What Happens When A Beloved, Shuttered Magazine Gets A Second Chance

***THE MEDIA CLASSIFIED ADS***

►You’re invited to Medium Day, a free virtual conference on the future of tech and media. Join us on August 12 for a full day of talks and panels with authors, poets, researchers, data scientists, AI experts, and many more industry leaders. RSVP today and we’ll see you soon!

►Want to write more, worry less, and tell that “it’s not good enough!” voice in your brain to calm down for a second? Take Amber Petty’s Perfectionist’s Half-Assed Writing Challenge starting August 1. Previous participants have sold stories they worked on during the three-day bootcamp to Huffington Post, Insider, and more. Starts August 1st. Sign up (for free) right now. 

The Classified Ads are back! Want to have your business, job opening, newsletter, etc. seen by a legion of extremely-online media workers? Run a Classified Ad in our weekly Digest and Opportunities newsletters. We also offer add-on placement for Slack and Listserv posts.

 Click through for rates, testimonials, and to get in touch. 

---

When so, so many print magazines closed in 2008, digital media quickly moved in to fill the void left in the media landscape by the Great Recession. The moment of both contraction and consolidation that the industry is experiencing now doesn’t have quite so obvious of a next phase — will it be the return of the homepage? AI? The continued rise of newsletters? One somewhat bright spot within this otherwise dreary landscape is the second life that some shuttered magazines are finding as…magazines, but run by people with new ideas (or maybe just new conviction) for how to make them actually work as businesses. The prime example is that of Bookforum, which is being revived by The Nation after Penske Media Group bought sister publication Artforum late last year, leading to the beloved literary publication’s closure. 

In a New York Times story about Bookforum’s return, The Nation President Bhaskar Sunkara  argued that niche magazines can be good businesses. “We need to stubbornly try to make these institutions sustainable on their own,” he said. “It’s somewhat defeatist to just say that these entities can’t be profitable, or that in a country of 330 million people — and in a much bigger language market — you can’t find enough people to sustainably produce a quarterly print magazine.” It’s a simple, but rather thrilling conviction: that a small print mag can not only survive but thrive. But when you look at the various publications that, like Bookforum, have garnered something of a second chance, it’s clear that, from a business standpoint, not every revived (or reinvigorated) legacy magazine brand ends up looking exactly the same. 

For a time, Kat Craddock was the food magazine Saveur. Or what remained of it, rather. In late 2020 the magazine was sold by Bonnier Corporation to the private equity-backed digital media group called Recurrent Media (alongside a number of other titles), which has made a business out of turning legacy print pubs into learn digital outlets. By February 2021, the print magazine was a thing of the past (though there have continued to be special newsstand editions and cookbooks), and the digital operations were looped up with North Equity’s Kitchenistic and BobVila.com to form a “home” vertical. At one point during Saveur’s North Equity era, Craddock was the only person working solely on Saveur. 

But today, Saveur has a staff of 8, including Craddock, who now has the dual title of both EIC and CEO after she organized a sale from North Equity to an anonymous investor in April, taking the brand independent. 

“Eventually it was going to change hands, and the best thing that could have happened is that somebody takes over who really loves it and who isn’t buying it to make a quick buck or stripping it for parts,” she told Study Hall. 

Though not technically a magazine (the bulk of its content continues to be digital), an independent Saveur is able to prioritize its budget to spend on the things that make good food magazines successful — namely recipe testing and photography (full disclosure: I worked on one issue of Saveur as a contractor while it was still owned by Bonnier). As Craddock put it, “We can spend where we need to spend but be a little scrappier where we can get away with it.”

In terms of revenue, Saveur will be relying on everything from ads and affiliate marketing to licensing partnerships and events. “It can’t be one pot of gold that’s going to help this brand survive into the future.” Craddock said. “It has to be every single opportunity, optimized and overseen with care.” 

The special cocktail of revenue streams is a key part of making these legacy magazine brands thrive in their new forms. The global market for print ads has declined by half in the last six years, and as the ill-fated pivot to video showed, chasing revenue by making the content that tech companies say they want is a bad idea. So the revived mags are playing to their strengths. 

For Bookforum, the focus is going to be on growing print subscription revenue — starting, one can’t help but assume, by making sure that everyone who lamented about its closure is actually subscribed to the reboot. 

But there are more opportunistic buyers in the magazine marketplace too, and oftentimes acquisitions seem to go awry (remember when The Believer was leveraged to hawk sex toys?). Brian Calle has picked over the remains of a number of fabled publications over the years, including both LA Weekly and the Village Voice, both of which are now (at best) sad shadows of their former selves. One of Calle’s more recent acquisitions is  Paper Magazine, which closed this past April.

In a recent oral history of Paper published by the Times, Calle’s lone quote was focused on the question of how to make money. “I’m passionate about figuring out ways to create a new model for these legacy institutions, but then also preserve the work itself. I think Paper is perfectly positioned to be the go-to avant-garde agency.”

To judge by the alt-weeklies in his portfolio, Calle may have kept these pubs from dying (or brought them back from death) in name only. This notion that a novel revenue model is needed (and spinning out a boutique ad agency from a legacy publication is by no means new; in fact, Paper already has its own, Extra Extra) may be the biggest fallacy in the second-chance magazine market. Running a high quality magazine that lives up to its legacy should be enough.  Hopefully, this iteration of Bookforum will prove that.

---

Study Hall Blog Round Up

Hello… hello… blog update! This week, Daniel Spielberger reported on how the Hollywood shutdown is impacting entertainment journalism. 

---

COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Kalia Richardson started a new role as entertainment reporter at Rolling Stone.
—Aramide A. Tinubu is now a TV critic at Variety.
—Zoë Schlanger is joining The Atlantic as a staff climate reporter.
—Natasha Mascaren has joined The Information as a reporter on their venture capital and startups team.
—Zachary Small is joining the Culture Desk at the New York Times as a staff reporter. He will be “covering the wild and ever-converging worlds of art, technology, video games and more.”
—Shirin Ghaffary will be joining Bloomberg as an AI, ethics and policy reporter.
—Leon Yin is joining Bloomberg as a data journalist.
—Steffi Cao is joining Forbes as a staff writer covering “the internet and creator economy.” 

---

EVERYTHING ELSE

—The Salt Lake Tribune, which started running as a nonprofit three years ago, has acquired The Times-Independent, a newspaper based out of Moab, Utah.
—Here’s some more AI news from the depths of hell: OpenAI has reached a $5 million deal with the American Journalism Project to “help fund efforts by local outlets to experiment with artificial intelligence technology.” OpenAI reached a deal with The Associated Press last week. According to Axios, the funding will be distributed amongst 41 organizations as grants to help them “experiment with best practices for ways local news outlets can leverage AI responsibly in their newsrooms, products and revenue teams.” Oh boy!
—Last week, Hearst Magazine laid off 41 employees. “We are disappointed and angry that Hearst unilaterally chose to lay off our members instead of coming to the table to explore alternative options,” Hearst Magazines Media Union said in a statement.
—Jeff Light, the editor in chief and publisher of The San Diego Union-Tribune, announced that he’s leaving the newspaper. The Union-Tribune was recently purchased by MediaNews Group.
—As part of cuts to the company, top editors at Penguin Random House have accepted buyout packages. According to the New York Times, 60 people were laid off.
—NME is relaunching its print publication, which it discontinued in 2018. The print magazine will be bimonthly with each issue focusing “on an emerging artist as part of NME’s commitment to music discovery,” according to Variety.