THE PURPOSE OF TRAVEL

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The world is adrift in travel magazines that tell you to go here and stay there, to order certain foods at “of-the-moment” restaurants. And when you go to these places you find yourself surrounded by other travelers like you, and the only locals you interact with are, maybe, the waiter, or your Airbnb host, or the tour guide taking you on a generic definitely-not-what-the-locals-do tour of the trendiest neighborhood in town. 

Or you might not even meet a local. Or ever stop looking at the screen on your phone.

You will have ticked items off your travel bucket list, but will you have actually traveled? Travel becomes consumption and as with all manner of consumption, you are never quite sated, and hey, there’s a media ecosystem out there to help you along.

And then there’s Ori. Founded by journalist Kade Krichko, Ori bills itself as a “travel, art and education platform” that allows local storytellers to tell their stories on a global scale. It is a magazine that understands travel is an experience first and foremost, and that traveling well means an immersion into people and places, an opportunity to grow and to heal.

It’s a magazine that assumes you should think about and experience the world around you, and that if you think about it and experience it enough, the world becomes a more interconnected and better place; it becomes a place of wonder.

And isn’t that why we travel?

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

PART OF THE STORY

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Susan Casey has won National Magazine Awards for editing, writing, and design—a feat that may well be unprecedented in the industry’s history.

In her native Canada, they call people like this “Wayne Gretzky.”

She has worked—under various titles—for the following magazines: The Globe & Mail, Outside, Time, Esquire, eCompany, Business 2.0, Sports Illustrated Women, National Geographic, Fortune, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She also worked for the iconic 1990s fashion brand Esprit. 

These days—literally on any given day—you’re likely to find Casey in the water, where she spent much of her childhood, later with the swim team at the University of Arizona, and, as an adult, as the author of four immersive books—all best sellers—about the ocean: The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean; The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks; Voices in the Ocean: A Journey Into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins; and her most recent, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

A self-proclaimed “outspoken designer” early in her career, she refused to accept the career path limits others imposed and instead laid the groundwork for a rich creative life.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

FOOD IS FOR EVERYONE

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That meal your grandmother always cooked. Or your mother. Or your father, for that matter. The odors that permeated a kitchen or the entire house. The first taste. The idea of comfort food.

So much of who we are and what we remember are about food, sure, but also about place, and most definitely about the person doing the cooking.

While many food magazines go beyond food to create the context about the recipes they print, writer and editor Kyle Yoshioka felt they lacked the backstories that make food about more than taste or trends or wine accompaniments. And with no experience in the form, he was part of a team in Portland, Oregon that decided to launch Provecho, a magazine all about the backstories, and especially the culture and communities, behind each and every ingredient that goes into each and every lovingly created dish. And without a single recipe.

Provecho, then, is not really a food magazine at all, but a cultural review that uses food as a focal point. It’s anthropology that tastes good. One that is, in its own way, creating a community all its own.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

LOST IN TRANSLATOR

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There are more than 7,000 languages in the world and there’s a good chance that you don’t speak or read most of them. Being an English-language speaker is, among other things, a huge privilege in this multilingual world because while it may not be the most widely spoken first language, English is the language that is most widely spoken.

There’s a chance that you can get by in English almost everywhere. And so English speakers tend not to learn other languages. To their detriment. (And to the resentment of others. But that’s another story.)

Not all of the world’s 7,000 languages are robust enough to support their own media. But guess what—there’s a lot of media in this world that isn’t created in English. Enter Translator, a magazine of translated journalism and reportage from around the world for, “the open-minded and the language-curious.”

And in a world where much of our media is controlled by fewer and fewer people, this kind of wider view of what others are saying and thinking is, perhaps, more necessary than ever. 

Maybe the only surprising thing about Translator is that it wasn’t created … sooner.”

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

AN ELEGY FOR THE ELITE

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Michael Grynbaum is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he has covered media, politics, and culture for 18 years. He’s reported on three presidential campaigns, two New York City mayors—they're always so boring—and the transformation of the media world in the Trump era. He lives in Manhattan and he’s a graduate of Harvard.

His first book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America, was published by Simon & Schuster in June, 2025. In the book, Michael chronicles the origins of the company, its go-go boom days in the eighties and nineties, and its more recent post-print transformation into whatever Condé Nast is these days. We’ll figure that out later.

Michael’s bestseller captured a lot of attention when it was published—it’s a bestseller and it’s the latest in the line of books by and about Condé Nast magazine makers—full of great anecdotes and good stories. The kind of stuff we love here on Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!), and it’s extremely readable.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

POP GOES PRINT

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“Today, creativity feels like it’s being squeezed into smaller and smaller boxes. Content is designed to chase likes, rack up views, serve a clear function—a purpose….we’re here—to celebrate creativity for creativity’s sake, no strings attached. Analog isn’t dead; it’s the new rebellion.”

This manifesto is a part of a striking editorial in the first issue of Playground, a new magazine created out of Singapore by Pop Mart, the maker of the Labubu. I honestly never thought I would a) write that kind of sentence in my life, and b) understand it, but here we are. It’s 2025! If  you’re unfamiliar with PopMart you are unfamiliar with one of the largest creative companies in the world, one valued almost as much as Disney or Nintendo. 

Playground is an extraordinary editorial project, championed by creatives and executives in a company that claims its mission is to “light up passion” so that its brand can promote a “galaxy of creative possibilities.” Got all that? 

So by now you might be asking yourself a fundamental question: Why? Why this thing? And why print? Well, that same editorial anticipates this exact question:

“So, why print? Because print makes you pause. You can’t swipe past a paragraph in a magazine. You can’t multitask while turning a page. Print demands your attention and invites you to linger, to savor, to think…So here it is: our first issue. Take your time with it. Flip through the pages, spill some coffee on it if you must. Just don’t try to scroll.” 

Amen

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

SHE LOVES HER WORK

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The word ‘unicorn’ gets thrown around a lot these days. But in our book, Sarah Ball is the Real Deal. The editor of WSJ. Magazine is a student of old-guard, in-the-trenches, work-on-a-story-for-years magazine making, which has earned her cred among the Jim Nelsons and David Grangers of the biz.

She’s also a digital native with a flare for experimentation and a new media scrappiness. Sarah spent her career bridging those divides predominantly at Vanity Fair and GQ where she helped those titles join the digital revolution—much more stylishly and convincingly than many of her competitors.

Arguably more than any other editor of her generation, she brings print-era rigor, and also the romance of the whole magazine-making endeavor to digital-era reality. That's why when the Vanity Fair editor-in-chief job came open last spring, Sarah was right at the top of The Spread’s list for who should get the gig.

The wind blew a different way, as we all know by now, and she’s happy at WSJ. But when you listen to our chat, we think you'll get why our money is on her.

There’s a lot of pessimism in journalism these days for good reason, but we challenge you to listen to this conversation without getting just as swept up as we did in Sarah’s passion for magazines. It's almost enough to make us believe that print is not in fact dead. Not yet, at least..

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

A NEW RECIPE FOR FOOD MAGAZINES

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You may think a magazine called Famous for My Dinner Parties would be about food or entertaining—and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. You wouldn’t be wrong, but you also wouldn’t be right.

Taking its name from Robert Altman’s film, 3 Women, Famous for My Dinner Parties started as a pandemic-inspired digital project among three friends (Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenheim and Yannic Moeken) in Berlin and has evolved into a proper magazine and media brand, and along the way has won an engaged and broad audience far beyond Berlin. Something that continues to surprise the founders.

The magazine is slightly odd, if I’m being honest, idiosyncratic, thoroughly compelling, and undeniably beautiful. It’s also almost entirely done in house, including all the design, photography and writing. And despite this, or maybe because of it, the thing works. Whether or not this method—or lack of one—is sustainable is another question.

And just to be clear, there is not a single recipe in the magazine. Just a whole lot of ideas. This is a magazine then, editorially and conceptually, built around vibes. Fuel for a discussion, perhaps, at your next really great dinner party. Whether or not you aspire to any sort of fame.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

THE GOOD CITIZEN

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This episode is a special one for us here at Magazeum. We even gave it its own code name: “Project Rosebud” (IYKYK). But if you only know our guest as the grandson of the man who inspired the lead character in the film classic Citizen Kane and the founder of one of the largest publishing empires in the world, you are missing out. 

Will Hearst could have done the easy thing, but he chose not to. As the current chairman of the Hearst Corporation, Will balances stewardship of a sprawling media empire with a commitment to community and lasting value. Unlike the new breed of media moguls, his leadership is less about compliance and more about the continuing importance of fostering quality journalism rooted in place and purpose.

But aside from his role as a suit at the Hearst Corporation, Will’s labor of love is Alta—an indie quarterly that champions a distinct West Coast voice, providing a vital counterpoint to the East Coast lens that still dominates the national discourse.

Alta is crafted to be held and savored—he thinks of its subscribers as members more than a mailing list. In an age dominated by volume, speed, and algorithms, Will Hearst would like to remind us to slow down, listen deeply, and consume wisely. 

In times like these, his vision seems almost Quixotic—to see media as craft, culture as inheritance, and storytelling as something lasting. Nevertheless, he continues to charge, shaping a legacy both ancient and urgently new.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

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While it’s not true that kids don’t read, it may be true that adults aren’t teaching kids to read. It’s also true that today’s children face issues that those of the past didn’t. And the pandemic—there’s that word again—impacted everyone in ways we’re still figuring out, including kids. Perhaps especially kids.

There are, amazingly, and encouragingly, many new magazines for children of all ages now. One of them is Anyway, a magazine for tweens founded by two mothers—and long-time friends—who grew up loving magazines and, yes, were worried about their kids’ screen time. They also knew that tween issues weren’t being addressed properly and that a root cause of some of them was a media landscape that pushed consumers, no matter the age, into silos—or communities—where they could go through life unchallenged.

Go to the Anyway website and you are confronted with the slogan: “Growing up is hard. You can do it Anyway.“ This speaks to both kids and parents, another reality of a kids magazine that most magazines don’t have to face: you have two very specific markets—kids and their parents—and your readership will eventually age out. Meaning the marketing challenges never end even while reader loyalty does. What does that mean for a media brand?

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025