While passion might get a print issue started, operational rigour is what keeps the lights on. My latest guest, Megan Wray Schertler has mastered the art of that tension.

Splitting her time between Berlin, New York and Reykjavik, Megan spent her early career at cult titles like Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman and Interview Magazine before co-founding her own magazine business consultancy, In Real Life Media.

Megan defines modern magazines as both a signal of discernment to build audience trust, and a valuable cultural archive.

Our conversation explores how titles can thrive not just through smart distribution, but through building unique worlds that both founders and fandoms themselves are excited to be part of. And it all starts with “knowing your why.”

• Megan hosts the all-woman panel at IRL Media’s Print-First Futures, an event celebrating innovation in the print magazine industry, on March 20 at Head Hi in Brooklyn, NY.

• Read Megan’s piece for Huck Magazine about physical magazines making a comeback.

• Follow ⁠inreallife.media on Instagram⁠.

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My latest guest is Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter.

Alongside helping creators bring their dream literary projects to life, Oriana’s also written and edited for Vice, MTV News Slate and many more. Her first book, Brooklyn Spaces: 50 Hubs of Culture and Creativity , grew out of a multi-year project capturing the rise and fall of under-the-radar creative spaces across New York City.

My favourite parts of our conversation land on definitions of publishing success, cultivating your audience (note, these two things are correlated), books as identity signals, and the evolving self-publishing landscape as an influence on more traditional publishing models.

Provided you have the reach, the ceiling for niche publishing is “endlessly high,” which is where you can calibrate the level of your ambitions.

Lastly, don’t guess. Ask. Nurturing an empathetic relationship with your audience and “asking your people what they want” is sometimes overlooked, but it’s one of the most practical strategies any creator can adopt. As Oriana tells me, “they just might surprise you.”

Episode image photo credit: Kirsten Nicolaisen

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In conversation with Max Leonard, Publisher and Creative director at Isola Press. Max creates award-winning photo books and stories of adventures that explore place, space, culture and history.

We discuss the publishing (and self-publishing) industry with reference to Max’s 2024 book with Henry Iddon, Mountain style: British Outdoor Clothing 1953-2000, and his new book, One Ride Away.. the memoir of legendary mountain bike pioneer, Tom Ritchey, out this spring 2026.

We talk about the on-going value of social media in community-building and project funding, championing British outdoor brands, and the current status of the non-fiction book market alongside podcasts and audiobooks.

Max explains how imposing limits on the scope of your own projects allows space for the story that sits behind them. Each of Max’s books documents an evolving outdoors culture, his own narrative always landing somewhere in the vastness of the mountains.

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London-based Laura Bryan is Insight Director at Spring Studios. With a background in design and luxury fashion communications, she has worked across various research and cultural strategy roles from Jump Innovation to Discover AI.

Laura’s essay on the theme of ‘quiet disobedience’ and ‘small acts of rebellion’ for the School of Critical Design was published last year. Those ideas feel like they gain momentum the more we explore what it means to question society’s status quo.

We discuss strategic creative processes, and IRL brand-adjacent experiences (print, events, live reads). Laura explains case studies from fine jewellery to no-alcohol, using macro/micro trend signalling, in-field work and identifying intersections of culture and category to uncover truths that resonate with audiences.

My favourite idea here is that no research is wasted. A past rabbit hole (trust me, I have many) can that bring depth to new projects.   

More broadly, Laura’s ideas around ‘interconnectedness’ frame strategy as divergent thinking and pattern-matching, with nuance and human connection at its core. 

There are no binaries here. Laura blends commercial acumen, with experience-honed instinct and real-world research.

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Steve Watson, Director at Stack Magazines, has been in the “magazine club” business for 17 years. One thing hasn’t changed. Whenever he thinks he’s checked out every Stack-coded indie mag on the scene, “another one pops up,” whack-a-mole-style.

And while the print landscape’s been “challenging” for what feels like forever, he admits that’s still a good problem to have.

Steve doesn't make value judgments around print or digital. He calls both mediums ‘tools,’ and in the creative context of magazines, he sees them a vessel for ideas, explaining the inherent friction and human-led serendipity of print.

Steve’s a proactive champion of excellent writing wherever it’s found. His latest project, The Mortar, builds a new home for storytelling curated from the best publishers around the globe.

Subscribe to ⁠Stack Magazines⁠, follow ⁠@StackMagazines⁠.

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New Niche ID incoming! We’re kicking off Season Two by looking at how print and analogue media anchors us.

My first guest is Kaye Symington, CMO at ⁠Newspaper Club⁠, an on-demand printing service for creatives and brands to build their own newspapers, zines, and print projects, plus design support to get their work out there, in a tactile, tangible format.

Kaye understands her audience, and sees print as a tool for memory-making, connection and celebration. She talks print-first, global brand collaborations as well as print-as-play projects.

Kaye is also the co-founder and co-organiser of the ⁠⁠Glasgow Print Fair⁠⁠, an annual IRL celebration of print that attracts creatives from around the globe, and reflects a growing appetite for offline storytelling. "It’s such a funny project and it's a total labour of love," she says.

Dive into this one and explore the future of connection as tactile, sensory, and made of paper. Beyond the page too, it’s about the people who bring it together.

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The first season of the Niche ID podcast wraps for 2025. To celebrate, here's a short episode including some compelling ideas that stayed with me long after each edit.

When I started this series, the tagline was, "The choices we make when we build for a creative life." But guest Jozef White, sums it up better by saying, “It’s like doing an ethnography of the thing while you’re inside of it.”

And that’s exactly what this year’s felt like. While conversations with creatives documented their choices, I recognised a lot of similar themes from my own life.

From the fractured nature of the modern niche, to how conviction acts as the only reliable compass. We explore the subconscious, subjectivity, co-ownership and the vital need for ‘play’ without a deadline. Support networks embolden us to take bigger risks. Thanks for being part of it.

New episodes dropping January 2026.

Refs for this episode:

⁠The Anthropocene Reviewed⁠

⁠The Dark Forest Collective⁠

⁠"How acting small can make us better" Sociology of Business [paid]⁠

⁠Eileen Myles on Pathetic Literature⁠

G. Klasek’s journey jumps from Dunning-Kruger to Sisyphus, Hunter S. Thompson to Adam Curtis. Cultish beginnings led to leaving school in 8th grade and a lifetime of exploration. Not your standard desk-based creative – after reinventing herself through “hundreds of jobs,” G found her niche as a global field researcher, consultant and strategist. This conversation spans both the challenges of sustaining a true ethnography practice in a scale-obsessed world, and G’s one-of-a-kind creation story.

N.B: G is also a musician and phonographer – or, in her words, “a collector of sounds.” This episode includes an extract from one of her tracks, plus an endearingly off-beat collection from her archive , including a subway accordion in Berlin, the bag carousel at JFK and an energetic sermon at the 16th St Baptist church, Alabama.

G’s consulting, brand strategy and in-field research at Yours in panic. You can also find G on Linkedin here.

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London-based Owen Booth, author of What We’re Teaching Our Sons and The All True Adventures...of Daniel Bones, is "low-key obsessed with Frankenstein." 

Which, coincidentally, makes this episode perfect listening for spooky season.

Owen’s short story (with a long title), Frankenstein's Monster is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences, took the Moth short story prize in 2020 and has been adapted for the stage "entirely by accident” more than once (premiering at the Origin Theatre Festival in New York, 2023). 

Owen's formative influences – vintage horror movies, and Stephen King’s exploration of fright fiction in Danse Macabre set the tone for a conversation that stumbles delightfully from horror to comedy.

We settle the score between art vs. craft, bouncing from the inside of Mark E. Smith’s head to True Grit, the perils of PowerPoint (see Play from Current Slide⁠), the pleasure of live readings, and a writing process that lets Owen's “subconscious out to play.”  

You’ll probably learn (and definitely laugh) with this one. And if you’re new to Owen’s work, check it out – whether by accident or design, it’s excellent stuff.

Find Owen on his site

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Roya Shariet pitched to Emily Weiss, founder of Glossier, on the streets of New York, back in 2018. It changed her world. “I got a job offer for a job that didn’t exist, with no job description, to lead social impact at Glossier.” Don’t you just love it when that happens?

She stayed for almost seven years – through the wildly successful launch of the You fragrance and the inception of Glossier’s partnership with the WNBA. Heads up, beauty x sport fans – that partnership’s still going strong, five years later. 

Today, an Iranian-American cookbook and a hundred thousand followers on TikTok later, Roya's still building out spaces that intersect her passions – beauty, sport, fragrance, and food. 

We chat about leveraging fandoms through Glossier x WNBA, the importance of storytelling in fragrance, and the (frankly, wild) amount of work that goes into nailing that ‘undone’ look. But we also explore the art of making your own luck – which, as Roya explains, tends to strike big when you’re brave enough to ask.

Roya’s links: Consumed⁠ Substack, Maman and Me: Recipes from our Iranian American Family⁠, Roya’s Insta⁠, Roya’s Cooking Insta⁠

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