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WHAT MAKES STEVE BRODNER HAPPY
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When your boss tells you to track down an amusing Steve Brodner factoid to open the podcast with, and one of the first things you find is a, uh, a “dick army,” welp, that’s what you’re going to go with.
Lest you judge me, I can explain. Brodner’s drawing of this army was inspired by a guy who was actually named Dick Armey (A-R-M-E-Y)! He was Newt Gingrich’s wingman back in the nineties. I thought to myself, the people need to know this.
However, with the election now a few days behind us, maybe the time for talking about men and their junk is over?
What you really want to learn about is this Society of Illustrators hall of famer’s career. Brodner’s work, which has been called “unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass, and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion,” has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and many others.
In this episode, Brodner talks about how the death of print has led to the current misinformation crisis. As it gets harder and harder to tell what’s true, the future becomes increasingly uncertain. Even his most biting drawings are rooted in truth.
“Satire doesn't work if you are irresponsibly unreasonably inventive. If satire doesn't have truth in it, it's not funny.”
A production note: This episode was recorded exactly one week before the election. As our conversation began, we took turns telling stories about memorable election night parties, and our plans for November 5th. Here’s Steve, talking about his plans…
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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SHE’S OUR TYPE
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Everybody knows that in May 2023, a jury found Donald Trump liable for defaming and abusing E. Jean Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. And everybody also knows that in January 2024, another jury found Trump liable for defamation against her to the tune of $83.3 million. P.S., with interest, his payout will now total over $100 million.
But not everybody remembers—because we are guppies, and because, ahem, Print is Dead, y’all—that E. Jean is a goddamn swashbucking magazine-world legend: a writer of such style, wit, and sheer ballsy joie de vivre that she carved out a name for herself in the boys club of New Journalism, writing juicy and iconic stories in the ‘70s and ‘80s for Outside, Esquire, Playboy, and more—and then finally leapt over to women’s magazines, where she held down the role of advice columnist at Elle for, wait for it, 27 years. Elle is where we intersected with E.Jean and where we first saw up close her boundless enthusiasm and generosity for womankind.
We’ll also never forget sitting at one of the magazine’s annual fancypants dinners honoring Women in Hollywood—these are real star-studded affairs, folks—when Jennifer Aniston stood up to receive her award and started her speech with a shoutout to her beloved "Auntie E.,” whose advice she and millions of other American women had devoured, and lived by, for decades.
Here’s the truth: The woman that most of the world came to know through the most harrowing circumstances imaginable really is and has always been that fearless, that unsinkable. It’s not a persona—it’s the genuine article. And when you hear her stories about how hard she slogged away for decades to finally get her big break in publishing, listeners, you will have a whole new respect for her.
As E. Jean tells us herself in this interview, she does very, very little press. So we couldn’t be more honored that our friend and idol and The Spread’s most enthusiastic hype woman sat down after hours with us for this interview. We just hope we did her justice!
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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Fehlende Folgen?
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SOUL SURVIVOR
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Just about every magazine Richard Baker worked for has died. Even one called Life.
Also dead: The Washington Post Magazine, Vibe, Premiere, and Parade. Another, Saveur, also died, but has recently been resurrected. And Us Magazine? A mere shadow of its former self.
Sadly, Baker’s career narrative is not that uncommon. (That’s why you’re listening to a podcast called Print Is Dead).
But Richard Baker is a survivor. He’s survived immigrating from Jamaica as a kid. He’s survived the sudden and premature loss of three influential and beloved mentors. And he survived a near-fatal medical emergency in the New York subway.
Yet, in the face of all that carnage, Richard Baker just keeps going. To this day, he’s living the magazine dream—“classic edition”—as a designer at a sturdy newsstand publication (Inc. magazine), in a brick-and-mortar office (7 World Trade Center), working with real people, and making something beautiful with ink and paper.
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE
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In the past few weeks, Will Welch has taken a bit of flack for letting Beyoncé promote her new whiskey label on the cover of GQ’s October issue, with an interview that one X user described as “an intimate email exchange between GQ and several layers of Beyonce’s comms team.”
Whether that kind of thing rankles you or not—and yes, we asked him about it—in the five years since Welch took over, GQ seems to be doing as well or better than everybody else in the industry. Why? Ask around. He’s got a direct line to celebrities, who consider him a personal friend. He’s got real credibility with The Fashion People. And because of both of these things, advertisers love him.
Perhaps most importantly, his boss Anna Wintour loves him.
The Atlanta-born Welch started his career at the alternative music and culture mag the Fader in the early aughts, and jumped to GQ in 2007. For a decade under EIC Jim Nelson, he operated as the magazine’s fashion-and-culture svengali, eventually becoming the creative director of the magazine and the editor of the brand’s fashion spinoff, GQ Style.
In 2019, Wintour tapped him for the big job: Editor-in-Chief of GQ—a title that in 2020 was recast in the current Condé Nast survival-mode as Global Editorial Director of GQ, overseeing 19 editions around the world.
After speaking with Welch only a few hours after the Beyonce cover dropped, we get what all the fuss is about. He is a great sport with good hair and just enough of a Southern accent who is confident-yet-never-cocky about his mission at GQ.
Let other people bemoan the “death of print.” Will Welch is having a blast at the Last Supper.
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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WHEN ‘HOUSE’ IS NOT A HOME
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Dominique Browning jokes that after the interview for this episode, she might end up having PTSD. After more than 30 years writing and editing at some of the top magazines in the world, Browning has blocked a lot of it out.
And after listening today, you’ll understand why.
At Esquire, where she worked early in her career, Browning says she cried nearly every day. There were men yelling and people quitting. Apartment keys being dropped off with mistresses. A flash, even, of a loaded gun in a desk drawer.
At House & Garden, where she ended her magazine career in 2007 after 13 years as the editor-in-chief, the chaos was less Mad Men and more Devil Wears Prada. It was glitzy Manhattan lunches mixed with fierce competition and co-workers who complained that her wardrobe wasn’t “designer” enough. The day she took the job, she says she felt like she had walked into Grimm’s Fairy Tales. (Her friends had warned her that it was going to be a snake pit.)
When the magazine unexpectedly folded on a Monday, she and her staff were told they had until Friday to clear out their offices. “Without warning,” she says, “our world collapsed.”
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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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VIVE LA CREATIVITE!
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There are many reasons for you to hate Fabien Baron (especially if you’re the jealous type).
Here are 7 of them:
• He’s French, which means, among other things, his accent is way sexier than yours.
• He’s spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of supermodels like Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Kate Moss.
• He gets all of his Calvin Klein undies for free.
• Ditto any swag from his other clients: Dior, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, or Armani.
• When he tired of just designing magazines, magazines went and made him their editor-in-chief.
• He was intimately involved in the making of Madonna’s notorious book, Sex. How intimately? We were afraid to ask.
• Also? Vanity Fair called him “The Most Sought-After Creative Director in the World.”
With our pity party concluded, we admit “hate” was probably the wrong word, because after spending time talking to him, it’s easy to see why Baron has been able to live the kind of life many magazine creatives dream of—and why he’s been so incredibly successful.
His enthusiasm is contagious. It’s actually his super power. And it’s a lesson for all of us. When you get next-level excited, as Baron does when he can see the possibilities in a project, his passion infects everybody in the room.
And then, when you learn that Baron believes he’s doing what he was put on this earth to do, and claims that he would do it all for free. You’ve kind of got to believe him.
I never, ever worried about money. I never took a job because of the money. Because I think integrity is very important. I think, like believing that you have a path and that you’re going to follow that path and you’re going to stay on that path and that you’re going to stick to that. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Welcome to Season 5 of Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!)—
This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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THE FIFTH
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You cannot overstate how much Tom Bodkin has changed the Times. In fact, you can say that there was the Times before Tom and the Times after Tom.
The Times before Tom threw as many words as possible at the page, with little regard for the reader. The Times before Tom thought tossing a couple of headshots on the page was all the visual journalism we needed. The Times before Tom held to a hierarchy where designers were the other, somehow not quite journalists.
Then there is The New York Times after Tom.
Tom taught us that design was not only integral to journalism, it was in fact integral to storytelling at its height. The front page that listed the COVID dead was more powerful than any one story could ever be.
Roy Peter Clark, the writing guru at the Poynter Institute, captured it best:
“Nothing much on that front page looked like news as we understand it, that is, the transmission of information,” he wrote. “Instead it felt like a graphic representation of the tolling of bells. A litany of the dead.”
Personally, Tom taught me something that made it easier to lead the newsroom in the digital age: Design demands a level of open-mindedness to the possibilities of different types of storytelling. It also rewards collaboration, since the most perfect stories are told by different disciplines working together to convey the best version of the truth every day.
Those, in fact, are the qualities that mark the modern, digital New York Times. Qualities that honestly have made it the most successful news report of the day.
Hard to imagine we—certainly not I—would have been prepared for this new world without Tom’s leadership.
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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 ©2021–2024
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DUTCH MASTER
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Dutch-born, California-raised designer Hans Teensma began his magazine career working alongside editor Terry McDonell at Outside magazine, which Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner launched in San Francisco in 1977.
When Wenner sold Outside two years later, Teensma and McDonell headed to Denver to launch a new regional, Rocky Mountain Magazine, which would earn them the first of several ASME National Magazine Awards. On the move again, Teensma’s next stop would be New England Monthly, another launch with another notable editor, Dan Okrent. The magazine was a huge hit, financially and critically, and won back-to-back ASME awards in 1986 and ’87.
Ready for a new challenge — and ready to call New England home — Teensma launched his own studio, Impress, in the tiny village of Williamsburg, Massachusetts. The studio has produced a wide range of projects, including startups and redesigns, as well as pursuing Teensma’s passion for designing books.
Since 1991, Teensma has been incredibly busy: He was part of a team that built a media empire for Disney, launching and producing Family Fun, Family PC, Wondertime, and Disney Magazine. He’s designed dozens of books and redesigned almost as many magazines. And he continues to lead the creative vision of the critically-acclaimed nature journal, Orion.
You might not know Teensma by name, but his network of deep friendships runs the gamut of media business royalty. Why? Because everybody loves Hans.
When they designed the ideal temperament for survival in the magazine business, they might as well have used his DNA. He’s survived a nearly 50-year career thanks to his wicked sense of humor, his deep well of decency, and above all, his unlimited reserves of grace.
You’re gonna love this guy.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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THE ART DIRECTOR’S ART DIRECTOR
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Janet Froelich is one of the most influential and groundbreaking creative directors of all time. For over two decades, she lead the creative teams at The New York Times Magazine and its sister publication, T: The New York Times Style Magazine. In this episode, Froelich recalls her own personal 9/11 story, and what is was like to be in the newsroom on that awful day, as well as how she helped create the magazine cover that inspired and informed the memorial to the Twin Towers and those who lost their lives there. She talks about other Times magazine covers that left a mark, about her early years as an artist living in SoHo and hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, and why you should never be afraid to hire people better than you.Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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A HANDY MAN
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Photographers are gearheads. They’re always throwing around brand names, model numbers, product specs.
So when legendary photographer Eddie Adams asked today’s guest, Dan Winters, if he knew how to handle a JD-450, it was a no-brainer. He had grown up with a JD-350. So yeah, the 450 would be no problem.
But here’s the funny thing: the JD-450 is not made by Nikon. Or Canon. Or Fuji. Or Leica. Not even his beloved Hasselblad. Nope. The JD-450 isn’t made in Tokyo, Wetzlar, or Gothenburg.
The John Deere 450 bulldozer is made in Dubuque, Iowa, USA.
And what Eddie Adams urgently needed right at that moment, was someone to backfill, level, and compact a trench at his farm, which, coincidentally, was prepping to host the first-ever Eddie Adams Workshop, the world-renowned photojournalism seminar, at his farm in Sullivan County, New York, near the site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival.
Get to know Dan Winters a little bit, and none of this will come as a surprise to you. It also won’t surprise you that the bulldozer incident isn’t even the funniest part of the story of how Winters got to New York City in 1988 to launch what has become one of the most distinguished careers in the history of editorial photography. A career which began with his first job at the News-Record, a 35,000-circulation newspaper in Thousand Oaks, California.
The secret—spoiler alert—to his remarkable career, Winters will say, “is based in a belief that I’m being very thorough with my pursuits and being very realistic. I’m not lying to myself about the effort I’m putting into it. Because this is not a casual pursuit at all. This is 100 percent commitment.”
Well, that, and out-of-this-world talent and vision.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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THE JAZZ OF THE NEWSROOM
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In this episode, we talk to George Gendron, the long-time editor [Inc. Magazine] and educator who created one of the first liberal arts-based entrepreneurship programs in America. We talk about his first job working under legendary editor Clay Felker in the early days of New York magazine, how a third-grade book report set him up for a life in publishing, the near-fatal car accident that changed everything, why we should look to TV for the future of magazines, and how to build an economically-sustainable life around doing the work that you love.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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THE ARTIST AS ENTREPRENEUR
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Michele Outland has spent her career at some really beautiful magazines. Beautiful ... because she made them that way. Her resume includes stops at Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food, Domino, Nylon, and Bon Appétit, as well as the magazine she created and launched with her good friend, Fiorella Valdesolo: Gather Journal.
Gather, which only published 13 issues, made a powerful impact on the magazine business. In its five-year run, it won a James Beard Award for Visual Storytelling, an Art Director’s Club Award, and 20 medals from the Society of Publication Designers, including being named “Brand of the Year” in 2015.
Under her leadership, Bon Appétit won the ASME National Magazine Award for Design along with a slew of SPD awards.
We talked to Michele about: the power of internships, her Korean mother’s influence on the way she thinks about food, about how to start a magazine in a post-print world — and when we can expect the return of Gather Journal, the strong female role models who shaped her career, and, of course, PIZZA.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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THE GREATEST STARTUP IN THE HISTORY OF MAGAZINE STARTUPS
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We’ve always had a thing for magazine launches. They’re filled with drama and melodrama, people behaving with passion and conviction, and people ... misbehaving. Anything to get that first issue onto the stands and into the hands of readers.
Some new ventures seem to sneak in the back door. Who saw Wired or Fast Company coming?
Others are to the manner born, and from the most elite print parents. But, even with that pedigree they never gain traction, never display the scrappiness and experimentation that we’ve come to expect from anything new. (You know who you are).
But then, one day, along comes The Greatest Startup in the History of Magazine Startups. A magazine that dares to mercilessly, and humorously, vilify high society. The one that big time journalists pretend to ignore but were first to the newsstand each month to grab their copy. The one that created packaging conceits: Separated at Birth, Private Lives of Public Enemies, Blurb-o-mat, and Naked City. Plus, the adorable nicknames — “Short-fingered vulgarian” — that persist to this day.
That’s right, we’re talking about Spy.
And in this episode we’ll meet Kurt Andersen who, along with Graydon Carter and Tom Philips, founded what became an instantaneous cultural phenomenon: SPY magazine. The axis of the publishing world tilted when it hit the stands.
“Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s,” the author Dave Eggers wrote. “It definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully-written and perfectly-designed — and feared by all.”
There had never been anything like Spy before.
Nothing since has come close.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER?
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Roger Black is a pioneer. His art direction of iconic print brands and high-profile redesigns, his early embrace of digital publishing technology, and his typographic innovations are hallmarks of a 50-year, trailblazing career.
He’s refined his design mastery at publications ranging from Rolling Stone to Esquire to Newsweek to The New York Times Magazine. He’s written books and started companies. He’s worked for clients on every continent.
And now, at 73, Black’s focus has shifted to type. More specifically Type Network, a font platform launched in 2016, where he serves as the company’s chairman.
Black’s design legacy not only includes memorable makeovers but also the fundamental need for an underlying reason and purpose behind them, often sophisticated, always functional. Throw in his signature color palette—red, white, and of course, black—and you’re in business.
All that said, Black preaches that the true DNA of a successful brand identity is its typography.
We talked to Black about why he left home in the third grade, how an early blunder almost cost him his publishing career, what it felt like to follow in his mother’s footsteps at The New York Times, what he thinks are the five best-executed magazines of all time, and about why he’s always on the move—and where he’s headed next.
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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 ©2021–2024
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THE SLOWER THE BETTER
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Given that this is the final show of the season, it is perhaps a bit poetic that our guest today is Rob Orchard from Delayed Gratification. Not that we would plan an episode around a bad pun. Not us.
Delayed Gratification is media created to comment on, and offer a counterpoint to, the media. Rob Orchard and his team met each other, for the most part, in Dubai in the early aughts, working on Time Out Dubai. In that magical place on the Gulf they found—no surprise—lots of money and conditions amenable to journalism of all sorts.
Then Orchard returned to London … and he didn’t like what he found. He and his friends and colleagues were dismayed by the realities of the digital world, the relentless emphasis on quantity over quality, the losing battle between what they wanted to do and the evangelists of SEO and purveyors of click bait, and so they created Delayed Gratification.
Inspired by the Slow Journalism movement taking root around the world, Delayed Gratification is a quarterly publication that values contemplation and time, a curation of the important events of the past three months, along with long-form essays and colorful infographics. The result is a reminder that important information, properly curated or edited, continues to be enlightening, informative, entertaining—and extremely important.
Delayed Gratification is an indie in the truest sense of the word. And probably the only media that suffers existential quandaries around their own social media. Because Rob Orchard and his team are passionate about getting things right. Not getting there first.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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RICHARD TURLEY CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP
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Richard Turley is changing the idea of the magazine. Richard Turley has no idea what a magazine is in the year 2024. And in this sense, he is not so different from you or I.
Richard Turley’s magazines—and there are many—are confrontations, loaded with text, or not, sometimes, but if you ask him, he’s not sure what he’s doing. He claims to be boring. He once said, “I’m a boring, traditional, formalist thinker” and he probably is, but you have to really know your stuff to get where he’s coming from.
Where Richard Turley is coming from is England, yes. He got his start at The Guardian. He was then lured to New York to help revamp Bloomberg Businessweek and his work there made art directors everywhere ugly jealous.
The secret to Richard Turley’s work is the freedom it seems to exhibit. From form. From rules. From common sense. Sometimes even from good taste. But only if you’re stuck up. Which Richard Turley is most definitely not.
Richard Turley once claimed his design philosophy was “to do something unlikable, repellent, horrible, and ugly.” Richard Turley is punk in a way, but mainstream. He’s underground-adjacent. Which just makes him even more punk.
Richard Turley has worked at MTV and ad agencies. Richard Turley designed the logo for one of the world’s largest sports. Richard Turley now runs his own creative agency. And is the art director of Interview magazine. And co-created Civilization. And Nuts International. And Offal. And has designed a literary magazine, Heavy Traffic. And has just redesigned one of the most iconic magazines in existence. Which one? You’ll have to listen to the podcast.
But just remember this: Richard Turley is a busy man.
I, however, am not Richard Turley. Far from it.
Nobody is.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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IT’S COMPLICATED
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If Teen Vogue’s editorial still surprises you, it might be time to admit that this says more about you than it does about Teen Vogue. And also, perhaps, that you haven’t been paying attention.
Teen Vogue is not the first magazine aimed at “the young” of course, and it’s not the first one to address multiple issues. But…Teen Vogue is the first, perhaps, to make a certain kind of noise.
Since well before the Trump presidency, but certainly turbocharged during it, Teen Vogue has mixed tips on fashion and beauty, profiles about the latest girl groups from Korea, and the scoop on the stars of Bridgerton, with political analysis and opinion, stories about identity and social justice, and an election primmer that is maybe one of the most thorough you’ll find anywhere.
Versha Sharma has been editor since 2021 and has not only maintained all the pillars that make up Teen Vogue but enhanced them. She came to Teen Vogue from overtly political media like Talking Points Memo, NowThis, Vocativ, and MSNBC. And she says she’s landed her dream job.
Sharma and her team are unabashed and unapologetic about what they do—and know that they are serving a large community of very active young women (65% of the readership) who follow the brand on every social channel imaginable, visit the website by the millions, and attend Teen Vogue Summits—in person!—to listen to their favorite influencers, singers, entrepreneurs, actors and activists talk shop.
Sharma feels like the luckiest editor in the industry. But one thing is missing: paper.
Teen Vogue discontinued its print edition more than seven years ago. Her new dream? Convincing her bosses at Condé Nast to bring it back.
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024
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THE FIFTH
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I want you to stop what you’re doing for just a moment and imagine we’re back in 1998. (Those of you born since then will have to use your imagination). We’re on an ASME panel exploring the future of magazines in the digital age.
The moderator, eager to get the discussion off to a lively start, turns to you and asks, “What magazine that we all cherish today is least likely to adapt and survive what’s coming?”
Without hesitation you blurt out “The New Yorker!”
The audience murmurs in agreement.
“The Atlantic!” someone shouts from the crowd.
More murmuring.
I’m not surprised. Neither is anybody else in the room. It’s almost three decades ago, and yet we’ve already headed into a new world of “nugget” media—and the total loss of our collective attention spans. Hell, magazines that feature 25,000-word polemics on topics like the squirrels of Central Park are already dinosaurs, even here in 1998.
It’s a bleak outlook for an institution—I’m talking about The New Yorker—that claims the following heritage:
It has survived two world wars and the Great Depression, it’s been led by only five editors, ever, in its 71-year history,it didn’t use color—or photography!—until its 67th year when a young, supremely talented, and controversial Brit took over in 1992,and it’s now run by a former newsman who had never edited anything except his high school newspaper.But here’s the thing: It’s 2024 and we’re looking at a decimated magazine business. Mighty brands and hot-shit startups alike are dead and gone—or running on fumes. The big publishers are divesting from print right and left.
And yet, there is a shining light.
Today The New Yorker is busy preparing for its 100th anniversary, with that same newsman at the top of the masthead who has brought video, events, podcasts, print (a magazine!)—and even some branded pajamas—together with the most legacy of legacy brands to create a 21st-century media juggernaut.
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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 ©2021–2024
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THE FINE ART OF MAGAZINE MAKING
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Imagine this: You’re a 42-year-old designer who’s only worked at one magazine. Ever. Then one day, unexpectedly, you’re tasked to lead the design of that magazine. Now imagine that the magazine is universally lauded as a design masterpiece. Add to that, your immediate predecessors have both been enshrined into every hall of fame across the design and media universe.
Heard enough? Well now throw into this mix that your job is only an interim post.
Why? Because just as your boss was leaving, his boss was out the door, too. That’s right, now you’ve got to navigate all of … this … while the company is searching for your new boss. And whatever you did that got you a shot at this opportunity the first time? You’re gonna have to do it all again. And likely for an editor who’s been tasked with coming in and shaking things up a bit.
“I’m fucked,” you might think. But you’re not Gail Bichler.
As you already know, Bichler survived the turmoil that started her tenure at The New York Times Magazine. And the astonishing thing—well, astonishing until you know more—is that Bichler has not only maintained the exalted design standards, she has pushed even further.
“Her magazine looks different from Rem [Duplessis]’s, as Rem’s did from mine. She’s pushed the envelope in dramatically new directions,” says her legendary predecessor—and the woman who discovered Bichler—Janet Froelich. Why? Because Bichler is an artist. And, as Froelich states, “she chooses to work with people who work the way artists work. She’s firmly committed to ideas and, most importantly, to journalism.”
“What elevates her as a leader is the discipline, structure, and consistency she brings,” says Arem Duplessis, whose departure for Apple created the opportunity for Bichler to move up. “Gail has always been so reverential to the Times’ legacy—and she fiercely protects that.”
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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 ©2021–2024
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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 ©2021–2024
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