Inside the New York Review of Architecture
We delivered the New York Review of Architecture to Stack subscribers in April this year, which means that last month two of the team dropped into our Stack Magazine Club to give us an insight into the making of the magazine. We were joined by deputy editor Chloe Wyma and associate publisher Nicholas Raap, and together they talked us through their insiders’ guide – see below for our video of the conversation.
The magazine is a worker-owned cooperative, which means that all full-time staff and some part-time are given the option to become part-owners of the business, and the pair returned to that fact several times throughout the conversation. It sounds like the flat structure helps to ensure that everybody knows what everybody else is doing, without the need for KPIs or other formal management, and it seems to contribute to the magazine’s general sense of mission: Everybody on the small team is passionately committed to achieving NYRA’s ambitious aims.
They also spoke interestingly about the focus of the magazine – as the title would suggest, the New York Review of Architecture covers architecture in New York, but it does much more than that too. As Chloe explained, she sees the two thematic parts of the magazine as offering “alibis” for one another, allowing the team to stretch out and cover more ground than you might expect. (After all, there are lots of stories here that are not about architecture, and lots that are not set in New York.)
I’m a massive fan of this big, clever, funny magazine, and it was fantastic sitting down to speak with them. We hold our Stack Magazine Club every month, so if you’d like to get closer to some of the world’s best independent magazines, sign up for our subscription club and we’ll start sending you our surprise magazines, and inviting you to speak with the people who made them.
