our print businesses in terms of what’s the right way to produce our products and the creation of the Hearst Design Group led by your alum, Mr. Newell Turner, and bringing three teams together into one big team to produce three different products, running against the traditional standards of the business and those businesses today are not only economically healthy, but gave us the confidence to do a pilot issue of Metropolitan Home, a great mark that we acquired, it was defunct, with the Lagardère acquisition and a chance to bring it back.

And so we’re always kind of thinking differently. Recently we made the move to have Jay Fielden not only continue to oversee Town & Country as editorial director, but also be the day-to-day editor in chief of Esquire. Jay is a real talent; he did a fantastic job at Town & Country.
So, we stretch our teams and we stretch our thinking.

And then on our digital operations to figure out that scale has to be our friend, that we have too much self-inflicted complexity, that the only way to make digital work is to have a giant, global content ecosystem, where content gets to travel across brand and across geography without permission, friction or cost. And that was one of the most disruptive decisions we made, over the course of my career, but one of the biggest, because the profit growth that we’ve had from digital has allowed us to make our numbers and has taken pressure off of the organization. So, that has allowed us to avoid a large staff restructure and so on, because we’ve met our numbers for our U.S. business, largely by taking business model risks that have paid off. But our teams have implemented brilliantly.

Samir Husni: The word on the streets is you’re not only launching new magazines, you’re bringing back magazines from the dead and putting them back into print, such as the case with Metropolitan Home. And this is the first major test where you didn’t partner with someone else, such as with the last three or four magazines that you launched. Is there still talk about other partnerships?

David Carey: Yes, we’re talking about partners all of the time. We generally prefer the partnership model, because we do believe when two companies contribute financial resources and management talent, promotional platforms that you can use and significantly boost your chances of success. So, partnership is out preferred course.

But in this particular case, we had the mark and Newell had a vision for it. And we were able to officially produce it out of the Hearst Design infrastructure. The way this worked was different, we didn’t need to assemble a team and hire a bunch a people. We managed to fit it in within the workflow, both sales and editorial, of the existing population of managers. And so it was a different model. This group found that they could stretch even beyond Elle Décor, Veranda and House Beautiful. It made sense because we had a mark, Metropolitan Home, for many people they still remember it fondly. And this is our way to kind of test that reservoir of good will that hopefully exists for the brand.

This was driven by Newell. He came to us with this plan, had a vision for it, believed that we could do it in a way that made sense financially and we like to empower our managers. And our discussion with Newell was to go for it.

Samir Husni: One thing that I’ve noticed this year in following magazine media and the marketplace, no one is saying that print is dead anymore. That mantra has vanished. Why did it take us seven years to discover that print is neither dead nor dying?

David Carey: The print is dead movement was, I think, largely led by newspaper journalists who were maybe feeling in their own newsrooms what was going on and they were extending it to any traditional form.

I think what’s happened is that the rest of the world has been caught up in this absolute state of chaos. And suddenly, magazines don’t seem as chaotic. The cable TV business seems incredibly chaotic. Parts of the digital business, you have Yahoo, one of the big players, looking at revenue declines of 15% per year, and all the disruption there.

I think what’s happened is every sector of media, literally every sector, is in a period of enormous disruption and I think that has put the magazine industry in context, and I guess that we look at disruption as opportunity. People will succeed and make money from disruption and people will find themselves challenged and we want to obviously be in the former.

It’s been important for those that long-thought certain industries had a get-out-of-jail-free card forever and that proved not to be true. I believe that has changed the thinking around magazines, and for the good. We always believed it, of course. People would look at other things as sure bets and the good news is that there are no moats around any business, no matter how large, that business is available and it’s up to you to determine whether you’re going to succeed or fail. I don’t care if you operate a digital company, a television network, or a magazine company.

Samir Husni: In 2010, did you envision that Hearst Magazines would be where they are now when you assumed the position of president?

David Carey: I knew going in that we had things that were uniquely suited to Hearst; we have a parent company of remarkable strength. The corporation, because of what Frank Bennack built and now his transition to Steve Swartz, you have a company, unlike other media companies that perhaps you could imagine threats to their existence; Hearst is the opposite of that. From our entertainment division assets, to our business media assets, to 30 local TV stations, which do exceedingly well in political years; and our newspaper division that has seen growth and profits now four years in a row, there’s that can-do spirit that’s part of what we do as well as the financial ability to invest.

I knew we had a team that knew how to innovate and not take everything they do too seriously. And I think at the same time we’ve pushed that hard against the conventional thinking, or in some cases the disruption that has impacted some of the other companies in the industry,

I’m proud of where we are, but I do believe that we can go much further. I give our team high marks that we have still a lot more to get done and a lot more to accomplish.

Samir Husni: How much are you going to push those new partnerships, whether it’s with Complex or Vice or other entities? Are you going to bring them into the fold or is it as you were reported in the New York Observer and also told me: “you wake up at night and think about these things?”

David Carey: Those are with our entertainment division as you know. This news relationship with Verizon that we have is a very important one. We’ve formed this Verizon relationship that’s going to be programming content for the Go90 platform and then Verizon came into our Awesomeness business, not just ours; it’s owned 51% by DreamWorks and 49% between Hearst and Verizon, so for Hearst to now have this relationship with Verizon is fantastic, given their power. The credit goes to Neeraj Khemlani, who is co-president of our entertainment division and did a brilliant job on that. We haven’t worked so closely with Complex yet, but we’ve had ideas with Vice and have been discussing different things that we can do together.

We get a lot of people who knock on our door and want to co-create media with us, in what used to be only print, but now in other interesting incarnations. In digital of course, in the fall we created the new digital business with Lena Dunham around the “Lenny Letter,” which was a very successful newsletter with a clear, concise voice. We’ve created a new digital business and partnership with Lena and her production partner.

Of course, we also did our new joint venture with Snapchat, their first ever joint venture was with Hearst. Joanna Coles did a great job leading that. We announced our relationship with Condé Nast, so this is just in a few months, and then with Verizon.

In just a four or five month period, we’ve partnered with Condé Nast and Verizon and Snapchat and Lena Dunham. We’ve been thinking about these pop-up magazine concepts for some time. And many people come to us because they’ve seen the great success of Oprah or Food Network and some of them have good brand recognition, but maybe not in terms of promotional resources, a real big company behind them. So, we’ve been thinking about what to do.

What we first did with Carine Roitfeld and Harper’s Bazaar, as you know, four times per year she publishes this brilliant portfolio that runs across every edition of Harper’s Bazaar globally in the same month. And no one does that, right, simultaneous global content creations. We’re trying something different on that.

And what we’re going to do with Linda Wells in the fall, and of course, Linda is the highly-respected, long time editor of Allure, we’re building internally is the Wells Report and we’ll see what the final title will be, but it will be a content play that will run across Elle and Marie Claire, Town & Country and Harper’s Bazaar, partial circulation and you take a concept that would reach a slice of those audiences, and we have a lot of those individuals who approached us, that could work as a pop-up magazine, maybe not work as their own dedicated franchise, but could very much work as a horizontal content play.

So, we’re piloting the Linda Wells project with great hope and we have others behind it. Since we did the Lena Dunham deal with “Lenny,” we’ve had many others who are successful, content names in their own right, approach us to do something similar. Our hope is that we can do a couple of these a year. We could probably do more if we want to respond to all of the inbound queries, but we want to execute each one well. That’s why when we talk print, we do it in an every two-to-three-year cycle, because we want to make sure that we can really focus and do it right and then move on to the next one.

Samir Husni: What do you use as a filter? I’m sure you’re bombarded by people who want to partner and who want to do a pop-up magazine. What’s the filter; which ones make it to David’s desk?

David Carey: We take everything seriously. But there are a couple of important considerations. The first is, we do spend a lot of time early on in a chemistry check, because we know these partnerships ideally last for a very long time and the signing of the deal is the easiest, least stressful piece, right? We do spend a fair amount of time making sure that it feels like we have a good relationship with the partner, because that’s just like the people who are your closest associates in the world. So, there’s a good chemistry period.

And then we do research and we test to see if the concept will be able to grow and be able to command an audience and drive advertising. But I would say one of the most important considerations is; are these people who we’re going to spend a lot of time with, ones that we can problem solve with? You hope problems never come, but they do come. As a result, there are projects that I won’t name; two projects in the last two years that came up that I thought were really, highly promising businesses, but we weren’t so sure the partnership was going to be strong and we passed on something that we thought could have been successful, but might have been choppy midway through because we didn’t have good alignment with the partner.

Those are the decisions that I make with Michael and Ellen. Those are hard decisions, to walk away from something that might have been a good business, but the partner has some questions. But we have to do that.

Samir Husni: For an outsider, people look at you and at what you’re doing and think: wow, David’s life at Hearst has been nothing but a rose garden. But what has been the most challenging time you’ve had?

David Carey: Part of our day, every day is filled with the good stuff and part of our day is filled with the tough, operating decisions and problems that you get around the world and that you have to manage.

Samir Husni: What has been the hardest decision that you’ve made since you became president of Hearst Magazines?

David Carey: We make a lot of decisions; we’re always rethinking flows and structures and what people do and how they do it. And you deal with human beings and some are great with change and others are not so good with it. And we’re a culture that’s sensitive to people and we balance implementing, at times, disruptive actions with respect for the individual.

It wasn’t a hard decision. The implementation of Pub Works is filled with complexity and opportunity. I do believe at my core that this is a significant advancement for the entire industry, not just these two companies. But we have a lot to do between now and then. You can’t be afraid.

The age-old question, and people have different personal characteristics; the age-old question that people always ask is: what keeps you up at night. And I don’t like that question. The reality is nothing. I sleep well every single night and I always have. And maybe I’m fortunate that that’s me, because we have all sorts of issues, things that go right and things that go wrong. You wake up the next day and you try to solve them again. And we’ll solve a bunch of them, but we won’t solve them all.

Samir Husni: So, rather than me asking you my typical last question about what keeps you up at night; if I showed up unexpectedly to your home one evening, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; your iPad; watching television; or something different?

David Carey: People have different media consumption habits; this is not a statement which some people make because they try to come off as intellectuals, but I really don’t watch TV; when you don’t watch TV you have a lot of extra time on your hands, a lot of extra time.

I watch maybe two or three hours per week of TV, maybe. So, that gives me a lot of time to do a lot of other things. I don’t really like sports; I’m not good at playing them and I’m not really interested in them, except with my sons in a live setting at a baseball or football game.

So, I spend a lot of time reading our magazines; there are all sorts of interesting and thoughtful analyses of trends across the world. I do very much believe in interdisciplinary thinking, that the answers to some business problems are found by looking at other industries, not just our own. So, I like to consume as much as I can.

Again, I also get more than a handful of emails at all hours of the day and so I’m communicating all through the day and evening. It’s a weird statement to make, but part of my personal career success is that fact that most people watch TV 20 or 30 hours per week. If you only do that two hours per week, you have a lot of time to do a lot of other things, from reading books for enjoyment to playing games and just everything else. That will eliminate me from being head of Hearst Television; I can cross that job off the list. (Laughs) But I have friends who talk about this show or that show and I don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s just one of those things. My wife and kids will watch every Housewives show, you name it, but it’s something that never really attracted me.

Samir Husni: And what’s the next big surprise we’re going to hear from Hearst Magazines come October 2017, since October seems to be the launch date for new magazines?

David Carey: I think that we’re at it every day. We run in spurts as I mentioned to you. We have big initiatives and they all come in kind of when they’re ready. But our teams are thinking about how to advance and evolve other businesses every day. I don’t know if we have any significant step-function changes in what we do, but I think that being open to everything is how we spend our time.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“We live in a world right now where you have legacy brands trying to become smart digital operations and you have smart digital operations trying to build brand. I think in both cases the job is tough, but I actually think we have the better hand. In other words, it’s easier for a great brand to build a good digital organization than it is for a good digital organization to build a great brand.” Alan Murray

A legacy brand that has no misconceptions about the future of business in today’s digital world; Fortune magazine has established a deep footprint in both print, and as recently as two years, also digital. In March 2016, the brand’s website realized over its target of 20 million unique users, an amazing accomplishment, especially for a website that didn’t exist two years ago.

Alan Murray is editor of Fortune and has a clear vision for the brand and also a clarion view of business today and why there is renewed interest and resurgence in the world of business magazine media. It’s Alan’s belief that the millennials of today have turned back to the business world as disillusionment with Washington and all things political have set in over recent years. No longer do they feel they can impact society and the world in general through government, but have a better chance of doing good and realizing goals and dreams through the channel of business.

I spoke with Alan recently and we talked about the good “fortune” of the brand, and how for him and the Fortune team the realization of those 20 million unique web users wasn’t just a numbers game. He said a concerted effort to maintain and improve on the quality of their online journalism had been a prime goal, producing a steady stream of smart stories, exclusive scoops and authoritative analysis that Fortune’s readers value. In addition, subscribers to their newsletters – the brand’s most loyal and valuable readers – had grown to well over 200,000.

So, I hope that you enjoy this glimpse into the world of business magazine media with a man and a brand that knows the niche from the inside out and offers a renewed hope and excitement for all things “Fortune;” the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Alan Murray, Editor, Fortune Magazine.

But first, the sound-bites:

On whether the hierarchy of politics first and business second from the days of Henry Luce still stands or there’s been a change in the audience’s attention: I think, particularly in an election season like this one, people are very interested in politics. And there are probably more people interested in politics than there are in business. But the fact that we’ve reached 20 million visitors in March suggests that there are quite a few people interested in business as well.

On whether he thinks there has been resurgence in business magazine media or there’s an uncaring-type attitude when it comes to the audience’s interest: No, we don’t get that. First of all, most people are employed by businesses, so I think people certainly care about their jobs. But I also think that we’re at this interesting moment where in the United States the government has failed us. And so people who really want to make a difference in the world more and more are turning to business rather than government.

On how he plans to incorporate his vison for the Fortune brand throughout the different platforms: Increasingly people are seeing business as a principle means of doing good in the world. We started something last September called the “Change the World,” which focuses on companies that are trying to address global social problems as a core part of their profit-making activities. Obviously that’s not every company, but you see more and more of that and that’s the motivation of a lot of young people going into business today. Our most popular franchise of Fortune is something that you may have seen called “100 Best Companies to Work For.” And that’s very popular with young people looking for jobs. They go there to see what companies share their values and will give them a chance to make an impact in the world.

On how he contrasts the website with the printed edition of Fortune: We’re trying to do great journalism both online and in the magazine. The difference is not so much about the quality of the journalism; it’s the way it’s consumed. When the magazine goes into people’s houses and they sit down on the weekend to spend 30 or 40 minutes flipping through it; that’s a very laid-back reading experience. With the website, you’re talking about people who have maybe three minutes to scramble through some information in the morning before they go to the office or they take a few minutes at lunch. I did research on this when I was at the Pew Research Center; people are reading more than ever before, but they’re reading in stops and starts on their mobile phones.

On whether his job as an editor today is easier or harder than in the past: I think it’s very hard. Let me give you a prime example from Fortune. Probably the best single story we did last year was a story on the Sony hack. It was written by Peter Elkind, a long-time Fortune writer, who spent six months of last year reporting and writing this story, and that’s all he did for us during those six months. Then on the other hand, you look at someone like Dan Primack, who writes “Term Sheet,” which is an incredibly respected newsletter for the private equity audience. Peter Elkind and Dan Primack are both great journalists and anybody you talk to that reads their work recognizes that, but they’re dealing in very different media. And it does make managing a news organization that cuts across those media more difficult.

On whether he misses the good-old-days of being an editor: No, I think journalism is more fun today than it’s ever been before because you have access to all of these different media, different ways of reaching people, because you can reach a broader audience than ever before. Fortune has never had the 20 million people who came to Fortune in March. It was the biggest audience by far, by orders of magnitude that Fortune has ever had.

On what motivates him to get out of bed in the morning: It’s a combination of the things that we’ve already talked about. One is that journalism is more fun and exciting; it’s changing more rapidly than it ever has before and change keeps you excited. I’ve been fortunate in my career to do just about everything that a journalist could do. I’ve hosted a TV show on CNBC for three years; I’ve written three different columns for the Wall Street Journal; I’ve written long-form and short-form, but the fact that the medium is constantly changing and evolving makes it fun.

On whether he can ever envision Fortune without a print edition: I think that someday print will go away, but I don’t think that it’s going to be in my lifetime. There are still too many people who love the print form. I suspect someday that we’ll figure out a way to imitate that in digital so that we don’t have to cut down all of the trees, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen in my lifetime. I think that print is going to be around a lot longer than people think it is.

On anything else he’d like to add: The only thing that I would say is this, we live in a world right now where you have legacy brands trying to become smart digital operations and you have smart digital operations trying to build brand. I think in both cases the job is tough, but I actually think we have the better hand. In other words, it’s easier for a great brand to build a good digital organization than it is for a good digital organization to build a great brand.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up at his house unexpectedly one evening: My wife works in Washington most of the week, so a lot of times I come home and I’m by myself, and at the very last hour of the day, I tend to watch TV. That’s the only time I watch TV. I watched all of “Mr. Robot,” for instance. I usually pick up an hour of TV right before I go to bed.

On what keeps him up at night: The rapid pace of change in the advertising market and the race to create other forms of revenue to make up for that, and whether we can do the second task enough to make up for the first. You can’t understate how important the conferences are to the Fortune brand. That’s such a critical part of our brand, the conferences that we do.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Alan Murray, Editor, Fortune Magazine.

Samir Husni: Almost nine decades ago when Henry Luce launched Fortune, it came after Time magazine, so we had the politics first and then the economics. Are we still in that same hierarchy when it comes to our audience’s attention? Is it still politics first and business second or have you felt a change in the country and in the audience?

Alan Murray: I think, particularly in an election season like this one, people are very interested in politics. And there are probably more people interested in politics than there are in business. But the fact that we’ve reached 20 million visitors in March suggests that there are quite a few people interested in business as well.

Samir Husni: Why do you think that is the case? Part of me feels like there has been a resurgence of the business magazine media and the other part of me wonders if sometimes there’s an uncaring attitude when it comes to business media by the audience.

Alan Murray: No, we don’t get that. First of all, most people are employed by businesses, so I think people certainly care about their jobs. But I also think that we’re at this interesting moment where in the United States the government has failed us. And so people who really want to make a difference in the world more and more are turning to business rather than government.

I know young people that I talk to who really want to make a difference and who two or three decades ago might have been dying to go to Washington, are now talking about starting their own business or joining a startup. So, I do think people increasingly see business as a way to make a difference in the world.

Samir Husni: And how do you take that and apply it to your vision for the Fortune brand, whether it’s print, online, or any of the available platforms? I know just in the last two years the brand has gained its own website, fortune.com, and has excelled with it, but how do you take that vision and incorporate it throughout the brand?

Alan Murray: We see two big trends driving interests in business right now. One is technology. Over the last two decades the excitement was about consumer technology; it’s now really moved into the workplace and transformed the way businesses operate in a profound way. That’s why we have doubled our technology reporting staff in the last year; we hired seven reporters from Gigo who focus on cloud computing and the Internet of things; artificial intelligence and all the technologies. They’re really transforming the way business is done. And it’s a huge issue for our readers.

We did a survey of Fortune 500 CEOs last year and we asked them what was the biggest challenge facing their business, and we gave them all kinds of options. Was it regulations; competition from China; was it their concerns about the economy? The number one reason they gave us; the number one challenge facing their businesses they responded, was the rapid pace of change in technology. So, that’s one thing driving this interest in business. And companies like Apple that used to be solely focused on consumers, are now focusing on the workplace.

The second thing that I believe is driving business is what we were just talking about: increasingly people are seeing business as a principle means of doing good in the world. We started something last September called the “Change the World,” which focuses on companies that are trying to address global social problems as a core part of their profit-making activities.

Obviously that’s not every company, but you see more and more of that and that’s the motivation of a lot of young people going into business today. Our most popular franchise of Fortune is something that you may have seen called “100 Best Companies to Work For.” And that’s very popular with young people looking for jobs. They go there to see what companies share their values and will give them a chance to make an impact in the world.

So, I think those two things together are driving the current interest in business and the current rise in interest in Fortune.

Samir Husni: How do you either differentiate or contrast Fortune.com with the print edition of the brand? Are you working overtime to make sure that what you give me in Fortune the printed magazine is different than what’s online, because I noticed in your press release that you’re paying much more attention to and creating some very serious journalism online?

Alan Murray: We’re trying to do great journalism both online and in the magazine. The difference is not so much about the quality of the journalism; it’s the way it’s consumed. When the magazine goes into people’s houses and they sit down on the weekend to spend 30 or 40 minutes flipping through it; that’s a very laid-back reading experience.

With the website, you’re talking about people who have maybe three minutes to scramble through some information in the morning before they go to the office or they take a few minutes at lunch. I did research on this when I was at the Pew Research Center; people are reading more than ever before, but they’re reading in stops and starts on their mobile phones. So, you have to create content that reaches them on their phones. How do we do that? Well, it has to be much shorter because it’s not 30 minutes in the armchair; it’s five minutes at the train station. You need to have headlines that will grab their attention; you need to aggressively work the social networks because a lot of people are taking their lead from friends or people that they follow on social media.

We now have six morning newsletters, including one that I do myself, that have close to 300,000 subscribers and very high open rates, so that’s a way of capturing people on their mobile phones. And we create over 100 stories per day. So, it’s really about creating content in a way that caters to the method that’s being used by the people consuming it.

Samir Husni: Does that make your job easier or harder? Is the job of an editor in chief today a heavier load than what it used to be and how are you juggling your time?

Alan Murray: I think it’s very hard. Let me give you a prime example from Fortune. Probably the best single story we did last year was a story on the Sony hack. It was written by Peter Elkind, a long-time Fortune writer, who spent six months of last year reporting and writing this story, and that’s all he did for us during those six months. And it was an incredible piece of journalism and probably one of the longest that we’ve ever run in the magazine that is already winning a lot of awards because it was done so well.

Then on the other hand, you look at someone like Dan Primack, who writes “Term Sheet,” which is an incredibly respected newsletter for the private equity audience. Dan writes a newsletter every single day and on top of that probably posts three stories per day to the website.

Peter Elkind and Dan Primack are both great journalists and anybody you talk to that reads their work recognizes that, but they’re dealing in very different media. And it does make managing a news organization that cuts across those media more difficult.

Samir Husni: Do you miss the good-old-days?

Alan Murray: No, I think journalism is more fun today than it’s ever been before because you have access to all of these different media, different ways of reaching people, because you can reach a broader audience than ever before. Fortune has never had the 20 million people who came to Fortune in March. It was the biggest audience by far, by orders of magnitude that Fortune has ever had.

So, you reach more people and you reach them in more diverse ways. You can do interesting things with video; you can interact with them on special networks. I think journalism is more fun than it’s ever been before in my lifetime.

Samir Husni: What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning and be excited about going to the office?

Alan Murray: It’s a combination of the things that we’ve already talked about. One is that journalism is more fun and exciting; it’s changing more rapidly than it ever has before and change keeps you excited. I’ve been fortunate in my career to do just about everything that a journalist could do. I’ve hosted a TV show on CNBC for three years; I’ve written three different columns for the Wall Street Journal; I’ve written long-form and short-form, but the fact that the medium is constantly changing and evolving makes it fun. So, that’s one.

And then two is the fact that the story is so interesting; we are in the middle of something that I believe is the equivalent to the industrial revolution. It’s forcing companies to rethink the fundamentals of how they do business and it’s forcing business leaders to rethink the way that they lead. And that’s very exciting and very interesting and Fortune is determined to lead the way.

Samir Husni: Can you ever envision Fortune without the print edition?

Alan Murray: I think that someday print will go away, but I don’t think that it’s going to be in my lifetime. There are still too many people who love the print form. I suspect someday that we’ll figure out a way to imitate that in digital so that we don’t have to cut down all of the trees, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen in my lifetime. I think that print is going to be around a lot longer than people think it is.

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

Alan Murray: The only thing that I would say is this, we live in a world right now where you have legacy brands trying to become smart digital operations and you have smart digital operations trying to build brand. I think in both cases the job is tough, but I actually think we have the better hand. In other words, it’s easier for a great brand to build a good digital organization than it is for a good digital organization to build a great brand.

It was true at the Wall Street Journal; it was true when I worked at the Pew Research Center, and it’s true at Fortune. Having a great brand is a powerful weapon and as long as you don’t screw it up, you can win, even if you’re late to the game.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine, reading your iPad, watching television, or something else?

Alan Murray: My wife works in Washington most of the week, so a lot of times I come home and I’m by myself, and at the very last hour of the day, I tend to watch TV. That’s the only time I watch TV. I watched all of “Mr. Robot,” for instance. I usually pick up an hour of TV right before I go to bed.

Samir Husni: Who would be the best president for our economy from those that are still in the running now?

Alan Murray: I’ve been pretty straightforward about that. I’ve said that I don’t think there is a viable candidate left who would be good for business. And I think that’s the first time in my lifetime or my career that that has been the case. It shows that business is really on the political outs because I don’t think any of the candidates really provide what business needs.

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

Alan Murray: The rapid pace of change in the advertising market and the race to create other forms of revenue to make up for that, and whether we can do the second task enough to make up for the first. You can’t understate how important the conferences are to the Fortune brand. That’s such a critical part of our brand, the conferences that we do. And that’s part of the way that we keep from being totally dependent on digital advertisers.

It’s a three-legged stool, and in my mind, they’re of equal importance: our digital operation, the magazine, and the conferences.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“So, when you look at all of the various platforms that CNET provides its content to; print was actually a platform that we were not invested in. When we looked at the opportunity to do a print magazine, we thought about it and we realized that the magazine publishing world was going through a challenge, but we do believe that people still like to read some content in print.” Connie Guglielmo

“Since I spend all of my days on the computer and my Smartphone and tablets, if you were to come to my house unexpectedly, you would see a library of books. I have physical paper books, hardcover, softcover, large format, small format books. I inherited a library from some relatives and my husband inherited some from his relatives, so we have lots and lots of books. I live not very far from Apple and not very far from where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak set up the Apple Garage, and I’m surrounded by books because even though I love my technology and I can’t imagine a world without it, I still like paper.” Connie Guglielmo

From a television channel 20 years ago, to the web and all things digital, CNET has been the go-to resource for tech lovers when it comes to news and information about the technological trends and products that are being born and used on a minute-by-minute basis in the world of high-tech. The one area that CNET had no presence in however was print. That was rectified with the launch of their ink on paper product in 2014. Since then, the magazine has set out to prove that tech isn’t just for the tech-iest. Average people who may not invent Hoverboards and savvy computer programs do use technology on a daily basis and are very interested in it.

Connie Guglielmo is the magazine’s co-editor in chief and believes that the print product may reach a mainstream consumer that the website might not attract. Connie is a tech user and lover, but also a firm believer in the fact that some people still like to consume their content through ink on paper.

I spoke with her recently about the attempt to take away any of the fear of technology and reach a wider audience with the print magazine. With the spring issue, the magazine highlighted actress Olivia Munn, who is a tech lover and is building a Smart Home of her own. Connie feels that by utilizing celebrities that are more well-known to the mainstream world, a broader spectrum of readers will recognize and relate to the “easy use of technology” train of thought.

And it seems that even those of us who value their digital devices know when it’s time for a cleansing. An article in the most current issue of the magazine talks about the fact that sometimes people need to disconnect from the device-laden world that we live in and perform a “Daily Detox” by switching their phone to airplane mode, writing down their thoughts and reading a book or a magazine. It’s a very interesting world when you evenly mix print and digital and CNET is proving that fact admirably.

So, I hope that you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with a woman who knows the value of technology, but also feels the connection of print and believes that the two together are an unstoppable team that will take the CNET brand to new heights.

But first, the sound-bites:

On why CNET decided they needed a print component after 20 years on the web: CNET is a media company that covers tech and provides our content in a variety of mediums. When we started out it was actually a cable TV channel; then we went onto the web. We were one of the first to do broadcast-quality video online; of course we do photography and we have a staff of photojournalists, which a lot of news organizations no longer have. We have mobile apps, of course, and we engage in social media. So, when you look at all of the various platforms that CNET provides its content to; print was actually a platform that we were not invested in. When we looked at the opportunity to do a print magazine, we thought about it and we realized that the magazine publishing world was going through a challenge, but we do believe that people still like to read some content in print.

On whether she feels the words news and print have become an oxymoron: When I look for news, there are grades of news. Today’s technology has allowed anybody with access to that technology to create a blogpost and share their opinions, or if they don’t want to get fancy they can just Tweet out their opinions or thoughts. Is that news? It depends. If they’re sharing breaking events and they’re the first to report something that’s happening. You can’t discount all of those ways that news is getting out, but as a consumer of news I can be discriminating about what kind of information is important to me. So, as an editor in chief of a news organization, I tell my staff every day; your job is to report the news. We are not columnists, necessarily. We don’t write commentary unless it’s labeled as commentary.

On the scale she uses to judge what news content is for which platform: We approach the storytelling in the quarterly magazine very differently than we do online. Everything that we write for the magazine is original. It’s not something that we’ve taken online and repurposed, then put in the magazine; although, there have been one or two stories that we have done online and then done a variation of for the magazine. But for the most part, 95% plus of the magazine copy is original.

On whether she feels more like a curator as an editor in today’s world than a creator: No, I think we’re definitely creators, but today’s creators are by default curators because you can’t write about everything. So, we’re by definition picking the stories that we think are most important to our readers, that we think are the ones that we want to tell, because like everyone in the world we have limited resources, so there is that aspect of curating.

On the biggest stumbling block that she’s had to face since the magazine started: I don’t know if it’s a stumbling block, we’re still working on it, but a lot of people associate CNET with being an online brand and don’t think about us as having a print magazine. We distribute our magazine through booksellers and airports and Wal-Mart; just a whole list of places where we are, so brand awareness, making sure that people understand that we’re even doing this and then of course, we have to explain constantly why we’re doing this. And when I do explain to people that we didn’t stop everything else that we’ve been doing and set up a magazine, they get it. Then they understand what we’re doing and that we’re not throwing away 20 years’ experience online and investing our total future in print. Again, that’s just a part of what we do.

On Olivia Munn being on the cover of the spring issue: Our purpose in reaching people who use technology and love technology is to talk about the kind being used today or might be using in the near future and how it might resonate with someone’s life. And Olivia Munn is on the cover of our spring issue, which the focus of that issue is the Smart Home, and she has turned her home into a Smart Home. So she told us a little bit about that. She’s also someone who has been around the tech industry for a while, from a tech culture perspective. People know her and she’s a bit of a controversial figure because she was the co-host of a television show called “Attack of the Show” which was on a video game channel. And some people think that that doesn’t mean she’s a video game player, but she actually is.

On whether they got the idea for the Smart Home that CNET actually owns from Olivia Munn: No, we bought the home last year in Louisville, KY., which is not far from our testing lab, where all of the Smart Home gear that we have is tested. And we’d been testing that gear for many years. We raised the stakes in what we do with the Smart Home by buying an actual home. But that predates any of the magazine work. It’s been in the works for years.

On anything else that she’d like to add: One thing I will say about the magazine is that we have so much content online at CNET, we’ve been doing it for 20 years, so when we approached the magazine; we didn’t want it to be a duplication of what we had online. We wanted it to be a complement to what we do.

On what someone would find her doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at her home: Since I spend all of my days on the computer and my Smartphone and tablets, if you were to come to my house unexpectedly, you would see a library of books. I have physical paper books, hardcover, softcover, large format, small format books. I inherited a library from some relatives and my husband inherited some from his relatives, so we have lots and lots of books.

On what keeps her up at night: You always want the story that no one thought of and so I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and I have a pen that lights up and I write in a notebook, or I talk and dictate notes into my device; I have story ideas all of the time. That’s my biggest worry and concern, but it’s also the fun and challenge of being an editor and a reporter, chasing the stories that no one has thought to write.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Connie Guglielmo, Editor In Chief, CNET Magazine.

Samir Husni: CNET magazine launched in November, 2014, but it’s been in the digital sphere for 20 years before that. Why did the powers-that-be at CNET decide they needed an ink on paper entity in addition to what the brand had been doing with pixels on a screen?

Connie Guglielmo: You’re right; CNET has been covering technology for 20 years. We actually celebrated our 20th anniversary last year. It’s important to understand why we’re doing print and that we’re coming at it from a completely different perspective than most publishers. Many people are in the business of producing a magazine and they have the staff and they build their resources around being able to produce a print publication and they rise and fall on the success of that print magazine.

CNET is a media company that covers tech and provides our content in a variety of mediums. When we started out it was actually a cable TV channel; then we went onto the web. We were one of the first to do broadcast-quality video online; of course we do photography and we have a staff of photojournalists, which a lot of news organizations no longer have. We have mobile apps, of course, and we engage in social media.

So, when you look at all of the various platforms that CNET provides its content to; print was actually a platform that we were not invested in. When we looked at the opportunity to do a print magazine, we thought about it and we realized that the magazine publishing world was going through a challenge, but we do believe that people still like to read some content in print. So, that’s why we produce a quarterly magazine. We’re not monthly or weekly; we’re quarterly. And that creates a cadence in how we produce the content.

We went with a premium quality magazine and we’re also trying to expand our brand and presence to the larger world and so the publication is very consumer-focused. It’s all about tech, but it’s very concerned with the consumer, which unlike some of the other tech magazines out there, they cater to their specific tech niche. You have some magazines that are for the digital audience; you have coders and tinkers; you have gamers; we are completely consumer-focused. So that makes us very different in the marketplace.

It was a combination of all of those things; providing our content to a new platform that we were not in, recognizing that we needed to approach it in the right way; quarterly and very high-quality. And we needed to represent the market audience that we wanted to attract, in terms of our quality and that consumer audience.

I’ll just say one other thing and that is, if in a couple of years refrigerators turn out to be a medium for content…

Samir Husni: (Laughs)

Connie Guglielmo: …we’ll produce our content and have it served up so that you can read our stories through your refrigerator. We’re platform agnostic. It’s all about the reader and how they want to consume content. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have pursued all of the different channels and opportunities that we have. So, mobile, obviously, is a big thing for us; it’s very big today and it’s going to be big tomorrow. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if the tech world would want to read news off of the refrigerator; I’m a Star Trek fan, so I would have probably said yes, it makes sense. Now, the general population probably wouldn’t think that, but to us it’s just another channel to reach people.

And our business doesn’t rise and fall on the print product. We didn’t go out and hire a whole new staff and invest in a whole new production system for this magazine. These are CNET resources that we’re just bringing to bear in a different way to produce the magazine.

Samir Husni: As CNET’s news editor in chief, do you feel the words news and print have become an oxymoron?

Connie Guglielmo: (Laughs) I think that’s probably a conversation that every news editor in the United States has had every decade for the past 100 years. How do you define news? Has the definition of news changed over the years? Yes and no.

I started covering technology right out of school and desktop publishing was just coming to the fore and anybody with a MAC computer and PageMaker could produce a newsletter. And what a big deal that was. You didn’t have to have any big print investment; anybody could do it with a couple of fonts, a printer and some stamps and there you go.

Did that change the quality of news? It changed the volume; there’s a lot more content, but I’m of the opinion that information is valuable and adds something to your life. I read a lot of books; I love fiction and non-fiction.

When I look for news, there are grades of news. Today’s technology has allowed anybody with access to that technology to create a blogpost and share their opinions, or if they don’t want to get fancy they can just Tweet out their opinions or thoughts. Is that news? It depends. If they’re sharing breaking events and they’re the first to report something that’s happening. You can’t discount all of those ways that news is getting out, but as a consumer of news I can be discriminating about what kind of information is important to me.

So, as an editor in chief of a news organization, I tell my staff every day; your job is to report the news. We are not columnists, necessarily. We don’t write commentary unless it’s labeled as commentary. Our job is to go out and report the facts, call people, flesh out the information, write it in a way that everyone can understand what’s going on. And that’s different from someone who is just reacting to a news event and sharing their opinion.

If you think there’s value in news and if you think there’s a skill and a craft and art to collecting information and putting it together in a story, then your estimation of news is going to be different than someone else’s. And I was one of those people who cheered when “Spotlight” won the movie of the year at the Oscars. The whole room stood up when one of the producers I believe said, it shows the value of journalism as a craft, that there is a reason to have people who know how to interview and collect information and produce meaningful copy. And I agree with that.

Samir Husni: Your words are music to my ears, because I also teach journalism and I tell people all of the time: all you have to do is watch CNN or Fox for a couple of hours and you begin to wonder what’s going on in journalism these days.

Connie Guglielmo: (Laughs) Again, it depends on what you’re looking for and what you value. As somebody who’s trained as a journalist, I have a graduate degree in journalism; I approach the way that I do my job differently than someone who might just want to write a fun, informational piece based on their point of view.

I’m not saying that that’s not valuable and that people are not interested in that kind of commentary. I love to read op-ed commentary when it’s informed and it’s teaching me something that I don’t know, or something new that I would have not known about. But again, it’s like anything else, where is your line? Where does it cross? There are probably many movies that someone else would watch that I wouldn’t be interested in. Just like there are many stories and books that I would read that other people wouldn’t.

So, having that diversity is important, in terms of news reporting, but I do think the most important thing to remember is, just because you can write something doesn’t make you a news reporter or a journalist. Hitting that high bar in that service to the reader is vital.

Samir Husni: And how do you take those standards and apply them to the minute-by-minute news coverage, such as on CNET News, and in a quarterly magazine? How do you balance or juggle between the moment-by-moment and the quarter-by-quarter? What’s the scale you use to judge which content is for which platform?

Connie Guglielmo: We approach the storytelling in the quarterly magazine very differently than we do online. Everything that we write for the magazine is original. It’s not something that we’ve taken online and repurposed, then put in the magazine; although, there have been one or two stories that we have done online and then done a variation of for the magazine. But for the most part, 95% plus of the magazine copy is original.

When you’re writing for that cadence, you’re approaching storytelling in a very different way than you are when you’re reacting to daily news. And I’ve worked at magazines in the past before I joined CNET; I worked at Forbes for two years and before that I worked at Bloomberg, which is a wire service; talk about minute-by-minute, and I worked there for almost seven years, so you do balance how you tell the story, but I don’t think that’s any different than any journalist would do. If you’re writing a book of poetry, you write your poems following a certain format. But if you’re writing Haiku, that’s a very short format.

So, when you look at the kind of content that we produce on a daily basis, a lot of it is reaction to news or getting ahead of the news or commenting on news, but we also do long-form and feature online.

For the magazine, we have to tell stories in one, two, or three pages, because you’re constrained by print, so we started to experiment with the very first issue on storytelling and if you’ve seen the first issue of CNET magazine, if you go into the magazine to two stories, one is called “Confessions of a Smartphone Thief,” and we worked with the San Francisco District Attorney for months to interview this thief who had stolen iPhones to hear his side of the story about why he did it and what happened to the iPhones after he took them and etc.

The story in the magazine is two pages and about 1,100 words. But the original story that he reported is 2,500 words, so if you look at the story in print, it gives you a link to the longer version of the story. So, we’re not bound by the limitations of the magazine, in terms of telling the story in so many words, because the longer version is online and we posted the 1,100 word version in the magazine. And that gives readers a choice. If they think the story is interesting, they can go and read the longer version of it. Some people never see the magazine, so they see the story online.

Then there was our interview with the cover candidate and for that first issue it was LL Cool J. We did a story about people being captured by their devices and we did a Q & A with him and we posted a video of him talking about what he’d told us in the interview. So, if you go to the print magazine you’ll find the link that takes you to the video.

With every magazine we’re trying to connect the online and print well to our advantage. If we can tell a story in a certain way online and then do it differently and have connections to the print, and vice versa, that’s great.

When we look at the magazine and plan out an issue, we do think about the space; the timing, something has to stand up if it’s been written two months before we go to print. So, it’s different, the feature approach. Again, because we have the tie-back to the online world, we can estimate and also do sidebars; we can do video; we can do infographics. We can enrich that content in any way we want. So, in that case, we’re not bound by the limitations of print. All we have to do is include a link in the magazine that takes you back to a page and then we can access that page at will whenever we want.

Samir Husni: Do you feel that now you’re more of a curator than a creator when it comes to content?

Connie Guglielmo: No, I think we’re definitely creators, but today’s creators are by default curators because you can’t write about everything. So, we’re by definition picking the stories that we think are most important to our readers, that we think are the ones that we want to tell, because like everyone in the world we have limited resources, so there is that aspect of curating.

But also the content that we produce is original, and occasionally we will link out to other people’s excellent journalism just to provide a service to our reader or we’ll link back to stories that we think adds a depth of content that helps our reporting, but we’re out there originally reporting every single day.

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest stumbling block that you’ve had to face since the magazine started and how did you overcome it?

Connie Guglielmo: I don’t know if it’s a stumbling block, we’re still working on it, but a lot of people associate CNET with being an online brand and don’t think about us as having a print magazine. We distribute our magazine through booksellers and airports and Wal-Mart; just a whole list of places where we are, so brand awareness, making sure that people understand that we’re even doing this and then of course, we have to explain constantly why we’re doing this. And when I do explain to people that we didn’t stop everything else that we’ve been doing and set up a magazine, they get it. Then they understand what we’re doing and that we’re not throwing away 20 years’ experience online and investing our total future in print. Again, that’s just a part of what we do.

So, telling that story and making sure that people understand that what we’re doing makes sense and then just raising awareness, which is why we’ve taken the tack that we have with our cover candidate, which you’ll see, they’re not your traditional tech industry people. They’re more mainstream celebrities that people know and identify with. And the point in doing that was so that we could show that these people use tech; it’s not the scary topic that I should be afraid of. So, we wanted to have a wider appeal and that’s why we went with celebrities on the cover. It’s telling the story and making sure that people understand the story. And that continues to be our top priority.

Samir Husni: You keep emphasizing, and rightfully so, that you’re putting the audience first, that you’re more of a consumer magazine, rather than a techy magazine. Tell me about Olivia Munn on the cover of your spring issue.

Connie Guglielmo: Again, our purpose in reaching people who use technology and love technology is to talk about the kind being used today or might be using in the near future and how it might resonate with someone’s life. And Olivia Munn is on the cover of our spring issue, which the focus of that issue is the Smart Home, and she has turned her home into a Smart Home. So she told us a little bit about that.

She’s also someone who has been around the tech industry for a while, from a tech culture perspective. People know her and she’s a bit of a controversial figure because she was the co-host of a television show called “Attack of the Show” which was on a video game channel. And some people think that that doesn’t mean she’s a video game player, but she actually is. She was raised with video games and she likes to play with technology. She talked to us about why she doesn’t like Apple products and prefers Microsoft and she talked about the tech that she would like to see in the future. And a spoiler is that she’s very disappointed that we don’t have Hoverboards like in the movie “Back to the Future,” ones that you could actually hover on, which she would love to do above Los Angeles traffic.

So, our goal in using her as our cover candidate was because she is connected to the world of tech in a way that most average people are connected. They use technology and add it to their home, they have Smart-tech in their cars and they use tech services; they have a point of view about entertainment. So, even though she is a celebrity, she’s more aligned with how the average person might use tech than say, Mark Zuckerberg.

Samir Husni: Did you get the idea for the CNET tech home that you built, the Smart Home in Louisville, Kentucky; did you get the idea from Olivia Munn?

Connie Guglielmo: No, we bought the home last year in Louisville, KY., which is not far from our testing lab, where all of the Smart Home gear that we have is tested. And we’d been testing that gear for many years. We raised the stakes in what we do with the Smart Home by buying an actual home. But that predates any of the magazine work. It’s been in the works for years.

And the gamble was in actually buying the house so that we could make it a living lab, not just say that this is how it’s supposed to work with the house, because we have been doing that. We have these rooms set up with filtration systems, temperature controls, test refrigerators and thermostats, but we wanted to use them in a real world environment, because that’s how you test all products.

That was why we made the investment in the Smart Home and I would say that the reaction from some of the people that we’ve talked to is they like to live in a Smart Home. Sofia Vergara was on our cover last spring for the Smart Home issue and she’s also building a Smart Home for herself in Los Angeles. She talked at length about the kinds of entertainment systems that she wanted incorporated in her home and the security system.

So, all of this predates Olivia Munn. Although, Olivia had a lot of fun ideas, but I’m sorry, I can’t give her credit for this one. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: Well, what got my attention was the robotic lawn mower. (Laughs)

Connie Guglielmo: (Laughs too) Well, we’re testing all kinds of technology here. And like I said, 10 or 20 years ago, would anyone have thought of a Smart thermostat or a Smart lock? But if you believed in the vision of the future and that everything was going to be connected, you might. We saw it coming and we saw that it was going to be real and not just a Sci-Fi futuristic kind of thing, which is why we started testing years ago and made the investment in an actual house. The idea was to have a real world place to test products so that everyone could see what was right and what was wrong.

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

Connie Guglielmo: One thing I will say about the magazine is that we have so much content online at CNET, we’ve been doing it for 20 years, so when we approached the magazine; we didn’t want it to be a duplication of what we had online. We wanted it to be a complement to what we do.

So, we thought about that in the ways that I shared with you; about how we could tie online and print and extend our coverage, but even in our Buying Guide, which is a big part of every issue, rather than just saying here are the Top 10 Smartphones or tablets, we have the Guide online too, but we broke it down by price for the Buying Guide in print, because a lot of people look at technology by price. And we did it in a way that we thought would be helpful to our readers. So, if they want to look at it online, they could. We didn’t have to reproduce it all in the magazine; we just let it complement what we have online. It’s not a duplicate. And that’s what we did throughout the magazine and I’m very proud that we did that.

And also in how we organized the magazine, a lot of people have features about technology for technology’s sake, and I’m not saying that’s not valid, but our approach was about people and how they use tech, so we have the magazine divided into four main sections: you; your house; your car; your work, because those are the four main areas that technology is going to touch you in your life. And every story we write slots into one of those categories by default because that’s how you use tech in your life.

We’re trying to put the “you,” the personal back into technology, because there are a lot of stories written about technology and I’ve been writing about them for more than 20 years myself. But the thing that we have to remember is technology is no longer this niche thing that only a few people touch; it is a part of everything that we do, every single day. And it’s important to remember that the technology is one thing, but it’s really how you use it that is the most important thing. Is it meaningful to you as a person? Can you integrate into your life? We wanted to remind people that “you” are the center of tech, not tech at the center.

Samir Husni: If I showed up at your home one evening unexpectedly, what would I find you doing, reading a magazine; reading your iPad; watching television; or something else?

Connie Guglielmo: Since I spend all of my days on the computer and my Smartphone and tablets, if you were to come to my house unexpectedly, you would see a library of books. I have physical paper books, hardcover, softcover, large format, small format books. I inherited a library from some relatives and my husband inherited some from his relatives, so we have lots and lots of books. I live not very far from Apple and not very far from where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak set up the Apple Garage, and I’m surrounded by books because even though I love my technology and I can’t imagine a world without it, I still like paper.

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

Connie Guglielmo: These days I sleep pretty well. Generally speaking, I’m always looking to make sure that our team is working on the next interesting story and not the same stories that everyone else is chasing. I like us to do original reporting that is slightly different from the conventional wisdom, that’s how you stay ahead as a journalist.

You always want the story that no one thought of and so I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and I have a pen that lights up and I write in a notebook, or I talk and dictate notes into my device; I have story ideas all of the time. That’s my biggest worry and concern, but it’s also the fun and challenge of being an editor and a reporter, chasing the stories that no one has thought to write.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“Print has a purpose in that you can still hold it and really experience the story and the imagery. It’s something that you can feel in your hands. But it’s also something that, with a high-end publication like The Surfer’s Journal, it’s something that exists in space and it can sit on your coffee table and really says something about you as a person. You can put your passion on display for your friends who come over to your house and it let people know who you are and what our interests are.” Brendon Thomas

“The same way that we see people cultivate their personas on social media by the things they share and what they like and what they say, print media says a lot about you as a person too when you interact with people in the real world. So, I think print will always have a place in people’s lives and as I said in the beginning, with so much time spent on digital devices, there is a need to unplug and disconnect at times and print is the natural place for that to happen.” Brendon Thomas

Anytime a magazine can celebrate 25 years of publishing success in today’s marketplace is truly a rare and remarkable milestone. The Surfer’s Journal is enjoying that landmark anniversary and deservedly so.

The Surfer’s Journal is a purist surf publication based in San Clemente, California and has always had a truly unique, venerated, and commercially successful product by being a circulation-driven publication rather than relying on advertisers to support the magazine. The idea of having readers subscribe to a pre-sold quarterly book novel, and having only six advertisers may have seemed unsustainable at a time when the goal of most publications was to increase the number of advertising pages, not curb them, but a quarter century later, The Surfer’s Journal remains commercially successful and has a definite eye on the future.

I recently spoke with publisher, Brendon Thomas, about the magazine’s 25th anniversary and the fact that The Surfer’s Journal has found and continues to grow a dedicated and passionate readership that sees the value in the tactile, print experience that the magazine offers. Brendon said this is due in large part to the exceptional in-depth, long form storytelling and superb photography that fills each issue.

But Brendon’s goal for the magazine is to continue the path that has already been set; to turn the magazine into a larger, stronger brand with many extensions, such as The Surfer’s Journal online store which lives on the website and offers readers a diverse array of high-end wall prints and other unique items.

So, grab your board and get ready to hang 10 or 25 in honor of The Surfer’s Journal’s silver anniversary as we open up the discussion with Publisher, Brendon Thomas.

But first, the sound-bites:

On what the role of a publisher is in a circulation-driven magazine: We’re a really small outfit, so the publisher wears a lot of hats, from marketing to sourcing the material to overseeing the editorial, so there are a lot of things that a publisher does. I also handle what a normal publisher would do, since we’re so small. There are still advertising relations that have to be maintained and upheld.

On the trend of new launches following The Surfer’s Journal business model: We get a lot of calls from startups asking how we do it and what our business model is. It’s very simple really. We’ve put the reader first for 25 years and I think in the current digital age there really is a renewed demand for a quality print publication, something that can sit around on your coffee table for a couple of months as opposed to being discarded after a day or two or put in the bathroom.

On the role of print in today’s digital age: That experience satisfies something within people. We’re all looking down at our Smartphones constantly and reading quick hits and really short articles. There seems to be a growing need in people to disconnect and unplug for a time. And longer form print publications seem to be a good way to do that. As of yet, people can’t just sit and meditate and stare into space; they still need something to do in their down time. So, reading about their passion, in our case surfing, is a great way to do that.

On the advice he would give to someone who wanted to start a new print magazine today: I would certainly encourage them to go for it. Digital, as much as it has done harm to print, it has also opened up avenues to reach potential readers in a way that we’ve never had before. The marketing possibilities are huge.

On whether the magazine is making more money or less money since the dawn of the digital age: I would say more, because the avenues for a magazine like The Surfer’s Journal have grown. It’s not just a print publication; it’s a brand. And the readers who are passionate about this brand want the other accessories that come along with the brand, such as the merchandise we offer: the art of collaboration T-shirts with The Surfer’s Journal limited edition runs and our online store where we sell master image prints, which are really high-end wall hangers and because we have a really good rapport with our readers, they trust us to kind of show them what else is out there.

On why the Pezman’s vision is even more sustainable today than it was 25 years ago when they founded the magazine: It has a lot to do with surfing itself. The Pezman’s started this publication with the idea that it was going to come from a purist’s point of view of the sport, so it appealed to people who didn’t want to see the sport of surfing get overrun by commercialization and brands. And people connected with it back then. The message of the publication was on-point back in 1992 and it’s just as much on-point now in 2016.

On what’s being done to expand the brand and make it more of a household name: We’re not really interested in chasing digital views or readers; we did just relaunch our website with a completely new redesign from the ground up. The goal of the website is not to get clicks; we’re not after eyeballs in that way. Our website is a vehicle to sell subscriptions and to promote The Surfer’s Journal as a print product. And it’s also a place for the converted and for people who love our brand to purchase items in our company store. From The Surfer’s Journal point of view, that’s our goal with digital.

On why he thinks it took magazine companies and publishers so long to figure out that devices like the iPad and entities like the homepage were not the salvation of magazines and magazine media: With every immersion into technology there’s a lot of hype and promise. And I would say that I’m not entirely sure most publishers have realized that fact yet, nor should they, depending on their business model. If they’re advertising-driven and they want eyeballs on their own property, then the websites are the place where they can get the most eyeballs. More eyeballs than they can get in print.

On how easy it is these days for editors and publishers to change places: I think it would certainly be easier for an editor to become a publisher, especially now, as I mentioned with native advertising, and editors are kind of tasked with thinking about revenue generation as opposed to just generating editorial. Editors today are being groomed more in the business side of things than they were in the past. As for my move from Surfer magazine where I was editor in chief to publisher at The Surfer’s Journal, the move made a lot of sense to me personally, because that church and state separation is something that a lot of editors hold dear. And The Journal does that so well; there is no crossover at all.

On what he feels the role of print is in a digital age: Human beings exist in the real world and we have interactions with other people in person. As much as we’re connected through digital media and social media and through our phones; we still interact in the real world. And I think interacting with a magazine is a different experience than interacting with something on your Smartphone or your computer. Print has a purpose in that you can still hold it and really experience the story and the imagery. It’s something that you can feel in your hands.

On anything else he’d like to add: We’re all so incredibly proud and grateful that we’ve made it to 25 years. We’re grateful to our readers who have supported us for so long and are really fanatical about getting their magazines every two months. We’re totally indebted to them, so a big thank you to all of them is all I really have to add.

On the high-end subscription price of $66 per year: You really have to work hard to convince people to part with roughly $17 per issue; it’s not an easy sell. And the benefits of the globalization of media and in having this niche to market to people is that we can reach a lot of international subscribers, but the strength of the dollar at the moment makes the proposition of subscribing to The Surfer’s Journal something you really have to think about. And yet, we’re still seeing growth in our international subscriptions.

On what motivates him to get out of bed in the morning: It’s very easy for me to get out of the bed in the morning because there are so many possibilities that are in front of me and all of us here at The Surfer’s Journal, because we’ve been so focused on our print product and we really haven’t explored any of the other opportunities that The Surfer’s Journal as a brand opens up. I’m really excited about all of the things that the magazine can still be.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up at his home unexpectedly one evening: reading a print magazine, or an iPad, watching television, or something else: This is a bad time to ask that because I have a newborn at home, so if you catch me there I’m probably tending to a crying baby. (Laughs) I’ve subscribed to a lot of print magazines over the years. I’m a magazine guy and that’s what I’ve been for a long time. So, I have magazines all over the place. I read the actual print product and I read them on my iPad. I follow them on social media, so depending on what time of the day you get me; you’ll see me doing any one of the three.

On what keeps him up at night: (Laughs) You know the answer to that one. It certainly isn’t work. I’m really lucky in that The Surfer’s Journal is so stable and it has been for 25 years and it isn’t something that keeps me up at night wondering if we’re going to keep the subscriber base up and if we know how to survive in this new digital era. That isn’t a problem for The Surfer’s Journal now. Just the crying baby is. (Laughs again)

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Brendon Thomas, Publisher, The Surfer’s Journal.

Samir Husni: After 25 years The Surfer’s Journal is still alive and kicking and enjoying a good life, with a business model that is more circulation-driven, than advertising-driven. That being said, what’s the role of a publisher in a circulation-driven magazine?

Brendon Thomas: We’re a really small outfit, so the publisher wears a lot of hats, from marketing to sourcing the material to overseeing the editorial, so there are a lot of things that a publisher does. I also handle what a normal publisher would do, since we’re so small. There are still advertising relations that have to be maintained and upheld. We have six sponsors that go into the magazine, so there is that aspect to it as well, which obviously helps absorb some costs. The goal is to drive some revenue, as is the goal of most publishers.

Samir Husni: Just in the last six months I’ve spoken with two or three publishers who have launched new magazines and it seems that everybody wants to follow The Surfer’s Journal business model.

Brendon Thomas: Yes, we’ve noticed that ourselves. We get a lot of calls from startups asking how we do it and what our business model is. It’s very simple really. We’ve put the reader first for 25 years and I think in the current digital age there really is a renewed demand for a quality print publication, something that can sit around on your coffee table for a couple of months as opposed to being discarded after a day or two or put in the bathroom.

We’ve seen that there are a number of lifestyle magazines, for example, the Kinfolk’s of the world, that are doing very well based on the fact that they’re almost an accessory as much as they are something to read.

Samir Husni: Tell me about the role of print today in a digital age and that connectivity that The Surfer’s Journal has with its readers. Is it that easy for others to imitate your business model and have the same success?

Brendon Thomas: No, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. It’s definitely a challenge. With the decline in newsstand and bookstores closing left and right, the avenues to get the print product into people’s hands has definitely shifted. And that’s part of the selling point for a magazine like The Surfer’s Journal. It’s a tactile experience and once you feel it and hold it, you really understand what it’s all about.

So, that experience satisfies something within people. We’re all looking down at our Smartphones constantly and reading quick hits and really short articles. There seems to be a growing need in people to disconnect and unplug for a time. And longer form print publications seem to be a good way to do that. As of yet, people can’t just sit and meditate and stare into space; they still need something to do in their down time. So, reading about their passion, in our case surfing, is a great way to do that.

Samir Husni: If someone approached you today and said that they wanted to start a new print magazine, based on your own experience, what would you tell them?

Brendon Thomas: I would certainly encourage them to go for it. Digital, as much as it has done harm to print, it has also opened up avenues to reach potential readers in a way that we’ve never had before. The marketing possibilities are huge.

And as Steve and Debbee Pezman (Founders of The Surfer’s Journal) keep telling me, you can’t start a new magazine without a list of people to market to from the get-go, because you really need readers in a reader-supported market and getting those readers from the start is really important to the success of your publication.

And depending on how you want to slash the advertising model, you can get a couple of brands that back your idea and believe in it and that will go a long way in helping you get off the ground.

Samir Husni: When it comes to money and revenues; since the dawn of the digital age, are you making more money or less money?

Brendon Thomas: I would say more, because the avenues for a magazine like The Surfer’s Journal have grown. It’s not just a print publication; it’s a brand. And the readers who are passionate about this brand want the other accessories that come along with the brand, such as the merchandise we offer: the art of collaboration T-shirts with The Surfer’s Journal limited edition runs and our online store where we sell master image prints, which are really high-end wall hangers and because we have a really good rapport with our readers, they trust us to kind of show them what else is out there. And that’s what we’ve been able to do. So, I would say that the revenue has increased, for sure.

And magazine-wise, it’s a tough one because, and I’m talking about the print artifact now, it’s kind of tough because the costs for printing are perpetually going up and we can’t keep asking our subscribers to pay more and more for the subscription. We’re a relatively high-end publication at $66 per year. So we work hard to try and keep that price down and still deliver the same quality to our readers.

Samir Husni: As you celebrate the magazine’s 25th anniversary, is there anything else you’d like to add about the concept of the magazine or the vision that the Pezman’s had 25 years ago and why that vision is still sustainable or even more so in today’s marketplace?

Brendon Thomas: It has a lot to do with surfing itself. The Pezman’s started this publication with the idea that it was going to come from a purist’s point of view of the sport, so it appealed to people who didn’t want to see the sport of surfing get overrun by commercialization and brands. And people connected with it back then.

And I think it’s truer and more needed now than ever before. As more and more people surf and the lineups around the world get more and more crowded, there’s definitely a yearning in surfer’s to kind of appreciate the purist’s point of view and surfing for surfing’s sake as opposed to surfing for a commercialized version of surfing. So, people really connect with the Journal’s message. Our reader base is passionate about surfing and they’re passionate about retaining the qualities that it had when they first started and what got them into it.

The message of the publication was on-point back in 1992 and it’s just as much on-point now in 2016. I would say that the biggest reason that we’ve been sustainable is that we connect with our readership in a way that few publications can.

As far as celebrating our 25th year, we’re certainly not resting on our laurels here. We realize that it’s a tough marketplace and we’ve been fortunate enough to be kind of exempt from the hardships of print that some of the other publications have been experiencing. But we also realize that there are a lot of avenues that we haven’t tapped into and there are a lot of opportunities that we haven’t jumped at so far. And there’s always room for the print publication to improve as well, so we’re constantly looking to do that.

Samir Husni: Is there room for you to duplicate that model? What are you doing to help expand that brand or to take it from just the magazine to a magazine media brand that everybody will be talking about?

Brendon Thomas: We’re not really interested in chasing digital views or readers; we did just relaunch our website with a completely new redesign from the ground up. The goal of the website is not to get clicks; we’re not after eyeballs in that way. Our website is a vehicle to sell subscriptions and to promote The Surfer’s Journal as a print product. And it’s also a place for the converted and for people who love our brand to purchase items in our company store. From The Surfer’s Journal point of view, that’s our goal with digital.

We’ve had huge hits in social media, but our goal in social media is to drive conversions into subscribers, so every piece of editorial we put out is an attempt to advertise the quality of our editorial, rather than to just have people come onto our website for being on our website’s sake.

The Surfer’s Journal does have both a French and a Japanese version of the magazine, which I think is very interesting and a testament to the brand’s success.

Samir Husni: Recently I was at a conference where I heard that the homepage is dead; the tablet is dead; everything is now all about social, videos and notifications. You mentioned that your website is more of a marketing tool rather than a content provider. Why do you think it took the magazine companies and publishers so long to discover that? That the iPad was not the salvation of the media; the homepage was not the salvation of magazines; why do you think it took them so long to figure that out?

Brendon Thomas: With every immersion into technology there’s a lot of hype and promise. And I would say that I’m not entirely sure most publishers have realized that fact yet, nor should they, depending on their business model. If they’re advertising-driven and they want eyeballs on their own property, then the websites are the place where they can get the most eyeballs. More eyeballs than they can get in print.

I basically came from Surfer magazine where I was the editor in chief for five years. And I watched the transition from print to digital and then from banner ads to native advertising and it’s a big shift for editors to have to undertake, but it’s become kind of the new normal. Native advertising and all that is really a way that most publishers are realizing revenue online. It’s a far better CPM than banner ads.

So, I don’t think that the websites are purely marketing tools for publishers and in some cases when the print product isn’t that strong, then yes, it might even be a salvation for some of those print products, where they can reinvent themselves online and let people know what they’re about. But from my own personal experiences, when I’m unaware of a publication, the website is the first place where I go to see what they’re about. If I happen to run into an interesting story on social media and it takes me to a site that I’m unfamiliar with, then that website and that editorial is my first impression of that brand, and whether I subscribe that day or five years later, those impressions matter. And I certainly don’t think the website is dead; it still influences people and enlightens them as to what you’re about.

Samir Husni: You’ve been both an editor and a publisher; do you think that we’re reaching the stage where, like some describe the destruction of the wall between church and state, editors can easily become publishers? And would it be as easy for a publisher to become an editor?

Brendon Thomas: No, I don’t think so. I think it would certainly be easier for an editor to become a publisher, especially now, as I mentioned with native advertising, and editors are kind of tasked with thinking about revenue generation as opposed to just generating editorial. Editors today are being groomed more in the business side of things than they were in the past.

As for my move from Surfer magazine where I was editor in chief to publisher at The Surfer’s Journal, the move made a lot of sense to me personally, because that church and state separation is something that a lot of editors hold dear. And The Journal does that so well; there is no crossover at all. The sponsors have no say in the editorial and they don’t want a say in the editorial. They just want us to create a beautiful book every two months.

So, it was very attractive for me to come over to The Journal because it’s still very much that way here. But from where I was and what I saw in the industry, I would say editors are increasingly publishers. They’re taking meetings with clients; they’re coming up with editorial ideas that can benefit their clients, especially in our world of action sports and the niche markets.

I would say that you’re probably going to see an increased amount of editors becoming publishers or they’re just going to be all kind of rolled up into one job.

Samir Husni: Can you define for me what you believe the role of print is in a digital age?

Brendon Thomas: Human beings exist in the real world and we have interactions with other people in person. As much as we’re connected through digital media and social media and through our phones; we still interact in the real world. And I think interacting with a magazine is a different experience than interacting with something on your Smartphone or your computer.

Print has a purpose in that you can still hold it and really experience the story and the imagery. It’s something that you can feel in your hands. But it’s also something that, with a high-end publication like The Surfer’s Journal, it’s something that exists in space and it can sit on your coffee table and really says something about you as a person. You can put your passion on display for your friends who come over to your house and it let people know who you are and what our interests are.

The same way that we see people cultivate their personas on social media by the things they share and what they like and what they say, print media says a lot about you as a person too when you interact with people in the real world.

So, I think print will always have a place in people’s lives and as I said in the beginning, with so much time spent on digital devices, there is a need to unplug and disconnect at times and print is the natural place for that to happen.

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

Brendon Thomas: We’re all so incredibly proud and grateful that we’ve made it to 25 years. We’re grateful to our readers who have supported us for so long and are really fanatical about getting their magazines every two months. We’re totally indebted to them, so a big thank you to all of them is all I really have to add.

Samir Husni: When one issue of The Surfer’s Journal is more expensive than an entire year’s subscription of some other magazines, you know that you’re connecting with your audience.

Brendon Thomas: Exactly. And you really have to work hard to convince people to part with roughly $17 per issue; it’s not an easy sell. And the benefits of the globalization of media and in having this niche to market to people is that we can reach a lot of international subscribers, but the strength of the dollar at the moment makes the proposition of subscribing to The Surfer’s Journal something you really have to think about. And yet, we’re still seeing growth in our international subscriptions.

And right now our international subscriptions are $108 and in many places where the currency isn’t as strong as the U.S. dollar, that $108 is easily a $150 in that local currency. So, it’s amazing to see people still willing to fork out what is a lot of money for a publication, but they believe in it and enjoy it so much that they just have to have it. It’s awesome.

Samir Husni: What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Brendon Thomas: I’m in the enviable position of being fairly new to my position here at The Surfer’s Journal. I’ve only been the publisher for a couple of months. I was the operations director before that. And as I said, I was at Surfer’s magazine before coming onboard here.

It’s very easy for me to get out of the bed in the morning because there are so many possibilities that are in front of me and all of us here at The Surfer’s Journal, because we’ve been so focused on our print product and we really haven’t explored any of the other opportunities that The Surfer’s Journal as a brand opens up. I’m really excited about all of the things that the magazine can still be.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening, what would I find you doing? Reading a print magazine, or your iPad, watching television, or something else?

Brendon Thomas: This is a bad time to ask that because I have a newborn at home, so if you catch me there I’m probably tending to a crying baby. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: (Laughs too).

Brendon Thomas: I’ve subscribed to a lot of print magazines over the years. I’m a magazine guy and that’s what I’ve been for a long time. So, I have magazines all over the place. I read the actual print product and I read them on my iPad. I follow them on social media, so depending on what time of the day you get me; you’ll see me doing any one of the three.

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

Brendon Thomas: (Laughs) You know the answer to that one. It certainly isn’t work. I’m really lucky in that The Surfer’s Journal is so stable and it has been for 25 years and it isn’t something that keeps me up at night wondering if we’re going to keep the subscriber base up and if we know how to survive in this new digital era. That isn’t a problem for The Surfer’s Journal now. Just the crying baby is. (Laughs again)

Samir Husni: Thank you.