The magazine about magazines
We don’t have many business to business magazines on the Stack site, 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. The theme of the latest issue is ‘Why Won’t Print Just Lie Down and Die’, which gives a decent indication of the knockabout, contrarian approach it likes to take to its stories.
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.”
It was great catching up with them, so I hope you’ll enjoy listening to this latest episode. At the end I mention that our next episode will be based around a conversation with Emergence Journal, which is happening this Saturday afternoon at the Oxo Tower here in London. The theme for the discussion will be the evolving medium of the magazine and tickets are free, so if you can make it over to that, book your space and I’ll see you there. Or, of course, if you follow us wherever you get your podcasts we’ll be able to deliver the audio to you as soon as it’s ready – hopefully in a couple of weeks’ time.
