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

A MODERN FORM OF WORSHIP

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Name the five photographers who, more than any others, defined the dramatic shift in the approach to magazine photography in the late eighties and early nineties. There’s Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel. Richard Avedon, of course. 

Who’s missing? I’m getting to that.

Today’s guest was discovered while still a student at ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, by Andy Warhol no less, whose upstart (and budget-deficient) team at "Interview" couldn’t afford to send a crew to LA for a shoot. His first subject, newbie director Steven Spielberg, launched his photography career, and soon he was shooting for every magazine you could imagine.

We’re talking, of course, about Matthew Rolston. He, and his fellow rebels, changed everything by bringing both a sensuality and a sexuality to newsstands that big publishing hadn’t seen before. Readers ate it up. Ask him to explain this transformation and you’ll get a hot take that will completely change how you think about media and celebrity:

“I think glamour—and glamour photography—is a substitute for god and goddess worship. The altar is the photo studio. So the goddess comes to the dressing room like she would’ve come to the preparation chamber of a temple. She’s anointed with oils and potions—that would be the hair and makeup team. She’s dressed in symbolic raiment—that would be the styling. And she’s led to the altar where the adherents kneel before her—that would be me on the floor with my camera. It is really the same thing. It’s just a modern, twisted version of the same impulses that we have to idolize people and worship them.” 

Just this year ArtCenter, his alma mater, presented the photographer, director, author, artist, and educator with its prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring both his creative legacy and his role as a mentor to the next generation. It’s the perfect moment to look back on his remarkable career, and to hear directly from Rolston himself.

Our Anne Quito caught up with Matthew in the lead up to the premiere of an evocative new body of work, "Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits," a site-specific installation at ArtCenter, which premieres this weekend.

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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

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

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Josh Jones has done a lot of things when it comes to magazines: Editor. Writer. Maker. Custom publisher. Mentor. Evangelist. All of the above. 

Has Josh helped write a book about hip hop in Mongolia? Yes. Has he sat back and watched Gordon Ramsey mash his face into a sandwich? Indeed. Has he written an instructive how to book that reminds the reader to always lift a box of magazines by bending one’s knees? Yes, again. 

For more than 20 years, Josh has been creating magazines, both for resolutely indie concerns and reasons, but also custom publications for the likes of The North Face, Red Bull, Interscope and Nike. And while he has no illusions about the challenges the industry faces, he’s also resolutely optimistic about a world that he loves, so much so that his “field guide to publishing an indie magazine” Just Make Your Magazine is, true to its subhead, the “fastest selling self help book.” OK, I don’t know if that’s true. It probably isn’t if I’m being honest. 

But still. You speak to him and you become an optimist. And this is not just because, as he says in the book, “indie magazine making has never been more popular.”

It’s also because, and perhaps caught up in the same optimism, I suggest that it’s possible we are over the Print Panic of the mid aughts and the industry, as a whole, is now back on a sustained kind of upswing. That’s an idea we’re going to explore on the show this season. Because there has to be some things that are right in the world, damnit.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

GUARDIAN AT THE GATEFOLD

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Today’s guest has become almost synonymous with graphic design and editorial publishing. His career began in the defiant New York “sex press” of the late 1960s, where not-actually-that-surprisingly, as a teenager he was already art-directing magazines like Screw and The New York Review of Sex. That unlikely starting point gave him a rare education in the power of design to command attention and shape meaning.

We’re talking about designer, author, editor, educator, and true legend, Steven Heller.

Heller went on to spend more than three decades at The New York Times, most memorably as art director of The New York Times Book Review. There, he transformed the visual life of the section, commissioning bold, original illustration and making the case—over and over again—that design is not ornamental but integral to editorial voice. Through his advocacy, he helped elevate the status of designers in publishing offices, giving visual thinkers a seat at the table alongside editors and writers.

Beyond the newsroom, Heller has been prolific almost to the point of obsession. He has written, edited, or co-authored more than two hundred books on design, creating an extraordinary record of the field’s history, ideas, and influences. And most recently, he turned that critical eye inward with his memoir, Growing Up Underground, a candid account of his early years in New York’s counterculture publishing scene.

Steve is a practitioner, a chronicler, and an advocate for design—and he’s also part of the team here at Magazeum. We are thrilled to turn the mic on him for this special conversation.

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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 REST OF THE STORY

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Most people in the world live in what we in the west sometimes dismissively call the “rest of the world.” Depending on where you live, “the rest” probably includes parts, if not all, of Latin America, Africa, and the vast majority of Asia. Much like the tendency of Americans to call the champions of their sports leagues “world champions,” the word “world” is never what it seems.

Except when it is.

Founded as a non-profit by Sophie Schmidt in 2020, Rest of World is meant to challenge the “expectations about whose experiences with technology matter,” as its mission states. With a global editorial team led by today’s guest Anup Kaphle, Rest of World’s emphasis on the technological transformation of the daily lives of billions of people is eye-opening, educational, entertaining, and fills in the gaps in our general understanding of how technology is used everywhere. When it won a National Magazine Award last year, one sensed that it had finally arrived to a broader audience.

The rest of the world is a big place, perhaps too big for a paper magazine. That’s why Rest of World is digital.

Those in the “west” would be better served by understanding it. Because everything and everyone is, ultimately, connected.

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

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025