NO RESERVATIONS

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Welcome to a new season of The Full Bleed. This year, we’re going to be talking to makers and creators, of course, but also more about the business of magazines. Because, let’s face it, making a magazine is not easy. It never has been. But we’re seeing more and more magazines—in print—out in the world and there’s a reason for that. At a time where the digital world is a messy place, and that’s being polite, magazines are perfectly positioned as a part of an “analog” wave that is going to become more and more important in the media and in marketing.

We open the season with Nathan Thornburgh from Roads & Kingdoms, a media brand that started out as a media brand—stay with me here—with the support of Anthony Bourdain, yes, that one, and then pivoted to becoming a kind of gastronomic tour company with loads of content on their website, and has now published their first magazine. And it won’t be their last.

Travel, especially these days, is pure analog, a completely human experience. It touches the senses in a way not many things can. Think about Anthony Bourdain’s work and you think of how immersed he was everywhere he went. Whether he was writing about the reality of a kitchen or filming a meal of noodles at a roadside stand in Thailand, he was all in. His was a very human-centered media, full of sights and smells and sounds and people. And that’s what Roads & Kingdoms will try and replicate. On the page. On every page.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press.

Nathan Thornburgh (Cofounder: Roads & Kingdoms)