Podcast: Ryan Fitzgibbon, Hello Mr magazine

The new look Hello Mr magazine launched this week, sporting a fresh and confident redesign and including a copy of Brunch Club, the first zine made under The Issues Residency, Hello Mr’s exciting new hothouse for promoting LGBT publishing talent.

Of course there’s nothing particularly surprising about a magazine redesigning, but it normally happens when the editor and art director are feeling like they need to freshen things up. By contrast, editor-in-chief Ryan Fitzgibbon says that things were going just fine with Hello Mr, but it was the trauma and shock that he and many others experienced after the shootings at the Pulse nightclub last year, which made him rethink his work publishing a gay magazine.

He was already midway through issue eight at the time, so he finished that and then took a break from the biannual publishing schedule to step back and reconsider his position. And as he explains in our conversation, the relaunch and his ambitious plans for a new generation of LGBT publishers are his response to the challenges and opportunities he sees around him.

I’ve been a big fan of Hello Mr for the last five years, and I’m really pleased to be starting our new season of the Stack podcast by speaking to Ryan. We recorded our interview during the Indiecon magazine conference in Hamburg last week, and we’ll release more episodes recorded at Indiecon over the next couple of weeks – if you’d like to hear those, make sure you follow us on Soundcloud or iTunes so we can deliver the episodes straight to you as soon as they’re ready. It’s good to be back!