Stack Magazines

"I can't just put this on a hard drive – I have to do something about it..." Mari Oshaug is editor-in-chief and publisher of Bikevibe, the magazine that sets off for a different city each issue and reports on the cycling culture it finds there. Mari started the magazine in 2014 by accident – she was on holiday in Tokyo and found herself taking hundreds of photos of the bikes she saw on the streets, and realised that she wanted to actually do something with the pictures rather than just store them away and never look at them again. In this episode she talks about building her team and what they look for in the cities they cover, as well as the obvious problems that coronavirus has thrown in their path.

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Marketa Kinterova is editor-in-chief of Fotograf, the long-running Czech magazine of photography and contemporary art. We delivered their ‘New Utopias’ issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and in this conversation we get into some of the things that I really love about this brilliantly provocative and avant-garde magazine.

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"You can't wait for other people to change things for you..." Afsaneh Rafii is founder and editor-in-chief of Icarus Complex, the magazine that takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding climate change. In this episode we go right back to the start to speak about her initial impulse to make a magazine, through the process of publishing a first issue and her realisation that while she’d been working on that, several other groups of independent publishers had also been creating the launch issues of their own magazines about climate change.

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"The future is always contested..." Casper Skovgaard Petersen is editorial manager of Scenario, the quarterly magazine produced by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. As you’d expect, he has a lot to say about the various possible futures we might have waiting for us, and in this episode he speaks about the different techniques they use at the institute, challenging dominant narratives to look beyond what seems to be obvious or self-evident, and how they use those same techniques editorially in producing the magazine.

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"I think it's striving for... the America we hope we can be." Hannah Hirsh and Natasha Rao are two of the editors behind American Chordata, the literary and arts magazine that recently published its 10th issue, and which we sent to our subscribers in September. It’s always been operated by volunteers as a labour of love, with the team constantly changing, and Hannah and Natasha took over part of the way through the making of this latest issue. In this episode they speak about that process, what they have planned for the future, and what they see as the overall mission of American Chordata today.

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"We have a sane business model... you don't spend more than you have coming in." Matt Bors is editor and founder of The Nib, the magazine that uses comics to tell stories about some of the big, serious issues facing the world. The magazine launched online first, as one of the sites that were part of Medium in its early days, and in this conversation he explains how that relationship came to an end, and how he ended up working with First Look Media, another company with lots of money to spend, and how that also came to an end as their priorities shifted. These days Matt is running the whole thing entirely independently on what he calls a “sane business model”, funded by his readers, and I was really interested to hear his thoughts on the experience of working with those big, wealthy partners, compared to the business he runs today.

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"It really is like getting a tattoo; for better, for worse..." Asher Penn is the editor and founder of Sex Magazine, a title that publishes brilliantly personal Q&A interviews with artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative people (and no sex). In this conversation Asher explains how the magazine has evolved over the years, and how he has developed his characteristic style, which draws upon his interviewees’ life experiences as a way to understand their creative output.

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"I didn't want to only do one thing..." Bardia Koushan is editor and art director of Autodidact, the magazine that brings together work by a wide range of artists and creative people. The second issue came out a few weeks ago, themed around the idea of mistakes, and I really enjoyed speaking to him about the different types of mistakes they included, and particularly the mistakes he made while making the issue. I love it when magazine makers speak openly about the pitfalls of publishing, and as he says, “You can’t make an issue on mistakes and not embrace it yourself.”

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"The bathing community is something special – if you know you know..." Ekin Balcioglu and Steve Weiner are the founding editors of Hamam, a new magazine that celebrates the art and culture of bathing. Inviting readers inside the world’s bath houses, saunas and hot springs, they're clearly having fun in their new role as bathing ambassadors, but there's something else going on here too. It’s hinted at in Hamam’s strapline, “The magazine of letting go”, and I was interested to hear how this magazine taps into their spiritual beliefs as well as a pursuit of freedom, openness and equality.

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"It's so Fare to be going to the grandmother's kitchen..." Ben Mervis is editor-in-chief of Fare, the magazine that travels to a different city each issue to report on the food culture it finds there. For their latest issue they went off to Antwerp in Belgium, and as he explains, they completed their trips to the city by the start of March, just before coronavirus restrictions kicked in. But with COVID-19 severely limiting the travel and hospitality industries for the foreseeable future, they have made dramatic changes to the magazine to make sure they will be able to keep on publishing over the coming months.

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