How to Invent Reinvention
Prepping for what comes next when you're not sure what comes next
There are places in the city of Denver where you can catch a glimpse of the not so far off mountains. From the play yard at the back of the Denver Animal Shelter where I volunteer early Thursday mornings before work, I can see one of my favorite peaks, Winter Park. It’s a reminder of how diverse the geography of this state is.
We moved to Denver last year to be closer to family, to have a more active role in a new family member’s life. It was hard to give up our life in Chicago even though I moved to that city after college on a literal roll of the dice. Over the years, the lake and the prairie grew on me. I lost my New England manners and became a Midwesterner. Am I a Coloradan now? I guess so.
When we moved out here, a friend who had previously transplanted from Chicago gave my wife a piece of advice about how to build a new life in a place where we knew virtually no one. “Say yes to everything,” she advised. “Try everything.”
A few weeks ago we moved out of Denver to a small town in Boulder County. We loved being close to the family, but city life was no longer our thing. It struck me one morning, while I was sitting in my newish office looking out the window and wondering how I was going to move a client from one platform to another platform, that the magazine world is now in that same sort flux. To survive, you have to be willing to reinvent. To try new things.
Over the years I have repeatedly reinvented my career. Many of my long term clients may editorially feel like they did when we first met, but they now distribute their editorial out into the world in ways we didn’t even consider a decade or two ago.
A few weeks back, Bo Sacks of the BoSacks newsletter put out a personal piece in which he described the newsstand as in a coma. His description of how we got there was close enough to the mark. I lived that contraction, he observed it. Our perspectives are different. The simple fact is that magazines in retail stores have gone from “Must haves” in the 1980’s, to “Nice to haves” in the 1990’s, to here in the third decade of this century “Well, we reorganized the store so what do we do with this magazine rack?”
But this is also a story of reinvention. The simple fact of the matter is that in the 1980’s and 1990’s magazine wholesalers and national distributors sold themselves to publishers as marketers and promoters of their magazines. While not entirely inaccurate, their primary job back then was, and still is today: Pick and pack, merchandise, collect and distribute funds. Magazine wholesalers and the national distributors exist because no sensible retailer with more than a few publications in their store wants to do business directly with multiple magazine publishers. It’s far too complicated.
Newsstand distribution today is really about making sure that all the “T’s” are crossed and all the “I’s” are dotted. It’s about making sure that if your publication is all about Des Moines, IA, that you don’t copies showing up in Portland, ME. My job with my newsstand clients today is radically different from what I was doing a decade ago and completely unrecognizable from what I did on the first day I hopped on a plane and flew off to Detroit as an independent consultant.
If I have a message to a publisher who wants to put their magazine on the newsstand in 2025, it would be this:
Your cover still matters. Make it recognizable.
Your audience is bigger than just your subscribers and single copy sales. What are you doing to reach out to that audience and convince them to subscribe, or become a member, or to go out and purchase a copy from the store? Or log in and buy it from your e-commerce store?
No one is out to get you or cheat you. All of those “stories” you heard are either legends, exaggerations of older legends, or flat out falsehoods.
Your newsstand sales are what you make of them.
The corollary to the above would be this: Sometimes sh*t happens. Figure out what that was. Accept it. Learn from it. Try to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again.
On a personal note:
Where have I been?
Well, right here. I just haven’t put out a newsletter recently. One reason is that the newsletter became one too many things to do. The other part is that honestly, I did not have much to say at the time.
Moving forward? I would love to hear from you. Did you find value in what I’ve shared with you? Is what you will see below this week, worth your time? Is there something you would like me to write about in these opening reflections or look for in articles or even report on myself?
One__Alternative futures for Vogue Magazine
WaPo’s remarkable op-ed cartoonist, Edith Pritchett has come up with a hilarious set of options for the storied Conde Nast title now that Anna Wintour has decided to retire.
Click here to see the whole thing. It put a huge smile on my face after a pretty stressful week.
Two__Turkey arrests magazine editors and cartoonists for “blasphemous” images
I always find these sorts of news reports extraordinarily chilling. The satirical Turkish publication LeMan saw several of its editors and cartoonists taken into police custody because a cartoon published in the magazine allegedly depicted both the prophet Mohammed and the prophet Moses. The editors denied this saying that the cartoon only portrayed a man with the same name. Shortly after the staffers were arrested, the magazine offices were surrounded by a pro-government mob.
Unsurprisingly, this is not the first time that a controversy over the depiction of the prophet Mohammed has occurred.
Three__Trump Admin cancels scientific journal subscriptions for federal agencies
In completely unsurprising news, the Trump administration has reportedly canceled subscription contracts with several publishers including Springer Nature. A German publisher of magazines such as Scientific American and Nature, Springer had contracts with the National Institutes for Health and other science related agencies. Earlier in the year, the Trump admin sent a letter to Springer accusing it of taking partisan sides in scientific debates and questioning its editorial practices.
Springer Nature publishers over 3,000 journals on a wide variety of scientific topics.
Four__German court lifts a ban on the far right magazine Compact
In more entirely unsurprising news for this timeline (It’s 2025, you should be used to this now), a German court lifted a July 2024 ban on the far rightwing magazine, Compact. A year earlier, Germany’s then Interior Minister ordered the magazine banned along with the company that owned it citing it was a central “mouthpiece of the rightwing extremist scene.” The company, which is owned by the right wing activist Jurgen Elåssåer went to court and last week, was able to get the ban lifted.
The court said that Germany guarantees freedom of speech, even for enemies of freedom of speech.
Five__Founder of Wonderland Magazine launched Imagine, a bi-annual this Spring
Was I ever the demographic for Huw Gwyther’s two previous launches: Wonderland Magazine and Man About Town Magazine? C’mon, be serious! No, of course not.
But that doesn’t matter because when I saw these titles in a local Barnes and Noble for the first time, I immediately fell in love with them and the idea of them. Why? Because they’re everything a magazine, a well made magazine, should be: Immersive, literate, aspirational, inviting.
I have no doubt that his new title, Imagine, is the same. Plus, the marketing guy in me really likes how he’s reaching out to his audience and the circulation guy in me likes his very targeted circ plan.
Your Moment of Magazine Zen…
I hope that you enjoyed this newsletter. If you did, please click “like” and subscribe. The goal is to deliver a brand new release to your email in-box every other Tuesday (Or sometimes Wednesdays if life gets a bit hectic around here.).
I am always open to a discussion about almost anything (Except for gazpacho. Gazpacho is gross and terrible and there is nothing more to say about it). If you want to start a chat with me about anything other than cold vegetable soup, please click on the “Comment” box below and let’s chat!
Want to find me on the social sites?
Here’s my Linktree that will take you almost everywhere…
Don’t want to mess with all that? I get it. Here’s my Instagram.
I still own a suit and a few ties and every now and then I put them on and look something like a professional. Want to see that? Here’s my LinkedIn account.
BlueSky is a nice place to go if you’re looking for authors, journalists and other professionals who contribute to the reading world. You can find me here too.
So that’s all I’ve got for you for now. If you’re in office, I hope you brought your hoodie with you because I hear Wallace has the thermostat turned way, way down. If you WFH, yay you! Corporate hasn’t caught up yet. Keep going, and don’t forget to check for crumbs on your shirt before turning the camera on for the next Teams meeting.
Good Lord Joe you utterly and completely made my day, week, all the measurements! Grateful you’re here..and found time! Having been a magazine/newspaper child, your assessments of the transitions are wonderful. It’s like reading Inside Baseball or Pro Football weekly!
Appreciate your updates on international state of print along with pics, graphics. Glad you’re here on SS, found your way to Colorado AND to Powells’s!
If/when you’re in Illinois again, please schedule time for a Cherry 🍒 Pit lunch, I’ll text Jerry. Sadly, Bill no longer available.