Stack Magazines

Rob Orchard is one of the founders and editors of Delayed Gratification magazine, and one of the authors of Misc., a new book they published earlier this month. If you’re a long-time listener to our podcast you might remember that I spoke to Rob three years ago, when the first Delayed Gratification book was published, and as you’ll hear, Misc. has been shaped in large part by that experience. This new book is smaller, cheaper, and more deliberately created for people buying Christmas gifts, but none of that changes the fact that the book market is incredibly competitive and a really tough place to make money. Or as he puts it, “When you publish a book, you buy a ticket in a lottery”.

Magculture Live is coming up fast (Thursday 7th November, at the Vitsoe shop here in London) so I took the opportunity to sit down with Magculture founder Jeremy Leslie and have a long chat about magazine stuff. We spoke about some of the high-profile magazines, like Vice and The Onion, which have recently returned to print. We spoke about changes in magazine design trends, and the forces that can influence those decisions. And there was a lot of love for Richard Turley and his many print projects.

Nicolas Kemper is publisher of New York Review of Architecture, the big, two-colour, newsprint magazine that has become renowned for its long, critical, entertaining essays about architecture and the city. He gave the first talk of the weekend at this year’s Indiecon and I loved his enthusiasm for all parts of publishing – not just the fun stuff like writing, editing, and throwing parties, but also what he calls, “building pipes”; making sure that things like their subscription management and contributor invoicing systems run as efficiently as possible. We're playing his Indiecon talk for this episode of the Stack podcast, so you can hear the story of how he and the team are building through their versions of the magazine.

Viêt and Jeremy Raider-Hoàng are the founders, editors and creative directors of No One, a new magazine that explores the queer nightlife of a different city each issue. It feels natural to marry the subjects of nightlife and queer culture, and you can tell there are big, serious ideas behind their impulse to document the hedonistic fun they see around them.

For this first episode of the new season I’ve got a conversation with Kat, the woman who makes Moan, a magazine of sensuality and eroticism that prioritises the female gaze. It has a lot of explicit imagery, but it’s definitely not pornographic, and in fact there’s something about the risograph print and production that makes it feel like more of an art book than anything else. Hear what she has learned from publishing the magazine for the last five years, and how she's planning on taking it to the next level.

Ellie Jackson is the editor-in-chief and creative director of The Movement Movement, the women’s sports magazine that is committed to broadening our understanding of what sports coverage should look like. Issue one came out a few weeks ago, but that was preceded by issue zero, which came out in 2022, and in this episode she speaks about the delay between the two issues, and the struggle to stay on track when life gets in the way.

Steph Chung is managing partner at Racquet, the New York-based magazine that takes a fresh, anti-elitist look at the world of tennis. There have been some big changes since the last issue, with editor David Shaftel and art director Larry Buchanan both leaving the magazine, and a more commercial emphasis across the pages, with a big Gucci photo shoot on the cover and inside, and a partnership with Seoul-based cultural creators Ssoldot. It’s all part of a plan to take advantage of what Steph calls, “the convening power of the magazine”, and in this conversation she outlines their plan for making it more commercially successful, while expanding further into events, merchandise, and other activities based around tennis.

Zuzana Kvetková is executive editor of Backstage Talks, the magazine that grew out of Bratislava’s By Design Conference. Their new issue will be landing in shops very soon, and as she explains in this podcast, it marks something of a watershed. Because after 10 years they’ve decided that it’s time to stop running the conference, which in turn prompts lots of questions about what the magazine should be.

Yuto Miyamoto is editor of Troublemakers, a new Tokyo-based interview magazine that fills its pages with ordinary people living variously extraordinary lives. It’s a very personal magazine – he makes it with his wife, Manami Inoue, who is the art director, and interviewees are photographed at home, with lots of space dedicated to exploring their thoughts and beliefs. They're stretching the dictionary definition of 'troublemakers', and having some fun along the way.

Tom Rowley runs the Backstory bookshop in Balham in South London. He was previously a journalist for The Telegraph and The Economist, which he describes as his dream job, but when the pandemic knocked everything sideways he decided it was time to reassess and follow his other dream of running a bookshop. As he puts it, though, he felt the pull of ink in his veins, and started publishing Backstory magazine, which allows him to dig into the stories behind the stories in the books that he loves, reflecting on the experience of reading and writing.

Lucy Roeber is editor and publisher of the Erotic Review, a magazine that became particularly well known as a bimonthly title in the late 90s and early 2000s. It had since switched to publishing online and it was going to close altogether, and in this episode she tells how she set out to bring it back as a fully-fledged print magazine. In her hands it has become a lovely, thick literary magazine, aimed at an international readership and dedicated to reaching, “outside the embarrassed parameter” to explore the rich subject of desire.

Conor Foran is editor of Dysfluent, a magazine based on his experience of stammering, which aims to become a publication of stammering pride. Using a custom typeface with letters that get stretched out, or chopped up and repeated, Dysfluent aims to reflect the sound of a stammer, representing individuals' voices as closely as possible.

For the entire time I've worked in magazines, I've been told that print is dead. But what does that actually mean? And why has the idea endured for so long? I took a deep dive into the death of print to see if I could figure out what's going on, and what that means for the future of magazines and digital media.

Olivia Crandall and Elena Foraker are editors of Not Here to Make Friends, a lovely, thoughtful, almost scholarly journal about reality TV. In this episode, they speak about wanting to engage completely with their subject matter, embracing both the good and the bad, and using this much maligned television genre as a way of understanding what’s going on in society more broadly.

Erin Rimmer and Simon Doherty are two of the founders of Roughcast, a brilliantly abrasive, punk-inspired magazine that’s here to shake up what it calls the “dull pastiche” of British media. It’s a passion project run by a group of friends, but it also has some big ideas about the way media works, particularly relating to freelancers, and the urgent need to find a way of publishing that doesn't depend on the routine exploitation of junior writers, photographers and artists.

Natassa Pappa is editor-in-chief and creative director of Desired Landscapes, the pocket-sized magazine that brings a fresh and philosophical perspective to travel writing. Natassa is based in Athens, but she was over in London recently for a talk at the Magculture shop, so we met up the following day and went for a walk on Hampstead Heath to talk about her radically subjective approach to travel.

Lina Fadel is one of the poetry editors at The Other Side of Hope, a magazine that centres around journeys in refugee and immigrant literature. It’s partly a literary magazine and partly a community project, because as she explains in this episode, it’s all about bringing people together and providing a platform for voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard.

"I was just hanging out with my algorithm and it got a little claustrophobic..." Daniela Rodriguez is editor-in-chief, designer and illustrator of Superstars Only, a brilliantly personal magazine that she makes with her boyfriend Adrian Tiu and a few close friends in New York. As you’ll hear, Daniela is incredibly self-effacing and the magazine itself has a lovely lowbrow charm, but it’s also really quite experimental and exciting, and I was interested to hear her describing the process she goes through in making an issue, and the special magic that she feels print brings to the project.

Recorded live at the Shifting Landscapes event in London on Saturday 2nd December, this conversation features Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, executive editor of Emergence, and Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters, founders of Studio Airport and designers of Emergence. Emmanuel has been on the Stack podcast before speaking about making Emergence magazine at the meeting point of climate, environment, spirituality and humanity, and in this discussion we broaden the focus to encompass Emergence's podcasts, films, immersive exhibitions and more.

We don't have many business to business magazines on the Stack podcast, but I'm making an exception for the Grub Street Journal because it's a magazine about magazines, and while it's ostensibly a trade magazine for the print publishing industry, it takes great joy in playing around with the sort of editorial tone that other B2B publishers would never try. As you'll hear, publisher Peter Houston and editorial director Joanna Cummings have loads of experience working across a wide range of contract publishing and newsstand titles, and lots of love not just for magazines, but also the people who make them. "Magazine people are people too," Peter says at one point. "We're not just spreadsheets and KPIs and ad / editorial ratios."