Afleveringen
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THE CHERRY ON TOP
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Cherry Bombe is a full-course meal. Its founder, Kerry Diamond, created the magazine after working in titles like Women’s Wear Daily and Harper’s Bazaar, and after working for brands like Lancôme. And in the restaurant industry. She worked in restaurants at a time when everything culinary was in the ascendance in the zeitgeist.
That’s also when Diamond realized a key ingredient was missing. None of the brash rising stars at the table were women. She had also been hearing from women who found the going in that world challenging. This in an industry that is difficult for everyone to begin with. Out of this came Cherry Bombe.
Today, Cherry Bombe is a full-fledged and rising media empire. It’s a magazine, sure, but their menu also includes multiple podcasts and a series of wildly-successful events. Their community, called the “Bombe Squad,” meet each other on Zoom, at the events, and form a tightly-connected sisterhood of fans and evangelists for the brand.
Diamond makes it sound like she built all of this without a blueprint, and maybe she did. But just like the best recipes, sometimes the tastiest things are the result of the happiest accidents.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
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In early April, what’s left of the magazine industry gathered at Terminal 5 to see who would win this year’s National Magazine Awards—the ASMEs. Throughout the evening, the usual suspects stepped up to accept their Alexander Calder brass elephants—the ‘Ellies’—on behalf of their teams at The Atlantic, New York, and The New York Times Magazine.
Then came the award for General Excellence, Service and Lifestyle—a category that covers every food, fashion, and fitness magazine in the business.
And the Ellie went to… content juggernaut Highsnobiety—a sneaker blog-turned-cool kid media amalgam that encompasses a twice-annual $20-per-issue print magazine, plus a flood of social media, a website that is also an e-commerce platform, and a creative agency that does 360-degree marketing and storytelling for brands.
Before the crowd could start scratching their graying heads, a Billie Eilish lookalike in a gray Thom Brown skirt-and-pant suit took to the dais. There were plenty of people in that room who had never given Highsnobiety much, if any, thought.
But in that moment, this woman, Willa Bennett, Highsnobiety’s 30-year-old editor-in-chief, had officially become a force to be reckoned with. Not only that, but Highsnobiety’s business model, which bends rules that had long been sacrosanct in magazine journalism, suddenly appeared to have won the seal of approval from the oldest of the old guard.
The post at Highsnobiety was a major leap for Bennett. Just two years ago, she was the social media manager at GQ. Our friends who worked with her there tell us they thought of her as “the industry’s little sister”—hungry, passionate, and looking to translate the magic of magazines to a new generation. They said that even though she’s disrupting the magazine as we once knew it, at heart Bennett is a “a magazine junkie who really venerates the old ways.”
And now the surprise win has put her in the spotlight of the establishment media, with The New York Times Styles running a portrait of Bennett in her signature suit-and-tie look on its cover. The win inspired a segment on the Slate Culture Gabfest in which the hosts pondered, “What Is a Magazine Now?”
Over in Spreadlandia, we thought, Why not turn that question directly to Willa Bennett herself? In the end, this conversation left us feeling more optimistic than usual about the future of media. It also made us feel old as shit. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
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This episode is a special collboration with our friends at The Spread and is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Lane Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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WELCOME TO THE GREAT OUTDOORS
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Mountain Gazette is one of those media … things … that only long-time fans really know about, with a long and colorful history. A kind of Village Voice of the outdoors, the first incarnation (1966) of the magazine was about mountains and for “mountain people”—a lifestyle magazine for those who weren’t interested in either coast, let alone cities, let alone New York.
Like many magazines, the Gazette succumbed to economic forces and shuttered. Twice. Until Mike Rogge, a journalist and film producer, and more important than that, an avid skier and outdoorsman, purchased the archives and the rights at a bar in Denver. The deal was drawn up on a napkin and consummated with a beer.
Mostly he bought it because it was there.
Rogge felt the media, specifically what he calls the outdoor media, was broken. Especially the advertising model. And he had grown tired of the arcane and opaque revenue streams of the digital world. So he decided to do his own thing. He rejected those models, and plowed into print.
And he went big. Literally. The result is a magazine that is a success in every sense of the word: aesthetically, editorially, and financially. It’s a black diamond in a magazine world that often feels like a series of bunny slopes.
But Mike Rogge and Mountain Gazette have proven something: you can have your mountain and ski it too.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
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A good editor can, theoretically, edit any magazine, regardless of genre. But in some cases, you need an outsider to make things right. To see the forest for the trees.
To that end, Janice Min has planted acres of forests—one tree at a time—on both coasts, where the Colorado-born editor considers herself an outsider.
“I cared about almost none of this. I don’t care about celebrities or reality stars. It was my job to just think about how to interpret what they were saying and turn that passion into stories. I don’t think that the editors always have to be their audience, but I also think, as an editor I was able to be removed from it and glean like, ‘That pops. That’s the most important story.’”
From Us Weekly, where her instincts led to a massive increase in readership that saved the floundering publication—and likely all of Wenner Media—to The Hollywood Reporter, which was in a death spiral but is now, once again, a widely-respected and well-read industry bible, Min has played a major role in creating what we now call the celebrity-industrial complex, as well as the rise of what became social media and the influencer economy. That’s all.
Now, as cofounder of Ankler Media, Min is once again rethinking publishing—and celebrity. The company is centered around its newsletter, The Ankler, which bills itself as “the newsletter Hollywood loves to hate—and hates to love” and is currently one of the top three business publications on Substack.
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Lane Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
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Emma Rosenblum is a best selling author and is about to release a new novel. But that’s not why she’s here.
As the chief content officer at Bustle Digital Group, overseeing content and strategy for titles like Bustle, Elite Daily, and Nylon, she has witnessed some if not all of the massive shifts and changes in the media business. The ups and downs and highs and lows, as it were.
Emma’s media past includes stints at New York magazine, where she began her career, Glamour, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Pursuits, where she served as editorial director, and Elle, where she was executive editor.
Meaning she’s a good person to talk to about the state of media today, a world where the change never stops. And she also has an insider’s opinion about the legacy big publishers and the advantages that BDG, as a digital-first operation, might have over them.
And did we mention she’s an author? Her first novel, Bad Summer People, was a national bestseller and her second novel, Very Bad Company, will be released in the coming weeks.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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DESIGN, BUILD, AND MODIFY
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In his mid-20s, Scott Dadich told his editor at Texas Monthly, Evan Smith, that he wanted his job.
A move like that is a combination of arrogance, youth, and frankly, balls. But you should also know that Dadich is an engineer. And what do engineers do? Well, according to one definition in Merriam-Webster, they “skillfully or artfully arrange for an event or situation to occur.”
Of course, you probably know Dadich as an art director and editor, but beyond the titles, he’s the kind of guy who builds things, re-engineers them, re-configures them or, more importantly, thinks differently about them.
To date, his life’s work has been building magazines—marrying words and pictures and combining his love of math and engineering with an eye towards new, unforeseen outcomes in a long career that includes stints at the aforementioned Texas Monthly, and also Wired, Condé Nast Digital—yes, we’ll talk iPads—Wired (again) and then on to his own agency, Godfrey Dadich Partners, where he is trying to engineer a new approach to advertising.
As a rare creative who has helmed a magazine as an editor-in-chief and art director, Dadich has ideas about how to better create everything, from where digital and print sit in the ecosystem, to the makeup of an actual magazine, and even how teams should fit on the masthead. He has put these ideas to practice on the page, on the web, and also on the streams, in his award-winning Netflix series about the creative process Abstract: The Art of Design, which premiered in 2017.
Our conversation with Scott, a rather long one for us, starts right now.
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Lane Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF THINGS
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The Bed. The Window. The Rope. The Sink. The Cabinet. The Ball. The Trousers. The Desk. The Rug. The Bottle. The Chain. The Log. The Letter.
These aren’t random words thrown together, nor am I reading a list of things I need to buy—though stop for a moment and admire the poetry and cadence of the list. No, those words are the themes of every issue of MacGuffin.
MacGuffin bills itself as a design and crafts magazine about the life of ordinary things. And in that simple descriptor, you can discover an entire world.
Founded in 2015 by Kirsten Algera and Ernst van der Hoeven, two Dutch art historians and designers, each biannual issue of MacGuffin is based around a single object, or word, and then explores that object in its entirety in quite surprising, and inspiring, ways.
MacGuffin doesn’t ask much of its global audience but reading it and experiencing it, might change the way you look at the world. MacGuffin came about because Ernst and Kirsten both felt that the discourse around design had become disconnected from the concerns of most of the world’s people.
In some ways, they have created a magazine that rejects the modern to appreciate what already exists. But don’t mistake the magazine or their ambition for nostalgia: MacGuffin is a thoroughly modern project and an ambitious one: oversized, heavy and thick.
Both Ernst and Kirsten acknowledge they are creating an object about objects, a collectible. A collection. They do this with an openness to the world and a thoughtfulness that is admirable. Because the world of MacGuffin is the world all of us live in.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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No ‘Visions of Loveliness’
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Picture it: It’s 1991. You’re sitting at your desk at The New York Times, when you get a call from the office of Condé Nast’s Alexander Liberman. Alex wants to meet you for lunch at La Grenouille to discuss an opportunity: Si Newhouse has decided to launch the first-ever beauty magazine, and he thinks you’re just the woman to make it happen. You’re 31 years old. The canvas is blank. The budget is endless. What’s your move, Linda Wells?
For the women’s magazine editors of today, struggling to keep the lights on by juggling Instagram, TikTok, marketing events, digital content, and whatever remains of their print product, this is a tale so far-fetched it feels like the stuff of an early aughts rom-com. But millennial editors’ wildest ideas about the “Town Car Era” of magazine-making were just another day at the office for Linda Wells.
Linda led Allure for 25 years, becoming a front-row fixture at Fashion Week—while also pioneering the cottage industry of backstage beauty coverage—and enlisting writers like Arthur Miller, Isabel Allende, Betty Friedan, and John Updike to write about … beauty.
In 2018, she pivoted, restyling herself as a beauty entrepreneur, launching with Revlon a makeup range she called Flesh. Now she’s back in the land of editorial, having a bunch of fun at the helm of the beauty vertical of Graydon Carter’s Air Mail, commissioning articles on everything from psychedelics to orgasm coaches.
We knew Linda Wells would be delightful, and yet she exceeded our expectations. We know you’ll love her too.
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This episode, a collaboration with The Spread, is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Lane Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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STRING THEORY
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Media, and most every brand in general, talks a lot about building and nurturing a community. Tribes, even. Finding one, inserting yourself into it, and then making your message an integral part of it. And what activity creates a more loyal community, than sports? If there is the ultimate niche audience, sports is it. It goes without saying that every sport has fans. And some lend themselves to something beyond fandom; they are lifestyles.
And few magazines have built up a brand around a single sport and its audience and their lifestyle as much as Racquet.
Launched with a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 by Caitlin Thompson, Racquet is a presence at major tennis events and has inserted itself into the lifestyle of tennis fans and players alike. The path has been rocky at times, but Thompson is clear about her aim to provide a “premium experience at a premium price,” as she told the Nieman Lab in an interview in 2017.
Like any other media, Racquet will live and die based on a business plan, and it is quite possible that Racquet magazine is just a small part of a larger creative media agency, all centered around a global community. And while she is not loath to smash some volleys in the direction of the tennis establishment, she is doing this while also trying to recenter the entire community and become its new beating heart.
Caitlin Thompson has much in common with the world’s top tennis players: passion, drive, ambition—and a willingness to make … a racket.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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WHAT'S RED AND YELLOW AND ORANGE ALL OVER?
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The images are iconic. And you know who they depict. They may be the most unforgettable magazine covers to emerge from the chaos of the late 2010s. Why are they so effective? Because of the implicit understanding of what’s being said between artist and audience—without a word being spoken. Using just three basic colors, today’s guest has created the brand identity of resistance.
Edel Rodriguez was born in Cuba, and though he left that island nation when he was quite young, arriving in the US during the Mariel boatlift, one can’t help sensing an aesthetic that might be especially Cuban, or can be called, perhaps, “authoritarian-adjacent.” Because when the US flirted with—as it will again this year—a presidential candidate rotten with autocratic tendencies, Rodriguez’s imagery is the perfect match for the moment.
His red, yellow, and orange covers for Time, Mother Jones, and Der Spiegel—25 in all—were minimalist, dangerous, and dead-on-balls accurate. And he joins us today fresh off the premiere of his stunning graphic memoir, Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey.
Of his notorious subject, Rodriguez saw the famously orange skin tone as a “warning sign,” he told Fast Company, and the simple style he employed resonated because it broke through the noise in the most effective way imaginable. Coming from Cuba, Rodriguez feels a duty to express, through his art, the potential outcomes of the choices we have made—and might make yet again. As he told The Guardian, “I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is.”
Of course, Rodriguez is more than just this one subject. But he’d be the first one to admit that he is political, and he makes no pretense of hiding his politics. As for his fans, they tell the artist that his work helps them crystallize their own thoughts and animates their feelings in ways they struggle to express on their own. A picture is worth a thousand words, indeed.
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Lane Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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Saveur was always a little different from the other food magazines. It was not exactly highbrow, but it did expand the definition of what a food magazine could be. If anything, it was a magazine about culture—centered on food, sure—but also about places, and things, and people.
It was a magazine for foodies before the word “foodie” was invented—and then became annoying. It embraced the web and digital. It attracted very smart writers and a dedicated readership (I was one of them). It branched into cookbooks (and I have some).
It was a media company centered around a defined editorial brand and mission. It was also bought and sold quite often—or often enough that each new owner and each new editor that came aboard tried to fix it, somehow, to make the numbers look better, perhaps, and that meant a lot of tinkering.
Of course, this was also a time when our traditional notions of media were being challenged and upended almost daily, so it didn’t really come as a surprise when Saveur announced they would cease publishing their print edition in 2021.
But then, in a move that recalled the famous Remington Razor commercials of the early 80s—“I was so impressed, I bought the company”—a longtime editor of Saveur, Kat Craddock, found some like-minded folk, and bought the company. And the first change she implemented was a return to print.
It’s out right now, and it looks delicious.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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THE LAST EMPEROR
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It might be difficult to remember, at least for our younger listeners, how vast the Time-Life empire was. At its height, during the John Huey dynasty of the late 1990s/early 2000s, the company published over 100 magazines.
Quite a rise from its humble beginning in 1922, when Henry Luce launched Time as the country’s first newsweekly. It was followed shortly by Fortune in 1930, Life in 1936, Sports Illustrated in 1954, and, finally, People in 1974. It was the largest and most prestigious magazine publisher in the world—and those five titles were the bedrock.
In 2006, Huey became the sixth editor-in-chief of Time Inc., overseeing more than 3,000 journalists.
In an interview with New York magazine, Huey described Time Inc as having a “public trust” and perhaps “an importance beyond profitability.” But not even a giant as powerful as Time Inc. was immune to the financial havoc brought about by the new digital age.
Huey retired in 2012, the last emperor of a vastly downsized and damaged empire. “Google sort of sucked all the honey out of our business,” he lamented then. In 2017, after Time was sold to its bitter rival Meredith Corporation, Huey tweeted “RIP, Time Inc. The 95-year run is over.”
Our George Gendron talked to Huey about Fortune’s battles with Forbes—and their pet names for each other, about giving Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen at Spy a taste of their own medicine, about not hiring Tina Brown, and about what his mother really thought he should’ve done with his life.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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Jeremy Leslie is a magazine person. A lifer. He has had his hands in a diverse group of publications and media, including Time Out, The Guardian, Blitz, and many others.
Since 2006, he has led magCulture, which started out as a research project, became a well respected blog, but now includes a retail outlet in London, a consultancy, events and conferences, and really, anything magazine.
He has written books about editorial design, and magazines, and his talents are sought after by clients the world over. magCulture, however, is more than a mere destination for magazine lovers. It is a resource, and perhaps more than anything, an evangelist for all things magazine. Its existence has been a boon to indie mags the world over.
magCulture continues to produce a vast array of content on all sorts of platforms and channels, and all of them are worth your while. magCulture's battle cry—something they shout from the rooftops—is a simple one, and one that we at Magazeum share: WE LOVE MAGAZINES!
Jeremy is arguably the best person to speak to about the state of the magazine today, and what the future of the magazine might be.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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MY EFFING CAREER
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When you’re born in a town called Media, your career path is pretty much preordained. It has to be, right?
And when you end up leading the design teams at blue-chip magazine brands at Condé Nast, Hearst, and Time Inc., the prophecy is then fully realized. (Yes, I just watched Dune). But the journey in between is not as cushy as you might imagine.
Since the age of 10, with his mother’s admonition—“you need to have a job”—ringing in his ears, designer John Korpics has found work doing all of the following: he’s bent sheetwork into duct metal, cleaned windows at factories, he was a fitness instructor, he had a paper route. He worked his way through college in food service—cleaning chicken, wiping counters, serving meals.
When you hear the title creative director, you’d be forgiven if your mind painted a picture. You know the type—the thoroughbred who studied at Parsons or SVA, apprenticed under Tibor Kalman or Roger Black, who gets included on some “30 Under 30” list. That’s not John Korpics. He’s worked hard to get where he’s gotten. Korpics will tell you that. He told me that:
“I always felt like I was the Pete Rose of magazine designers. I hustle, I work hard, I crank stuff out. Occasionally I get one and I hit one out of the park, but there are people in this industry that I think are truly giants. And I’ve never quite thought of the work I did in that league, but I am always inspired by them.”
And then, one day, he was 24 and hired to art direct his first magazine. And then another. And another. And like many of us, some of his jobs haven’t worked out. And when that happens, what does Korpics do? He gets himself another job. Like the time he became a Manhattan bike messenger after one particularly messy ending.
“I delivered mops to the 79th Street Boat Basin. I delivered products to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I delivered clothes from a studio to Vogue. I delivered a lot of lunches. And I actually really enjoyed it. Although I will say it’s not possible to make a living doing that. On my best day ever, I think I made about $90.”
It takes a special person to survive in the magazine business. Forty years in, Korpics is still at it. He’s focused on the big picture now—brands, systems, pixels—at Harvard Business Review, the 102-year-old publishing wing of the 116-year-old Harvard Business School. Yes, mom, he’s still got a job.
Let’s meet John.
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette and Commercial Type
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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Introducing our new podcast all about the future of magazines — and the magazines of the future. Check out episode 1, our interview with Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones.
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Radhika Jones was named editor in chief of Vanity Fair in November 2017, the fifth editor in the magazine’s storied history. Her hiring was met with some surprise, and more than a little skepticism. The Guardian called her bookish, as if that’s an insult.
She arrived at Vanity Fair from a path that included stints at The New York Times where she was the editorial director of the book section and Time magazine where she managed the Time 100, as well as The Paris Review, Art Forum, Book Forum, and Grand Street.
Now, more than six years later, Jones sits at the center of a massive media ecosystem that encompasses digital, social, print, video, and experiential platforms. The magazine has been called the curator of American culture, and sits under the flagship of Condé Nast. The good news is the numbers, including print, are not just good, they’re up across all platforms.
We caught up with Jones after she had put Vanity Fair’s flagship Hollywood issue to bed, but before the whirlwind of events that culminates in the very famous party the magazine hosts once the Oscars are done. The Hollywood issue is out today.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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THE ULTIMATE HYPHENATE
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Rochelle Udell is many things.
She is all of these things: teacher, ad woman, vice president, founder, wife, creative director, mentor, chair woman, student, marketer, graduate, design director, editor-in-chief, mother, chief talent officer, executive vice president, collector, president, meditator, internet strategist, partner, art director, volunteer, deputy editorial director, artist, retiree, and baker's daughter.
As Walt Whitman would say, “She contains multitudes.”
“As for the titles attached to my name,” she says, “I consider them important only in as much as they help the outside world understand who I am and what I do. My fear is that they often do more to confine rather than define one’s creative possibilities.”
The daughter of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, Udell began her career as a teacher at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, when a chance encounter with Milton Glaser launched her into the thick of New York magazine’s newsroom in the early 1970s where she and a group of women (including our Episode 25 guest, Gloria Steinem) created and launched the legendary Ms. magazine.
After that, Udell, an Art Directors Club Hall-of-Famer, put her talents, her hyphens, and her multitudes to work at the world’s preeminent magazines: Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, GQ, House & Garden, Esquire, Self, The New Yorker, and fashion brands, FIT, Chico’s, Revlon, and Calvin Klein.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, she was a pioneer of early-days digital media as the founder of Condé Nast Digital and its beloved, OG food blog, Epicurious.
Our editor-at-large, Anne Quito, spoke with Udell about all of it.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
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“I finally went up to Graydon and I said, ‘Hey, you know, I know you like me. I know you wanted me to be here, but I can also do covers.’”
• • •
That’s today’s guest, Mark Seliger. He’s the same Mark Seliger who, at the moment of this exchange with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, had already shot over 180 covers for Rolling Stone, where he was the chief photographer from 1992-2002.
Seliger had been heavily recruited by GQ and Vanity Fair to move to Condé Nast. But, as he learned, the days of being Fred Woodward’s go-to image maker were over. Once again, he was the new guy. And he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself.
Fortunately, reinvention is Seliger’s middle name.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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A CRIME OF ATTITUDE
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As George Bernard Shaw once said, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” Turns out it may be more than just the language.
Early in my career it became clear the British were coming. The first wave arrived when I was an editor at New York magazine: Jon Bradshaw, Anthony Hayden-Guest, Julian Allen, Nik Cohn—all colorful characters who brought with them, as author Kurt Andersen said in Episode 2, “an ability to kick people in the shins that was lacking in the United States.”
And kick they did.
A decade later, the British trickle became a surge that appeared everywhere on the mastheads of premiere American magazines. There was Anna Wintour. And Liz Tilberis. And Harry Evans. Joanna Coles. Glenda Bailey. Andrew Sullivan. Anthea Disney. James Truman. And, of course, today’s guest, Tina Brown.
And the invasion continues today, with the Brits taking over our newsrooms and boardrooms. Emma Tucker at The Wall Street Journal. Will Lewis at The Washington Post. Mark Thompson at CNN. Colin Myler at the New York Daily News.
But none of them made it bigger faster than Tina Brown. Si Newhouse never knew what hit him. Brown, having just turned 30, grabbed the wheel of Condé Nast’s flailing 1983 relaunch of Vanity Fair and proceeded to dominate the cultural conversation for the next decade.
And then? Another massive turnaround at The New Yorker. The first multimedia partnership at Talk. Nailing digital early with The Daily Beast. Then Newsweek. And, more recently, the books, the events, and the podcast.
So Tina, what exactly is it with you Brits that makes your work so extraordinary?
“Well, I think that the plurality of the British press means that there’s a lot more experimentation and less, sort of, stuffed-shirtery going on. The English press is far more eclectic in its attitude and its high/low aesthetic, essentially. There’s much less of a pompous attitude to journalism. They see it as a job. They don’t see it as a sacred calling. And I think there’s something to be said for that, you know? Because it’s a little bit more scrappy, I think, than it is here. And I think that’s served us well, actually.”
So it’s no surprise then to learn that there were early signs of future-Tina. Here we call it “good trouble.” Tina’s got another name for it. As the story goes, teenage-Tina, blessed with a “tremendous skepticism of authority,” somehow managed to get herself kicked out of not one, not two, but three—THREE!—boarding schools. Her offenses? Nothing serious. Just what the ASME Hall-of-Famer refers to as her “crimes of attitude.”
And you know, when you think about it, what is any great magazine but a crime of attitude?
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This episode is made possible by our friends at MOUNTAIN GAZETTE and COMMERCIAL TYPE.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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The Prime of Mr. Neville Brody
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“Once you have broken down the rules, literally anything is possible.’”
In the business of magazine design, few names resonate as profoundly as Neville Brody. And, to this day, he lives by those words.
Renowned for his groundbreaking work and commitment to pushing design boundaries at magazines like The Face, Arena, Per Lui, and others, Brody is a true auteur in the world of design. We talked to him at the launch of his spectacular new monograph, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3.
Nurtured on 1970s British punk music, which rejected anything that appeared self-indulgent or overwrought, Brody found the perfect launch pad at The Face, the London-based music, fashion, and culture monthly, created by editor Nick Logan in 1980.
The Face inspired an array of fellow magazine rule-breakers, including the late Tibor Kalman, David Carson, and Fabien Baron, who calls Brody’s work “powerful, aggressive, and simple.”
Since then, Brody's journey in graphic design has been marked by a relentless, almost unforgiving pursuit of innovation. His magazine design challenged conventional norms and redefined visual storytelling. Brody’s design approach is characterized by a rejection of conventional grid systems and editorial hierarchies, and a willingness to break free from established design rules.
And he thinks magazines today are missing a giant opportunity:
“That’s the beauty of print, that you can’t achieve in the same way digitally. Digital is so commoditized. We’re not expressing content anymore. We’re just delivering it.
Neville Brody's legacy in magazine design lies in his fearless approach to challenging the status quo and his ability to capture the zeitgeist of his time. By pushing the boundaries of traditional graphic design, he not only influenced the look and feel of magazines but also inspired a generation of designers to embrace innovation, experimentation, and a spirit of creative rebellion. Brody's work continues to be celebrated for its enduring impact on the evolution of graphic design and its role in shaping the visual language of contemporary media.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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One Eye on the World
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“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is, not as it should be!”
— Don Quixote de la Mancha
Monocle, the brainchild of the expat Canadian magazine maker, Tyler Brûlé, was born in early 2007, a relatively awful year for the magazine business, not to mention the entire world. In that year alone, more than 100 print magazines folded—or, as Wikipedia terms it, were “dis-established”—among them: Life (again), Premiere, Red Herring, House & Garden, Jane, Child, and Business 2.0. Months later, the global economy was hit by the Great Recession.
But Brûlé was coming out from under a rather lengthy non-compete agreement with Time Inc., after selling his previous startup, Wallpaper*, to the American media giant, and he was desperate to get back to the newsroom.
Given the times, and the stream of fading print publications, one could judge Brûlé’s resolve as “madness,” as Don Quixote cried in the opening clip. Digital was all the rage, the iPad was knocking on the door, and the radiation of the frenzied dotcom meltdown was still slowly killing legacy media.
“Madness”? Not if you know Tyler Brûlé.
In his world, “life as it should be” is rich—a morning espresso in a bustling cafe with a crisp newspaper written and edited in the romance language of your choice, sorting out weekends skiing the Alps or lounging on the Med while riding the night train to Vienna.
And then there’s the print—not only the magazine itself, printed on “upwards of nine different paper stocks, crammed with extremely niche articles about carbon-neutral airlines in Costa Rica and sleek Afghan restaurants in Dubai,” but also special edition newspapers, coffee table books, and Monocle-approved travel guides.
(Someone forgot to tell Brûlé and his brilliant team of collaborators that print is dead).
In a media culture traditionally obsessed with scale at any cost, Monocle’s modest 100,000 circulation belies a thriving multi-media juggernaut that confidently ignores the lure of social media. “We’re in a very fortunate position that we’re an independent publisher,” says Brûlé, “and we don’t have the commercial pressures of a big parent. And those commercial pressures can be two-fold: One is cost savings, but the other pressures are to go and chase after every new trend.”
In fact, Brûlé thinks of Monocle as a family business.
“We don’t set out to be pioneers, but also we’re a family company, and we can choose to do things quickly if we want to.”
That same culture has manufactured the pressure to establish one’s entrepreneurial cred. You’re not the editor, you’re the founding editor, the founding creative director, the founding director. But when asked about how he thinks of and refers to himself, Brûlé answers simply:
“If I think about ‘What do I do?’ I’m a journalist. I’m out to be a witness. I’m out to absorb, I’m out to interpret, and I’m out to communicate.
A print-centric media phenomenon, created as a family business, led by a journalist. Surprising? Not for someone who’s been building a “life as it should be.”
Here’s our editor-at-large George Gendron with Tyler Brûlé.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC & MO.D ©2021–2024
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