Magazeum

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

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“I finally went up to Graydon and I said, ‘Hey, you know, I know you like me. I know you wanted me to be here, but I can also do covers.’”

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That’s today’s guest, Mark Seliger. He’s the same Mark Seliger who, at the moment of this exchange with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, had already shot over 180 covers for Rolling Stone, where he was the chief photographer from 1992-2002.

Seliger had been heavil...

REALITY BITES

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 I am Gen X. I’m telling you this because, well, this is hardly something that is ever relevant to any conversation when, in fact, it is also always relevant to everything.

But I just don't talk about it because who cares when I was born, or that we Gen Xers all live in the long and darkest of dark shadow of Boomers, or the loud echo of Millennials, or the annoyingly brash and unknowing living of whatever the other ...

ONE EYE ON THE WORLD

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Monocle, the brainchild of the expat Canadian magazine maker, Tyler Brûlé, was born in early 2007, a relatively awful year for the magazine business, not to mention the entire world. In that year alone, more than 100 print magazines folded—or, as Wikipedia terms it, were “dis-established”—among them: Life (yet again), Premiere, Red Herring, House & Garden, Jane, Child, and Business 2.0. Months later, the glob...

THE MAGAZINE'S THE THING

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When you chat with a filmmaker who has become a magazine editor you start to note the parallels between filmmaking and magazine making that you never considered before. Ok, that I hadn’t considered before.

The relationship between editors and art directors, and the relationship between a director and cinematographer, well, that’s actually almost the same thing. Editors and writers. Editors and actors. Cop...

A STYLE ALL HER OWN

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Maggie Bullock: Last month, the big, bad headline in the world of women’s media was the shuttering of the groundbreaking feminist website Jezebel. We’ve since learned that Jezebel could be revived, but who even knows what that means? Regardless, the “closure” unleashed a wave of mourning, even among magazine fanatics like us who’ve become a little bit inured to the decimation of the legacy magazines that Jezeb...

THE JOY OF READING

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Newspapers are in trouble and that’s not news to you. Print is expensive, the ads moved to Facebook and Google, the classifieds bled over to Craigslist. You know all this.

So, hats off to the newspapers that succeed today. And the ones that do, the big ones, the legacy media, have a surprising thing in common: magazines. The New York Times. The Times of London. Le Monde. Germany. Italy. All over Asia. A lot of ...

AN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK

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If you can count yourself among the lucky ones who’ve met Robert Priest in person, any chance you remember what you were wearing?

Well, fear not: He does. According to his business partner, the designer Grace Lee, Priest possesses a near-photographic memory of how people present themselves. And those first impressions last a lifetime. 

To hear him talk, though, it’s not at all about being judgy. Priest i...

AN ART BAR FOR EVERYONE

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ArtBar is the perfect name for ArtBar magazine and that’s not always the case with the names of magazines. Founded by photographer and filmmaker Sarah Ingram in LA, ArtBar is like a dive bar for artists and their art. It’s democratic in its tastes, and wide in its scope. And fun.

Sarah wanted to hang with artists and so she created a space for them. Literally. From a recent editorial: "Art Bar is a hole in...

THE LAST CELEBRITY MAGAZINE EDITOR

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Maggie Bullock: It’s 2016. Rachel and I are sitting at our desks on the 24th floor of the Hearst Tower working at Elle magazine when the glass double doors blow open—or at least that’s how I remember it—and a vision of white-blonde hair, metallic pants, and checkerboard platforms, breezes into the office speaking in a commanding British accent to two or three minions in her wake.

There are no ca...

THE MAGAZINE OF THE MONTH CLUB

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One of the things I’ve learned while hosting this podcast is that there are a lot of magazines out there. More than I imagined. Meaning there was never a “death of the magazine,” simply a realignment of dollars and attention. If anything, there are more magazines being published than ever. 

But, and it’s a big but, they are harder and harder to find. There are fewer magazine stores. There are almost...

Highbrow, Brilliant: The Adam Moss Approval Matrix

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Adam Moss is probably painting today. He’s not ready to share it. He may never be ready to share it. You see, this ASME Hall of Famer unabashedly labels himself as “tenth rate” with the brush. And he’s okay with that.

As Moss explains, it’s not about the painting. After decades of creating some of the world’s great magazines, he is throttling down. He’s working with canvas, paint...

NO RESERVATIONS

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Welcome to a new season of The Full Bleed. This year, we’re going to be talking to makers and creators, of course, but also more about the business of magazines. Because, let’s face it, making a magazine is not easy. It never has been. But we’re seeing more and more magazines—in print—out in the world and there’s a reason for that. At a time where the digital world is a messy place, and that’s being polite, magazi...

THE VIEW FROM THE WINDOW SEAT

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Despite its name, Direction of Travel is not a travel magazine. Sure, it’s a celebration of a certain kind of travel, but this is not a publication that takes you somewhere. Unless you think of Air World as a destination. Which I do.

Founder Christian Nolle is an AvGeek. Which is not an insult. More an acknowledgement of a state of mind. Christian loves all things aviation. And mostly he loves how it lo...

WHEN EUSTACE MET FRANÇOISE

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 I first met Françoise Mouly at The New Yorker’s old Times Square offices. This was way back when artists used to deliver illustrations in person. I had stopped by to turn in a spot drawing and was introduced to Françoise, their newly-minted cover art editor.

I should have been intimidated, but I was fresh off the boat from Canada and deeply ensconced in my own bubble—hockey, baseball, Leonard Cohen—and so...

A 5-STAR MAGAZINE (DO NOT DISTURB)

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Orlando is the magazine as hotel, quite literally—we’ll explain what that means in a bit—a magazine that one can inhabit and live in, a love letter to culture in the most expansive use of the word. It’s also very Italian. Maybe because it comes from Italy. More specifically, from the mind of Antonella Dellepiane Pescetto, who is Italian. But more importantly, she is someone with exquisite taste.

An...

ONE CITY AT A TIME

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There are two kinds of travelers. The first group are those that need to see as many attractions as they can. The second are those that would rather wander around, get a feel for the place they’re visiting, and live as much like a local as possible. Neither is better. There’s no judgement here. But the people who are behind the bi-annual Fare Magazine are definitely of the latter group.

Founded almost ten years ag...

A MODERN MAGAZINE EDITOR IN A POST-MAGAZINE WORLD

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In the media storm that is 2025, the person you want captaining your ship is smart, decisive, and cool, calm, and collected—in other words, she’s Nikki Ogunnaike.

The editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, whom we got to know when we worked together at Elle, is the very model of a modern magazine editor, in that—unlike the lifers of old—she hopscotched through a ton of jobs, accruing skill...

THE PURPOSE OF TRAVEL

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The world is adrift in travel magazines that tell you to go here and stay there, to order certain foods at “of-the-moment” restaurants. And when you go to these places you find yourself surrounded by other travelers like you, and the only locals you interact with are, maybe, the waiter, or your Airbnb host, or the tour guide taking you on a generic definitely-not-what-the-locals-do tour of the trendiest neighb...

PART OF THE STORY

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Susan Casey has won National Magazine Awards for editing, writing, and design—a feat that may well be unprecedented in the industry’s history.

In her native Canada, they call people like this “Wayne Gretzky.”

She has worked—under various titles—for the following magazines: The Globe & Mail, Outside, Time, Esquire, eCompany, Business 2.0, Sports Illustrated Women, National Geographic, Fortune, and O, The Oprah Magazi...