Podcast
Magazeum
Hosted by Patrick Mitchell · EN
Podcasts about magazines and the people who made (and make) them.
13episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
David Temkin (Founder: InFormation)
2w ago00:35:33Tap to summarizeTHE INTERNET WILL NOT BE TELEVISED — The tech industry is easy to dislike, admire, ridicule, resent, need, and all of the above. Look, this podcast doesn’t exist without tech. But there is also no "enshittification" without tech. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow that word has entered the general lexicon with a speed and ubiquity that might make someone like, I don’t know, Shakespeare envious. If he knew what was going on. Which he doesn’t. All of this to introduce InFormation, a magazine about tech, but more importantly, a magazine about “what tech is doing to us.” The people behind it work in the industry and so understand it, which makes them dislike it even more. Twenty-five years ago, InFormation was like the Spy magazine of the dot com boom, a bit of a kick in the pants to an industry and a group of people who saw themselves in utopian if not messianic terms. And while they might still see themselves that way (spoiler alert: they most certainly do), a lot of people in the world do not, and so InFormation is back, it has reformed, and is being published again, with the same attitude, that is it continues to kick ass but with more feeling, because Silicon Valley is no longer a place but a mindset, techbros are a thing and a wealthy thing at that, and, well, there’s a general feeling that the world has been thoroughly colonized and completely enshittified. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
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Best of PID: Mark Seliger (Photographer: Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, more)
4w ago00:56:49Tap to summarizeTHE NEW YORK OBSERVER — “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. (Well, it’s really Alan, but you get what we mean). For example: Seliger grew up in rural Texas, but decides to go big and moves to New York City to get into the magazine business. Reinvention #1. He gets early work at business magazines like Manhattan, Inc. In short time his portraiture lands him a few plum assignments at Rolling Stone. Reinvention #2. Unforgettable shoots and an immediate connection with Woodward lands him the title of chief photographer, and he picks right up where the legendary Annie Leibovitz leaves off. Reinvention #3. His exposure at Rolling Stone leads Seliger (along with his pal Woodward) to directing music videos for A-listers like Lenny Kravitz and Courtney Love, and Gap commercials with LL Cool J and Missy Elliott. Reinvention #4. When Covid hits, and publishing effectively shuts down, he pivots to documentary photography and produces an epic portfolio of an empty and still New York City that becomes the book, The City That Finally Sleeps. Reinvention #5. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, Reinvention #6: Seliger starts writing songs in his free time, and then forms the band Rusty Truck. And at the moment Seliger is reminding Graydon Carter that he knows his way around a cover shoot, Rusty Truck releases its first album, Luck’s Changing Lanes, which is produced by Lenny Kravitz, Gillian Welch, Willie Nelson, Dave Rawlings, Sheryl Crow, T-Bone Burnett, and Bob Dylan. That’s a lot. A whole lot. But for Seliger, it’s all of a piece. Photography, music, work, life. He says it’s all about following your curiosity. Observing. Not just looking but seeing. “For me,” he explains, “it’s all about storytelling—the storytelling in photography translated well into the storytelling of songwriting. And that exploration leads you to do something that you’d never done before.” That’s the story of his life. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Laura LeBleu (Editor: Geezer)
May 100:47:36Tap to summarizeREALITY BITES — I am Gen X. I’m telling you this because, well, this is hardly something that is ever relevant to any conversation when, in fact, it is also always relevant to everything. But I just don't talk about it because who cares when I was born, or that we Gen Xers all live in the long and darkest of dark shadow of Boomers, or the loud echo of Millennials, or the annoyingly brash and unknowing living of whatever the other younger generations are called. I’m Gen X, and I just know one thing: there are more of you than there are of me, and there always have been. I'm saying all this because today we're gonna talk about Geezer magazine, as if any Gen X-er in their right mind would ever call themselves a geezer, because that's Boomer stuff. And hey, did you see we're turning 60? For fuck’s sake. As if. So yes, Geezer, a magazine by and for Gen X that is both completely irreverent and surprisingly serious and even tender, that balances nostalgia with irony. And while Gen X’s favorite word might be whatever, the secret is we care what you think. We always have. You just have to first extract a whole lot of other stuff, that cold exterior built up as a defense mechanism against a world that is stupid, and that for whatever reason the Boomers keep running. Meaning sure, we like to say never mind, but we also sang “Don’t You Want Me” and “Debaser.” So just take a chill pill. I promise we’ll talk about a rad magazine on today’s show.. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Best of PID: Tyler Brûlé (Founder: Monocle, Wallpaper*, more)
Apr 2400:52:08Tap to summarizeONE EYE ON THE WORLD — 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 (yet 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. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Heidi Saman (Editor: Seen)
Apr 2000:39:52Tap to summarizeTHE MAGAZINE'S THE THING — When you chat with a filmmaker who has become a magazine editor you start to note the parallels between filmmaking and magazine making that you never considered before. Ok, that I hadn’t considered before. The relationship between editors and art directors, and the relationship between a director and cinematographer, well, that’s actually almost the same thing. Editors and writers. Editors and actors. Copy editors and film editors. On and on. It’s uncanny. Seen is a magazine about the art of film and filmmaking that comes from BlackStar Projects, home of an annual film festival in Philadelphia and a creative space that “uplifts the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists.” Seen grew out of the program notes for the festival and it is everything cinema magazines used to be: thorough, intellectually stimulating, challenging. Heidi Saman, the editor, trained as a film maker and then worked at Fresh Air for over a decade. She doesn’t come from the magazine world. But she’s a storyteller. And after you listen to our chat, you, too, will see, perhaps, that making a magazine is a lot like making a movie. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Best of PID: Stella Bugbee (Editor: The New York Times Styles, more)
Apr 1000:51:49Tap to summarizeA STYLE ALL HER OWN — Maggie Bullock: Last month, the big, bad headline in the world of women’s media was the shuttering of the groundbreaking feminist website Jezebel. We’ve since learned that Jezebel could be revived, but who even knows what that means? Regardless, the “closure” unleashed a wave of mourning, even among magazine fanatics like us who’ve become a little bit inured to the decimation of the legacy magazines that Jezebel was invented to skewer. Rachel, Jezebel was supposed to be the radical “antidote to the establishment”—and it didn’t have to contend with the print and circulation costs that sink bigger ships. When that topples, you have to ask yourself: What era of women’s media are we in now? Rachel Baker: That’s what makes it such an interesting time to talk to Stella Bugbee. Ask any 30- or 40-something today about the one women’s media brand that is absolutely a daily must-read, and she will say New York magazine’s The Cut—the site that, starting in 2012, Stella built. The Cut was not just a women’s magazine re-sized for the internet, but a whole-cloth reinvention of the form. Jezebel (which was founded in 2007) was as much its forebear as the Elles and Vogues of the world: The Cut had the irreverence and voice-yness and political savvy of new media and the high-caliber production value of old media. And it was built to last: While we may have lost Jezebel, The Cut is still operating, more or less, on the blueprint that Stella created—and going strong. Maggie Bullock: What we’ve always found fascinating about Bugbee is that she started out as a designer—she worked at a creative agency and on the visual side of a ton of cool indie magazines (like Interview and Topic) and had a stint at The New York Times before becoming the design director of the original Domino. But then when that magazine folded, she somehow totally switched teams, becoming an editor and a really great writer. I can’t think of anybody else who did that, can you? It's no surprise that The New York Times tried for years to get Stella to come to run the Styles desk. Somehow, the middle of the pandemic—when most of the Times was still working remotely, when she was unable to meet her team in person—felt like the right time for her? Rachel Baker: Now I think you can really see the Stella touch in the way they package their stories. Like, a couple weeks ago, when the section ran a cover story titled, “Ozempic vs. Thanksgiving.” The idea sounds almost obvious, but I’d argue that it’s a masterclass in headline writing—it demonstrates a specific Bugbee-an ability to survey the culture and zero in on the thing everyone is thinking about—like when Styles spotlighted the “girl dinner” over the summer. My group texts are still full of photos of “cheese plates for one,” how about yours? Maggie Bullock: Totally. So should we stop yammering so folks can listen to what Stella has to say? Rachel Baker: Let’s do it. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →David Wolf (Editor: The Guardian Long Read)
Apr 300:42:52Tap to summarizeTHE JOY OF READING — Newspapers are in trouble and that’s not news to you. Print is expensive, the ads moved to Facebook and Google, the classifieds bled over to Craigslist. You know all this. So, hats off to the newspapers that succeed today. And the ones that do, the big ones, the legacy media, have a surprising thing in common: magazines. The New York Times. The Times of London. Le Monde. Germany. Italy. All over Asia. A lot of them produce print magazines as editorial add ons, supplements, not just for reader loyalty and engagement, but as a way to expand inventory for advertisers and a way to diversify business and the brand. That’s what The Guardian newspaper is doing and, being The Guardian, they are also doing it differently than their competitive set. How? By taking an existing feature of the newspaper, The Long Read, and reproducing their favorites in a stand alone magazine. A kind of greatest hits package if you will. Well designed. Very printy. Heavy stock. Debossed covers. So why do it? Who benefits? What is the business rationale behind it? To answer those questions, I spoke to David Wolf, the editor of The Long Read, the section and the magazine, about these topics and, mostly, about the joys of immersive storytelling, the state of journalism today, and the absolute joy of long reads in a world of shortened attention spans and general slop. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Best of PID: Robert Priest (Designer: Daily Beast, Cosmo, Marie Claire, more)
Mar 2701:02:24Tap to summarizeAN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK — If you can count yourself among the lucky ones who’ve met Robert Priest in person, any chance you remember what you were wearing? Well, fear not: He does. According to his business partner, the designer Grace Lee, Priest possesses a near-photographic memory of how people present themselves. And those first impressions last a lifetime. To hear him talk, though, it’s not at all about being judgy. Priest is just naturally consumed with all things visual. He has been since childhood. (He gets it from his mother). To him, design is everything. Priest has dedicated his 50-plus-year career to the relentless pursuit of taste, style, and fashion. And it shows. He has led design teams at all of the big magazines: GQ, House & Garden, InStyle, Newsweek, and Esquire (Twice!) But there’s another side to Robert Priest. He’s a huge sports fan. And designing magazines is his sport. Indeed, like a head coach, he’s hired to win. And the trophies in this case are readership, advertising, circulation, and buzz—and when that’s all taken care of, the design awards start to pile up—they certainly have for him. We talked to Priest about his early days in London, when he—and The Beatles and the Rolling Stones—were just getting started, about why soccer is the real football, and the rise and fall of one of the biggest magazine launches in history, Condé Nast Portfolio. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Sarah Ingram (Founder: ArtBar)
Mar 2000:42:53Tap to summarizeAN ART BAR FOR EVERYONE — ArtBar is the perfect name for ArtBar magazine and that’s not always the case with the names of magazines. Founded by photographer and filmmaker Sarah Ingram in LA, ArtBar is like a dive bar for artists and their art. It’s democratic in its tastes, and wide in its scope. And fun. Sarah wanted to hang with artists and so she created a space for them. Literally. From a recent editorial: "Art Bar is a hole in the wall where the graffiti artists, punks and poets, filmmakers, philosophers, painters, photographers, musicians, and wild-eyed creatures find themselves at the end of the day to tell our stories and share our work." So. A dive bar. And that bar was going to be in print. And she wanted to get the magazine in your hands no matter where you lived. ArtBar is widely distributed, available on newsstands, and seeks more. Sarah wants to create a community, of course, all editors do, but she also wants to create a community of indie magazine folk. She wants to break things and rules and invite like-minds to her art bar and hang out and see some cool stuff and do some cool things. Think I’m taking the dive bar thing too far? Here’s that editorial again: "We wanted to foster a place to gather, a common ground to share the stories of our human experiences and how they shape our work. This is a place where we can break things, break rules, get our hands dirty." I wasn’t joking. I may joke about a lot of things but not about a magazine set up like a dive bar for artists. Are you kidding? Doesn’t this sound like a place you might want to hang for a bit? Can you tell I love dive bars? — This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
Transcribe →Best of PID: Joanna Coles (Editor: Daily Beast, Cosmo, Marie Claire, more)
Mar 1701:03:28Tap to summarizeTHE LAST CELEBRITY MAGAZINE EDITOR — Maggie Bullock: It’s 2016. Rachel and I are sitting at our desks on the 24th floor of the Hearst Tower working at Elle magazine when the glass double doors blow open—or at least that’s how I remember it—and a vision of white-blonde hair, metallic pants, and checkerboard platforms, breezes into the office speaking in a commanding British accent to two or three minions in her wake. There are no cameras in sight, but it’s as if we’re watching a grand entrance and a reality TV show. You can almost feel the wind machines in the air, which is what it’s like pretty much any time you witness a Joanna Coles appearance in the corridors of Hearst. There’s just something cinematic about her. Rachel Baker: Joanna started her career as a reporter in London, moving to New York in the late 1990s to be The Guardian’s New York bureau chief. Next, she shifted into editing. First, as an articles editor at New York magazine, then over to More magazine. By 2006, she grabbed hold of the editor-in-chiefship at Marie Claire, part of Hearst, and in 2012 became the editor-in-chief of the company’s largest title, Cosmopolitan. Maggie Bullock: By the time she strode into the Elle offices in 2016, she was much more than an editor. She was also a reality TV star, a television producer, an author, a public speaker, a driving force of the “girl boss” movement, besties with Sheryl Sandberg, and a celebrity in her own right, who famously ran meetings from the helm of a treadmill walking desk. Rachel Baker: The Jo-Co who walked into our office in 2016 had been newly-crowned as Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines—the first to hold the title—and tasked with consolidating the creative side of the 100-year-old publishing giant in the new digital-first era. Maggie and I are a longtime print editors, so you can imagine how that sounded to us. But even through our fear goggles, we could also see that Joanna was ready to do the necessary surgery that other print editors didn’t have the stomach for, so that legacy magazines might live to see another day. Maggie Bullock: Joanna was certainly the most famous women’s magazine editor at Hearst at that time. But what wasn’t clear back then, and is undeniable now, is that she was the last of her breed. There was a rich history of iconic women’s magazine editors that came before Joanna, but can you think of an iconic, larger-than-life one that came after her? Rachel Baker: Joanna left Hearst in 2018, roughly around the same time that both Maggie and I did, and today she’s a board member for major tech companies like Sonos and Snapchat and an executive producer for major Hollywood projects, including an upcoming Amazon series starring Priyanka Chopra. And she is, as ever, a baller. Setting up our interview, with what lesser individuals might call a “personal assistant,” but Joanna has anointed Chief Get-It-Done Officer, when we met JC via Zoom, she was without pretense or treadmill desk. She was disarmingly down to earth. Maggie Bullock: And yet somehow she still emanated that chutzpah or moxie—or maybe we should bring back the word “pizazz” to describe it. The X-factor that, in a 44-floor media empire brimming with big egos and considerable talent, made her one of media’s biggest stars.ng. — This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press. A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025
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