Mr. Magazine

“The cover has been a big part of the discussion, obviously, about what we want to do as a magazine. For me, the goal to create the cover represented many different things that we were trying to do. My aim is that when you extend 1843 in whatever format, you find it surprising, it makes you smile and it leaves you with something that you want to share. It should be funny, but it should also be beautiful. And those are a lot of things to try and get into one place.” Rosie Blau…

“The relaunch is going to enable us to do two things and that is bolster reader revenue and advertising revenue. So, one thing that we are seeing is that both readers and advertisers are wanting to engage with audiences in a range of platforms and by relaunching 1843 on a number of platforms, we make those platforms available to advertisers and that will bolster advertising revenue. But also we make the content more engaging to readers too and they can read us where they want to read us.” Mark Beard…

The Economist announced the relaunch of its bimonthly lifestyle publication 1843, named for the year The Economist was founded. 1843 gives readers stories of an extraordinary world, with long-form narrative journalism a dominant feature, both in its print version and online. And as we all know, long-form narratives online are a no-no – or are they? Mr. Magazine™ loves a rebel, don’t you know. (Ole Miss pun intended)

I spoke with Editor in Chief, Rosie Blau and Publisher, Mark Beard recently and we talked about this taboo thing called long-form journalism online. Rosie explained that in 1843’s case, readers loved the meatier stories, the long-reads that keep them enthralled and begging for more. And with a redrawn logo and the tagline “Stories of an extraordinary world,” 1843 begins its new journey down a path that puts stories first and allows readers to be surprised and delighted by what they find along the way.

Mark explained that one of the excitements lay in the new incorporation of 1843’s app within The Economist’s app, and while the intricacies of the actual transfer of content was a bit hair-raising, it was well worth a few sleepless nights.

Rosie said the goal of the new design and compelling content was to make readers question assumptions and take a sideways look at the enduring stories of our age, with a bit of humor and irreverence. And Mark added that all of those great stories can now be enjoyed by even more readers since all editions of 1843 will be included in The Economist’s classic app.

And with a powerhouse like The Economist behind you, there is no way to go but up and all over the world. So, I hope that you enjoy this delightful interview with our friends from across the pond, Rosie Blau, editor in chief, and Mark Beard, publisher, 1843 magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On why the relaunch of 1843 is getting so much media attention: because of the refinement of James Wilson’s vision or because it’s part of The Economist (Rosie Blau): Obviously, we like to think that it’s a brilliant magazine that deserves the media attention in its own right, but it’s always wonderful to have the backing of a well-respected and already well-established and well-known brand behind us. So, we’re very lucky.

On why the relaunch of 1843 is getting so much media attention: because of the refinement of James Wilson’s vision or because it’s part of The Economist (Mark Beard): From the commercial perspective, it’s because we’ve kind of captured the mood in the sense of many publishers and that is, there is a need to change the business model and create content that readers and advertisers can engage with in different ways. And I think one of the reasons why we are seeing so much attention from the readers is that we are doing lots of that all in one go. So, publishers around the world are looking at how they can create film content and podcast content and they can place their content in digital environments like apps and online.

On the relaunch including the 1843 becoming bigger and more dominant on the cover and what they are trying to achieve with 1843 as a brand (Rosie Blau): The cover has been a big part of the discussion, obviously, about what we want to do as a magazine. For me, the goal to create the cover represented many different things that we were trying to do. My aim is that when you extend 1843 in whatever format, you find it surprising, it makes you smile and it leaves you with something that you want to share. It should be funny, but it should also be beautiful. And those are a lot of things to try and get into one place.

On whether she thinks the role of the magazine cover in this crowded information age has changed at all (Rosie Blau): I think it has changed because as you say it’s such a crowded market. But I think it’s also in that crowded market, as I said, there are these shorthand’s that we use to signal what we are. And so it’s difficult; interesting, but difficult, to signal that we’re something different. So, to me this is a move in that direction.

On the business model for 1843 (Mark Beard): The relaunch is going to enable us to do two things and that is bolster reader revenue and advertising revenue. So, one thing that we are seeing is that both readers and advertisers are wanting to engage with audiences in a range of platforms and by relaunching 1843 on a number of platforms, we make those platforms available to advertisers and that will bolster advertising revenue. But also we make the content more engaging to readers too and they can read us where they want to read us.

On whether her stories-first approach is similar to an audience-first approach (Rosie Blau): The thing about the stories-first approach is that the idea is there are really exciting things that we don’t tend to think about. And so for me, if I’m thinking what do the readers want or what do the audiences want, I don’t know that they know what they want. Part of the point is to challenge and surprise them, and it’s hard to think, okay, we know that this is something that they want, we know that they want more stories about hem lengths or whatever. So, I think what we’re trying to do is trust our intuition. For me, being a journalist is all about trusting your intuition, but there is something interesting here and let me find out more. And that’s really what we’re going with, kind of looking at these stories and thinking in what way can we push them and in what ways might we see them. So, that’s the stories-first approach.

On the genesis of the tagline: Stories Of An Extraordinary World (Rosie Blau): What that comes from, it was a very hard thing to come up with, and one of the other contenders was: Life, The Untold Story. What we feel we do best and what we really show in common with The Economist is this idea of challenging and posing and questioning assumptions. And our subject is “your world” and “your stories” and “the world that you experience.” And so my main aim is to be looking at the things that we take for granted, the things that we see around us, the issues of our day and the enduring issues of our time, and try and look at them in new and different ways.

On how it feels to be publisher of a global brand (Mark Beard): I’m obviously very proud to be publisher of 1843. It’s a job that I hoped I would get at some point in my career, so I’m very proud to have the role. One of my other roles at The Economist is I have past experience marketing for The Economist. And of course, The Economist is also global. So, I’m very used to operating in a global environment and the basics and challenges that come with that. And trying to benefit from being able to roll things out globally while understanding that there are local nuances to what you need to do to perform effectively around the world.

On the biggest challenge they have had to face (Mark Beard): One of the things that you’ll see if you were to open The Economist’s app today is that 1843 now sits within The Economist’s app, which enables many of our subscribers to The Economist to also benefit, read and engage with 1843 content. And that might look like a relatively simple process, a good strategy and relatively simple on the surface, but you can well imagine that working with the tech teams and the editorial teams to move content from one platform to another is not simple and that’s been challenging, but also rewarding because we’ve been told by a number of people that what we’re doing is cutting edge. And creating an app environment where our consumers can consume all of our content in one place is something that is added again, as I understand it.

On having a long read section on the web and whether she knows something others don’t when it comes to the thought that snippets of information are better-suited for the web (Rosie Blau): Do I know something that others don’t? Well, I don’t know, but what I do know is that with our content over recent years, the long reads are the things that people read most, read for longer, depending on how long they are. Our most popular stories are always our long reads. So for us, it’s a question of how we do more of it, not how we do less. And we actually find that the snippets often don’t do nearly as well, even things that we think might do well. So, our experience is that long reads do extremely well online and if we have the resources to do more of those, then we will.

On how she differentiates the long reads online from the long reads in print (Rosie Blau): Some of it is exactly the same and the features that we run in print also go online, and those are extremely popular typically and continue to be popular. But we don’t have a distinct form for long-form features online versus in print. There are a lot of things that we’re thinking about, different types of long reads that we might do for online only to help us be more timely, and things that work better for an online audience than in print, because we have quite a long delay even between going to press and coming out. But also, we only publish every two months, so there are things that we can do online, it offers us a chance to do things that we are excited about that we couldn’t do in print.

On whether he is selling the brand, the print magazine, the digital, or 1843, no matter the platform when he approaches advertisers (Mark Beard): We’re selling the content and the environment and an audience, of course. We have an extremely engaged audience. We are creating content and placing that content on the platform where we know they are grazing. We are able to offer incredible insight to advertisers as to who the audience is; we’re very clear that they are in the main existing Economist readers. We can describe exactly where they are, they are loyal subscribers.

On whether 1843 now has a different audience on digital than in print or it’s the same audience, or somewhat of a shared DNA (Mark Beard): We’ve been asked to describe a base for The Economist so let’s talk about those first, because a significant number of readers of 1843 are Economist subscribers. The subscribers who receive 1843, some of them are print subscribers and some are print plus digital subscribers, our bundle subscribers. And some of those people, of course, will be accessing 1843 content through the app, rather than from just receiving the print copy. And we do know that the make-up of our print plus digital subscribers is slightly different from our print only subscribers. You might imagine, for instance, that they’re younger and more digitally engaged. By making our content available on this range of platforms, we are able to tap into the different audience profiles of our subscribers to The Economist.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home (Mark Beard): You would probably find me walking my dog. I live a half an hour outside of London in a leafy green village. It’s a complete antidote and opposite of London. I generally come home from work and the first thing I do to relax is take our Border Terrier, Oakley, for a walk to clear my mind.

On what someone would find her doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at her home (Rosie Blau): I usually hang out with my kids, they’re quite a good leveler in all things, they’re six and nine. We discuss their day and I tell them silly things about mine, but for me that’s a great way to come back to earth and think about the really important things in my life, which is my family.

On what she would have tattooed upon her brain that would be there forever and no one could ever forget about her (Rosie Blau): Maybe the word interesting.

On what he would have tattooed upon his brain that would be there forever and no one could ever forget about him (Mark Beard): Positivity.

On what keeps them up at night (Rosie Blau): It was quite stressful producing the final; getting there for this relaunch. And the weird thing for me was after it had gone to press, but before we had it, this kind of fear of what I hadn’t saw, these huge glaring errors that were so big that I hadn’t seen. That is what has most often been keeping me up at night recently. But thankfully, no glaring errors have been found yet. (Laughs)

On what keeps them up at night (Mark Beard): What has been keeping me up at night recently is the switchover of our digital platforms and namely the move from websites and apps to being incorporated into The Economist app, which as I said before, sounds like a simple job on the surface, but had lots of intricacies. Of course, we had a launch deadline to work toward and everyone was working to ensure a smooth transition of the app of 1843 appearing in The Economist app, which fortunately it did. But as you can imagine, there were a few sleepless nights before that.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Rosie Blau, editor in chief, and Mark Beard, publisher, 1843 magazine.

Samir Husni: It’s rare to see a magazine relaunch get as much attention as 1843. Is it because it’s The Economist or is it because you’re refining James Wilson’s vision of what a magazine was back then and what a magazine is today?

Rosie Blau: I’m not sure that we’re redesigning James Wilson’s vision, but we have continued to interpret it, of course. I think The Economist is obviously a very well-known and respected and loved brand and we’re part of that and we’re really delighted to be in the same wit and rigor and trustworthy independent journalism, but on very different subjects and in a very different mode.

Samir Husni: So, do you think that’s the reason? Let’s say you’re doing 1843 without The Economist and you decide to relaunch it, would you have received the same media attention, if nothing else?

Rosie Blau: Obviously, we like to think that it’s a brilliant magazine that deserves the media attention in its own right, but it’s always wonderful to have the backing of a well-respected and already well-established and well-known brand behind us. So, we’re very lucky.

Mark Beard: From the commercial perspective, it’s because we’ve kind of captured the mood in the sense of many publishers and that is, there is a need to change the business model and create content that readers and advertisers can engage with in different ways. And I think one of the reasons why we are seeing so much attention from the readers is that we are doing lots of that all in one go. So, publishers around the world are looking at how they can create film content and podcast content and they can place their content in digital environments like apps and online.

Of course, what you’re seeing from the reader is that we’re doing much of this at the same time, and we’re able to do that in many instances because we are part of The Economist Group and we can tap into all of the good things that our association with The Economist brings. And I think that is also a valid reason as to why there is quite a lot of attention on this event, because we’re doing this holistically in one go, when many of the publishers kind of did that tied into various different platforms one at a time.

Samir Husni: Tell me then, we moved from Intelligent Life and a tiny 1843 to a big, dominant 1843 on the cover, tell me about the progression and the thinking behind the relaunch and what you’re trying to achieve today as an 1843 brand.

Rosie Blau: The cover has been a big part of the discussion, obviously, about what we want to do as a magazine. For me, the goal to create the cover represented many different things that we were trying to do. My aim is that when you extend 1843 in whatever format, you find it surprising, it makes you smile and it leaves you with something that you want to share. It should be funny, but it should also be beautiful. And those are a lot of things to try and get into one place.

Previously, we have almost always run a person on the front of the magazine. And as you know from the magazine world, that tends to be shorthand in the magazine world for: this is a magazine for men or for women. So, I’m not ruling out the idea that we might put people on the cover in the future, we may well do that, but for me, I wanted to move away from something that instantly looked like a magazine for men or for women and instead have this message of: this is something super-interesting and funny and challenging.

Samir Husni: Do you think the role of the magazine cover in this crowded information age has changed at all?

Rosie Blau: I think it has changed because as you say it’s such a crowded market. But I think it’s also in that crowded market, as I said, there are these shorthand’s that we use to signal what we are. And so it’s difficult; interesting, but difficult, to signal that we’re something different. So, to me this is a move in that direction.

And then in terms of the size of the logo, the first thing that I wanted to do when I became editor was get rid of the white strip across the top of the previous incarnation of 1843, because I just hated it. (Laughs) And we had a lot of discussions about it and we kept coming up with different covers, though we very often would have, with the possible new covers or the new logos and all of that, the white strip every time and that was one thing that I was adamant about that I didn’t want.

Samir Husni: Mark, as you see this relaunch and as you see the changing landscape of even the magazine business model, The Economist has always been as much circulation-driven as advertising-driven. What’s your business model for 1843?

Mark Beard: The relaunch is going to enable us to do two things and that is bolster reader revenue and advertising revenue. So, one thing that we are seeing is that both readers and advertisers are wanting to engage with audiences in a range of platforms and by relaunching 1843 on a number of platforms, we make those platforms available to advertisers and that will bolster advertising revenue. But also we make the content more engaging to readers too and they can read us where they want to read us.

And that has two benefits: there will be more people reading 1843 and we expect more to subscribe to 1843, but what we also see is that in many instances 1843 is a kind of onramp and an entry point into the Group’s other products, so people may begin to subscribe to 1843, but then also move on to ultimately subscribe to The Economist. The idea behind the relaunch is to bolster both sides of the business, circulation and advertising revenue.

Samir Husni: And Rosie, you mentioned in one interview that you start with a stories-first approach. Almost all of the editors I’ve interviewed tell me they start with an audience-first approach. Is the stories-first approach similar to an audience-first approach?

Rosie Blau: I suppose so. What tends to happen if you discuss a story is sometimes, if you’re thinking about different ways to do a story, you reach the realization sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly, that it’s not that interesting. And you don’t continue to be interested in it. So, in that sense, yes, I think we try and think about how attuned we are and how excited we are about stories, with a gauge for how we do them and what will work for our audience too.

The thing about the stories-first approach is that the idea is there are really exciting things that we don’t tend to think about. And so for me, if I’m thinking what do the readers want or what do the audiences want, I don’t know that they know what they want. Part of the point is to challenge and surprise them, and it’s hard to think, okay, we know that this is something that they want, we know that they want more stories about hem lengths or whatever. So, I think what we’re trying to do is trust our intuition. For me, being a journalist is all about trusting your intuition, but there is something interesting here and let me find out more. And that’s really what we’re going with, kind of looking at these stories and thinking in what way can we push them and in what ways might we see them. So, that’s the stories-first approach.

Samir Husni: Is that the genesis of the tagline: Stories Of An Extraordinary World?

Rosie Blau: What that comes from, it was a very hard thing to come up with, and one of the other contenders was: Life, The Untold Story. What we feel we do best and what we really show in common with The Economist is this idea of challenging and posing and questioning assumptions. And our subject is “your world” and “your stories” and “the world that you experience.” And so my main aim is to be looking at the things that we take for granted, the things that we see around us, the issues of our day and the enduring issues of our time, and try and look at them in new and different ways.

And I feel that sets incredibly well with the current news, which we are all subjected to a deluge of news and even news junkies, even those of us, and I include myself in those news junkies, we sometimes get sick of the constant breaking news, but also the fact that the world out there seems pretty scary and a worrying place, and like other Brits, I feel humiliated by my government right now. And so there’s a difference; it’s not saying go bury your head in the sand, but it’s saying there is an optimistic and incredibly positive side to the mess that lives around us. And I want us to see that extraordinariness. I want us to feel excited about understanding our own world better.

Samir Husni: Mark, how does it feel to be a publisher of a global publication? Yes, it is based in Britain; yes, it is also in the United States, but it’s available all over the world. Does that make you think twice when you wake up, thinking wow, this isn’t just a British publication, it’s a global publication?

Mark Beard: I’m obviously very proud to be publisher of 1843. It’s a job that I hoped I would get at some point in my career, so I’m very proud to have the role. One of my other roles at The Economist is I have past experience marketing for The Economist. And of course, The Economist is also global. So, I’m very used to operating in a global environment and the basics and challenges that come with that. And trying to benefit from being able to roll things out globally while understanding that there are local nuances to what you need to do to perform effectively around the world.

But yes, I’m extremely proud to be publisher of 1843. And more so at this point in time rather than any other; it’s such an exciting time for a publication and we’re transforming the business plan from top to bottom. We’ve looked at every single element of the commercial plan, from the brand positioning to the platforms that we want to be present on. And we’ve made conscious decisions for everything that we’ve done. I’m very proud, and the organization has been very supportive and patient and listened to what we believe and want to do. And they have supported Rosie’s vision, so yes, it’s a very exciting and thrilling time for us.

Samir Husni: And what has been the biggest challenge that you’ve faced and how did you overcome it?

Mark Beard: To some extent we can talk about the digital platforms and as you know, since apps and websites have come into fruition for publishers there has been a want and a willingness on the part of publishers to set up individual websites and apps for each and every publication that is within their stable. And we were one of those publishers for a period of time, we embarked upon a journey of setting up individual platforms, those apps and websites for 1843. And one of the things that Rosie and I certainly believe is that we should be taking much greater advantage of The Economist’s audience. And because of that we have commercially gone on a journey to incorporate 1843 content into more of The Economist’s ecosystem.

So, one of the things that you’ll see if you were to open The Economist’s app today is that 1843 now sits within The Economist’s app, which enables many of our subscribers to The Economist to also benefit, read and engage with 1843 content. And that might look like a relatively simple process, a good strategy and relatively simple on the surface, but you can well imagine that working with the tech teams and the editorial teams to move content from one platform to another is not simple and that’s been challenging, but also rewarding because we’ve been told by a number of people that what we’re doing is cutting edge. And creating an app environment where our consumers can consume all of our content in one place is something that is added again, as I understand it.

Samir Husni: You have a long-read section on the web, on the digital side; does this go against the norm, where people just want snippets on the digital side and long reads in print? Are you swimming against the current or do you know something that other people don’t?

Rosie Blau: Do I know something that others don’t? Well, I don’t know, but what I do know is that with our content over recent years, the long reads are the things that people read most, read for longer, depending on how long they are. Our most popular stories are always our long reads. So for us, it’s a question of how we do more of it, not how we do less. And we actually find that the snippets often don’t do nearly as well, even things that we think might do well. So, our experience is that long reads do extremely well online and if we have the resources to do more of those, then we will.

Samir Husni: How are you going to differentiate that from the long-read in print? What’s your philosophy on giving print what print deserves and giving digital what digital deserves?

Rosie Blau: Some of it is exactly the same and the features that we run in print also go online, and those are extremely popular typically and continue to be popular. But we don’t have a distinct form for long-form features online versus in print. There are a lot of things that we’re thinking about, different types of long reads that we might do for online only to help us be more timely, and things that work better for an online audience than in print, because we have quite a long delay even between going to press and coming out. But also, we only publish every two months, so there are things that we can do online, it offers us a chance to do things that we are excited about that we couldn’t do in print.

To go back to the stories-first idea, the idea of telling personal stories and trying to sort of illuminate and question our assumptions from the ground-up and through individual narratives is something that we apply across all formats, so that’s what we think about when we think about online features too.

Samir Husni: Mark, do you do the same when you are selling? Are you selling the brand; are you selling the print magazine; are you selling digital; or you are selling 1843 regardless of the platform?

Mark Beard: We’re selling the content and the environment and an audience, of course. We have an extremely engaged audience. We are creating content and placing that content on the platform where we know they are grazing. We are able to offer incredible insight to advertisers as to who the audience is; we’re very clear that they are in the main existing Economist readers. We can describe exactly where they are, they are loyal subscribers.

So, on the whole we have a very compelling proposition I think, not only to readers but to advertisers in that if they want to reach a certain audience on a range of platforms, we are perfectly positioned now to do that. And I think that’s a compelling proposition to advertisers who are, in increasing numbers, when they’re talking to publishers like us, asking for responses to their advertising briefs. And they want us to go back with a multiplatform response. And in the past, a few years back, we could have gone back with a print-only response, but in many instances advertisers are now saying we want you to tell us how you can help us reach these audiences in a range of platforms. And I’m proud that we can now to do that.

Samir Husni: Are you finding out that you have a different audience on digital than in print or it’s the same audience, or there’s some kind of shared DNA between the print and digital audiences?

Mark Beard: We’ve been asked to describe a base for The Economist so let’s talk about those first, because a significant number of readers of 1843 are Economist subscribers. The subscribers who receive 1843, some of them are print subscribers and some are print plus digital subscribers, our bundle subscribers. And some of those people, of course, will be accessing 1843 content through the app, rather than from just receiving the print copy. And we do know that the make-up of our print plus digital subscribers is slightly different from our print only subscribers. You might imagine, for instance, that they’re younger and more digitally engaged. By making our content available on this range of platforms, we are able to tap into the different audience profiles of our subscribers to The Economist.

I should also say that 1843 is helpful for us when we are attracting more women and females to the Group, and we know they’re a greater number of readers for 1843. So, 1843 is also useful in that regard.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; or something else? How do you unwind?

Mark Beard: You would probably find me walking my dog. I live a half an hour outside of London in a leafy green village. It’s a complete antidote and opposite of London. I generally come home from work and the first thing I do to relax is take our Border Terrier, Oakley, for a walk to clear my mind.

Rosie Blau: I usually hang out with my kids, they’re quite a good leveler in all things, they’re six and nine. We discuss their day and I tell them silly things about mine, but for me that’s a great way to come back to earth and think about the really important things in my life, which is my family.

Samir Husni: If you could have one thing tattooed upon your brain that no one would ever forget about you, what would it be?

Rosie Blau: Maybe the word interesting.

Mark Beard: Positivity.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Rosie Blau: It was quite stressful producing the final; getting there for this relaunch. And the weird thing for me was after it had gone to press, but before we had it, this kind of fear of what I hadn’t saw, these huge glaring errors that were so big that I hadn’t seen. That is what has most often been keeping me up at night recently. But thankfully, no glaring errors have been found yet. (Laughs)

Mark Beard: What has been keeping me up at night recently is the switchover of our digital platforms and namely the move from websites and apps to being incorporated into The Economist app, which as I said before, sounds like a simple job on the surface, but had lots of intricacies. Of course, we had a launch deadline to work toward and everyone was working to ensure a smooth transition of the app of 1843 appearing in The Economist app, which fortunately it did. But as you can imagine, there were a few sleepless nights before that.

Samir Husni: Thank you both.

“I really believe that we have come out of the era of broad general interest being a place of power for magazines. So, instead of trying to be everything to everyone, I want to be really clear about what GQ does better than anyone else on earth and I want to focus on those things.” Will Welch…

“It’s really a balance, and the words that I would use are participation and amplification. One of the first things that I wanted to establish in a really strong way when I started this role was rebuilding a core community for GQ. And that means identifying all of these people in our world. And they’re writers, photographers, stylists, and actors; some of them are super-famous, some are not famous at all and may have more of a creative director role or a guy-behind-the-guy role. This is the community of core people, and not only should they be in the core pages of GQ, but they need to be our first readers and they need to be our community that we’re talking to every day.” Will Welch…

“I think that one thing that I’ve always loved, whether it’s an early interview with Kanye where he was talking about a particular uncle who had a stack of GQs in the living room that was his height, or some friends that have texted me pictures of each issue of GQ Style saved in chronological order on their shelf; I think with print we are leaving a different kind of record behind in that it is a documentation of a moment.” Will Welch…

There’s a new era at GQ and the man running the epoch is Will Welch. The dynamic, newly refreshed generation of the magazine has been honed and infused with a stylish new “anything goes” mentality. No more “wear this, but don’t wear that” prescriptions for a man’s closet, but more along the lines of fashion is an individual decision, so be yourself.

Will also believes the power of the general interest type magazine is gone and being more niche-driven is the answer to the profitability question. I spoke with Will recently and we talked about all of these new directions and the clear vision he has for GQ. From the creative community from which the magazine lives and breathes to the reader realizing that they are as much a part of the GQ world as the people between the pages, GQ has come alive with new ideas, new passions and a new perspective of individualism and creativity.

The multiplatform brand has distinctive content and powerful images across the spectrum and Will has innovated the thinking behind the engine of the magazine, while maintaining the authenticity it has earned over its many decades. To say GQ has come of age in this new era of magazine making would be an understatement, it has come of age within its own individual era of men’s fashion and style.

So, please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with an editor in chief who is just as comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt as he is in an Italian suit, and makes them both look “GQ” fashionable, Will Welch, editor in chief, GQ magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On his vision for GQ under his leadership: I really believe that we have come out of the era of broad general interest being a place of power for magazines. So, instead of trying to be everything to everyone, I want to be really clear about what GQ does better than anyone else on earth and I want to focus on those things.

On whether with all of the changes he is implementing at GQ, the brand will be more of a reflector of what’s going on or an initiator of things moving forward: It’s really a balance, and the words that I would use are participation and amplification. One of the first things that I wanted to establish in a really strong way when I started this role was rebuilding a core community for GQ. And that means identifying all of these people in our world. And they’re writers, photographers, stylists, and actors; some of them are super-famous, some are not famous at all and may have more of a creative director role or a guy-behind-the-guy role. This is the community of core people, and not only should they be in the core pages of GQ, but they need to be our first readers and they need to be our community that we’re talking to every day.

On whether the changes he’s implementing are trying to bring back the “good-old days” where GQ was definitely different than Esquire: I am an almost completely forward-looking person, I would say. So, the moves that we’ve been making in this new era are not specifically inspired by the relationship between GQ and Esquire from the past. I have been at GQ since 2007, so I’ve been here a long time and have fully metabolized the history of the brand and what it stands for. But I also think that a brand as strong as GQ is incredibly flexible. And I feel completely empowered to really push it to a new place.

On the reinvention he did with GQ Style and whether he feels that magazine is a little bit different than GQ, and each one should have its own revolution: I think each will have its own revolution. I’ve definitely learned an incredible amount by the experience of launching GQ Style and the radical moves that I made and thinking about what the architecture of that magazine should be and what was possible in terms of the storytelling.

On whether he would rather have that one-on-one conversation with his readers, as though friends: The experience of being the editor in chief of the smaller spinoff title, GQ Style, it was an incredible experience, not just on a professional level, but also on a personal level, because I found that the more that I just allowed myself to be who I am, rather than trying to adopt any expectation or image of what an editor in chief or a Condé Nast editor in chief is supposed to look like, the more successful that we were.

On the biggest challenge or obstacle he’s had to overcome to get to the point he is today: In the early stages of GQ Style, with the first issue, I wanted to prove that it was its own magazine and could stand alone and that it had its own voice. And I was a little bit more calculating with the balance of stories in the first issue and was very methodical about what message that we would be sending to the industry and to our community and our readership, and to our potential readership. I was diagnosed with testicular cancer last year in late 2018, and that was an incredible witness test. It’s one thing to hold all of these beliefs and to hope that you’re living your life in a certain way, and then when you’re faced with a doctor telling you that you have cancer at age 37, although 37 is actually on the older side for that particular type of cancer, but I feel like a young vivacious man, and to be told that you have cancer, you definitely examine your life and ask yourself if you’re really practicing what you preach.

On anything he’d like to add: One thing that’s important is that we’re now in this time, especially with social media, which is just incredible, like Instagram is an incredibly intimate format. Podcasting is an incredibly intimate format. Instagram stories are amazingly intimate, you can watch people broadcast themselves waking up in the morning with their partner or with their pet; it’s just deeply intimate. And a title like GQ has to ask itself in this environment, the idea of GQ is this kind of vaunted, haloed thing, but what people want now is a little bit more down-to-earth, but at the same time with GQ, I don’t want to give up this authority that we’ve earned over the decades and the hard-earned gloss that we’ve also earned. So, how do you do both of those things and I think one way, there are many ways, but one way that I really believe in is, as you have identified, I’ve done it through personalizing some of the writing that I’ve been doing, as have many of the other writers and editors on the staff.

On whether he thinks the printed page leaves a different kind of impact: I think that one thing that I’ve always loved, whether it’s an early interview with Kanye where he was talking about a particular uncle who had a stack of GQs in the living room that was his height, or some friends that have texted me pictures of each issue of GQ Style saved in chronological order on their shelf; I think with print we are leaving a different kind of record behind in that it is a documentation of a moment.

On the biggest misconception he thinks people have about him: There is a funny one, very low-key, it’s not a big one, but we’ve really been evolving the look and feel of the fashion in the pages and because with my first editor’s letter I was wearing jeans and untied shoes, and then I did this other interview about the future of the suit, and so people have been asking if GQ was turning away from the suit, (Laughs) because for years we’ve been the champions of the suit and I would just like to say that I’m wearing a suit right now; I was wearing a suit yesterday. Tomorrow, I don’t know, it may be a suit and it may not. We haven’t turned our back on the suit.

On what keeps him up at night: What keeps me up at night and the sort of next phase in this new era of GQ is really getting all of the things that we’re doing moving in the same direction. We’ve been working really hard together as a team to articulate exactly what this new vision is for GQ. And I think it’s already pretty dialed in print, because with print you have the opportunity to…each month it’s just blank pages, there is a stop and a start to building each issue.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Will Welch, editor in chief, GQ magazine.

Samir Husni: You write in your latest editorial that this is a new era for fashion; it’s like a freestyle. Tell me your vision for GQ under your leadership.

Will Welch: I really believe that we have come out of the era of broad general interest being a place of power for magazines. So, instead of trying to be everything to everyone, I want to be really clear about what GQ does better than anyone else on earth and I want to focus on those things.

And first among those is fashion with a focus on men. GQ has long been perceived as and really is the flagship of men’s fashion in America. And if you stop somebody on the street and ask them what GQ means to them, they’ll say men’s style. I think in a way we’re returning to that core and really imbuing the entire brand, everything we do and we do so many things now across all of our platforms, with this sense of taste and stylishness. That is really the foundation of everything we do.

And making sure that when people think about GQ it’s not just how to get dressed, but it’s how to be stylish in a way that is forward-thinking and progressive. So, I think that’s a part of it. And then one really important way that the landscape of how men dress has shifted is we’re in this “anything goes” era. We’re seeing dress codes go away; there was a lot of news made recently when Goldman Sachs announced that it was softening its dress code, going more business-casual.

And also, with the Internet, basically in the past when designers were creating clothes they would find an inspiration and they would go digging in libraries and watching old movies and going deep into archives to explore one throughline for their collections, and now it’s all at your fingertips online. So, we’re seeing where you could make a great case for the 1950s being back in style or the 1960s, ‘70s or ‘80s or even the ‘90s, so all of this is happening at once.

And I think when we see a seismic shift in the way people are dressing, it’s really important that GQ be configured in a way that has the right combination in responding to that and then leading the way forward. So, we’ve been making all sorts of changes to reflect the way that I see what’s going on in the style space. And that means we’re taking a little bit less of a “do this” or “don’t do that” approach, like buy these pants, not those pants; you want your suit to fit this way, not that way. So, in this environment where anything goes, we want to be this aspirational board of ideas almost, rather than this super-prescriptive do this, don’t do that finger-wagging. I just don’t think the modern audience responds to that.

To give you a more technical example of the way that’s working, we’ve really taken a lot of the traditional-style service journalism that has been a part of the pages of GQ and moved it to GQ dotcom, where we find our audience comes looking for it, because it’s the audience that wakes up every morning and checks GQ dotcom style section first who is looking for it there, but so are readers who are just searching and coming to GQ dotcom through Google.

So, in a way what we have is this magazine that is incredibly elevated and aspirational on this really beautiful, luxurious environment, and then you have some of that simple service that our readers have always wanted, which we’re still doing, but we’re bringing it to them on GQ dotcom.

Samir Husni: I have been looking at some copies of the original GQ, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and one copy I have has President Kennedy on the cover. And the editor was just singing praises about what an honor it was to have the president of the United States, donning his suit with two buttons instead of three. There has always been a dual role with the magazine, on one hand it initiates things and on the other hand it reflects. As you approach the new GQ with all of the changes, and with having the multiplatform where you’ve moved service to dotcom; how do you see your role as editor, and the magazine as a brand? Will you be more of a reflector of what’s going on or an initiator of things moving forward?

Will Welch: It’s really a balance, and the words that I would use are participation and amplification. One of the first things that I wanted to establish in a really strong way when I started this role was rebuilding a core community for GQ. And that means identifying all of these people in our world. And they’re writers, photographers, stylists, and actors; some of them are super-famous, some are not famous at all and may have more of a creative director role or a guy-behind-the-guy role. This is the community of core people, and not only should they be in the core pages of GQ, but they need to be our first readers and they need to be our community that we’re talking to every day.

And we need them to feel like GQ is the magazine that truly gets it, like that’s “my” voice, that’s “my” magazine, that’s “my” outlet. We need to interact with them every day on Instagram; they’re texting me when a new issue comes out and telling me what they think about the cover. It was hugely important to me and one of the first things that we had to do, was to reestablish that connection to our creative community, who of course are very broadly influential in our world. In other words, the power of GQ radiates through them.

But they’re also doing all of this really interesting stuff themselves. And so rather than GQ’s pages reacting to what they’re doing or leaving them and saying that they’re following us; I see it as we’re participating in this community of creative, plugged in people who are doing interesting stuff in the style space and in the culture space. They’re political reporters and the best photographers in the world. So, we’re participating in a dialogue with them and creating content sometimes with them, but often about them as well.

And then we’re able, because GQ is this massive platform, as you said, it has this incredible history and we’ve really built authority and audience over the years, so then we’re able to take the best of what’s happening in this community that we’re a part of, and really amplify it. I think that’s a slightly different way of thinking about the role of GQ. But for me it was really the starting place; how do we rebuild this brand in this new era?

I have to say that so far it feels like it’s really been working. These very influential creative people who, like us, are just pouring themselves into this work every day, they’ve really been responding to what they’ve been doing. They’ve been writing for the magazine, shooting for the magazine, while other people have been featured in the magazine.

And when I’m onset with some of the people who we have put on the cover in these first few issues, who are these types of people, I find a moment when onset for the shoot to tell them that I’m interested in this not being a onetime transactional relationship, where we put them on the cover and they further their career or promote a new project they have going on, and we all just brush off our hands and move on when it’s done. Instead, how can this be an ongoing conversation and how can GQ be part of their world? When they have their next project, they call me again and we create something cool together.

So again, it’s about participation and amplification, instead of us just being this completely secondary source that is reacting or determining what is good and bad.

Samir Husni: The amazing thing to me, and I don’t know if it came to you subliminally or intentionally, but when Esquire launched GQ back in the fifties, they did their best to differentiate between the two magazines. And GQ was more of the fashion-driven title. Are you right now trying to bring back the “good-old days,” where GQ was definitely different than Esquire?

Will Welch: I am an almost completely forward-looking person, I would say. So, the moves that we’ve been making in this new era are not specifically inspired by the relationship between GQ and Esquire from the past. I have been at GQ since 2007, so I’ve been here a long time and have fully metabolized the history of the brand and what it stands for. But I also think that a brand as strong as GQ is incredibly flexible. And I feel completely empowered to really push it to a new place.

It’s kind of a both ends situation where, I’ve been here for quite a long time, obviously not since 1959 (Laughs), but I’ve been here for a long time and really do think that I know where we come from, and rather than feeling like I have to serve that or pay homage to it in some dutiful way, I really feel like that gives me the flexibility to push it someplace new. And to trust that I will be honoring the history of the brand by going with my gut instincts.

Samir Husni: And those gut instincts served you really well when you took over the helm of GQ Style and reinvented that magazine. Last time we spoke, it was more like a revolution, where you just destructed the whole magazine and got rid of some of the traditional things in the front and back of the book. Are we going to see something as revolutionary as that? Or is this Will-Style and you’re looking at it like GQ Style is a little bit different than GQ, and each one will have its own revolution?

Will Welch: I think each will have its own revolution. I’ve definitely learned an incredible amount by the experience of launching GQ Style and the radical moves that I made and thinking about what the architecture of that magazine should be and what was possible in terms of the storytelling.

But GQ Style also has a really unique format in that the advertisements, in addition to being oversized and printed on beautiful, thick paper, the advertisements are banked as spreads in the beginning of the magazine, and then you have some singles with the table of contents and the editor’s letter and that sort of thing. But then once the editorial pages proper begin, it’s just all double-paged spreads all the way to the end. And that was sort of a radical format that I received almost as a gift and then I really wanted to see where we could push it.

So, there were elements of experimentation, a lot of which I think were really exciting and successful in GQ Style that don’t apply in a one to one way to GQ, which has a little bit more of a traditional structure. There’s a front and middle of the book which has single-page ad adjacencies and then there’s a traditional feature well too.

But those structural differences aside, I have been challenging myself and the whole team here to really think about what is possible. These are blank pages that we’re given every month and we really get to do whatever we want with them.

I’ve been talking a lot about just trying to free ourselves of too much institutional memory, in terms of what print magazines are supposed to do, so that we can really look at each page and each story in a fresh way. And we’ve already been making a lot of the moves; my third issue as editor in chief, the April issue, came out recently and we put the cover online; it has J. Cole on the cover.

There have been quite a few moves that we’ve made to make it different and I think what I intended and what we’re finding so far in the reaction is that people are really noticing a difference, but I don’t think it’s in any way like unrecognizably GQ. We haven’t transformed it so much that large portions of our audience are confused or wondering what happened to it. (Laughs) But at the same time it seems like everybody notices the difference. So far I’ve just been thrilled that the reaction has been incredibly positive.

Samir Husni: We seem to be seeing a shift from the celebrity editors to more of the down-to-earth person editors. In your case, I’ve read some of your editorials in GQ Style, you get very personal, even discussing your battle with cancer. Are we seeing a transformation in the magazine business, would you rather have that one-on-one conversation with your readers, as though friends?

Will Welch: The experience of being the editor in chief of the smaller spinoff title, GQ Style, it was an incredible experience, not just on a professional level, but also on a personal level, because I found that the more that I just allowed myself to be who I am, rather than trying to adopt any expectation or image of what an editor in chief or a Condé Nast editor in chief is supposed to look like, the more successful that we were.

So, that applied to the stories that I would find, the covers that we went after, the way that I approached writing my editor’s letter, and the way that I interacted with my team. And then also with the way that I presented myself in a more public way to the world at large. And I just found that the more I trusted myself to be who I am in my gut, it was right. And I’ve done a lot of personal work over the years to try to align the person who I am in my head and my heart, in my family with my wife, to who I am when I show up at work and who I am if I do an interview or have my photo taken or hold a meeting; all of those things, I just really try to have all of those things be aligned. And I’ve found that as I’ve done that, not only do I just feel good about myself, but we also have been having success in the work.

So, it’s really just been a matter of gaining confidence and trust in myself that I don’t need to be anybody else’s idea of what the editor in chief of GQ should be. I just need to be myself. In a way, sure we’re a men’s fashion and style magazine and we’re a lifestyle magazine and we do these incredible reported features, and there are all of these proud histories and different throughlines for what GQ is about or what it is meant to accomplish, but to me it’s really about helping our readers to be their best selves. And I’ve been trying to do the same.

Samir Husni: Being yourself today, what do you think has been the biggest challenge or obstacle that you’ve had to overcome to reach this stage?

Will Welch: In the early stages of GQ Style, with the first issue, I wanted to prove that it was its own magazine and could stand alone and that it had its own voice. And I was a little bit more calculating with the balance of stories in the first issue and was very methodical about what message that we would be sending to the industry and to our community and our readership, and to our potential readership.

But over the course of making the first handful of issues, I just found that I didn’t need to be so calculating, I could just be more instinctive. There’s an editor that I hired, now he works on GQ and GQ Style and GQ dotcom, but I initially hired him to work on GQ Style and his name is Noah Johnson and he was the GQ Style senior editor throughout the course of the last few years of making that magazine. And he grew up in Troy, New York as a skateboarder, and he was bringing all of these amazing skate ideas, because the way I see style through the lens of music, he sees style through the lens of skateboarding in a lot of ways.

As I was finding that the more I let my best ideas just be what they were, as Noah started getting all of these skateboarding-related content into GQ Style, that stuff really took on a life of its own. So again, it’s not just about me, it’s about the staff as well. Just getting to be their best selves through the pages.

So, just that process was one thing, and then the other would be what you mentioned; I was diagnosed with testicular cancer last year in late 2018, and that was an incredible witness test. It’s one thing to hold all of these beliefs and to hope that you’re living your life in a certain way, and then when you’re faced with a doctor telling you that you have cancer at age 37, although 37 is actually on the older side for that particular type of cancer, but I feel like a young vivacious man, and to be told that you have cancer, you definitely examine your life and ask yourself if you’re really practicing what you preach. How square is the life I’m living with the life that I would like to think that I’m living? And when I asked those questions when faced with that experience, I was just filled with so much gratitude for what I felt like were the answers that came back.

So with those two experiences, one was like more of a slow building of self-confidence over a couple of years, the process of leading this little team and this little magazine called GQ Style, and the other one was being faced with what could have been a frightening moment and found that I was just so full of gratitude. I went into surgery and had a healthful prognosis and I’m very grateful for that as well. Those two experiences were nice benchmarks for me and have given me a lot of confidence going into this new role.

And the experience of sharing about it was really powerful. The decision to write my editor’s letter about the testicular cancer diagnosis; I was really unsure if I was going to regret that decision. But instead, it was quite the opposite. There was an incredible outpouring of love and support and some readers saying that they had gone through the same thing, or their moms had breast cancer; just every imaginable response. It all came flooding back when I put that out there and it was an incredibly rewarding experience and also just a testament to the power of the platform. You’ve been on this editor’s letter page at the front of an issue of GQ Style, if you say something meaningful to people this amazing dialogue will come out of it. It was remarkable.

Samir Husni: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Will Welch: One thing that’s important is that we’re now in this time, especially with social media, which is just incredible, like Instagram is an incredibly intimate format. Podcasting is an incredibly intimate format. Instagram stories are amazingly intimate, you can watch people broadcast themselves waking up in the morning with their partner or with their pet; it’s just deeply intimate.

And a title like GQ has to ask itself in this environment, the idea of GQ is this kind of vaunted, haloed thing, but what people want now is a little bit more down-to-earth, but at the same time with GQ, I don’t want to give up this authority that we’ve earned over the decades and the hard-earned gloss that we’ve also earned. So, how do you do both of those things and I think one way, there are many ways, but one way that I really believe in is, as you have identified, I’ve done it through personalizing some of the writing that I’ve been doing, as have many of the other writers and editors on the staff.

But we are also increasingly looking at GQ dotcom and our incredibly powerful social media platforms, and our absolutely, enormously thriving video platform, as opportunities to turn the staff and the way the brand is structured inside out a little bit and show some of the mechanisms and say this is a bunch of cool and talented, diverse men and women who are making an impact. GQ is not this glowing brand on a mountaintop; it’s made by cool people like you who really love this stuff and live and breathe it, whether that’s pop culture or politics, style or long-form journalism, eating, drinking, or travel. It’s really just put together by the hard work of some really interesting people.

And so we want to put those people forward and now we have all of these incredible pools to do that, specifically social media and video and occasionally the pages of the magazine. That’s something that we’ve been mindful of and I do think it’s a little bit different. It’s been evolving over the years. I remember first noticing Jane Magazine doing this. You really got the sense of this cool community of stylish girls who were making this magazine and the pages were really imbued with their voices, so that was kind of a predecessor of the way that we’re thinking now and we also have all of these cool pools to bring it to life.

Samir Husni: What you are introducing in print also is amazing. When I look at the couples that you publish, or the family, such as Simon Rasmussen, Marz Lovejoy, and their daughter, Nomi; do you feel that the impact a print page can have is different? I mean, this would be a fleeting moment on Instagram, but when you can hold it in the magazine, you’re still looking at it, but it’s tangible. How do you decide what goes into print and what goes on Instagram?

Will Welch: I think that one thing that I’ve always loved, whether it’s an early interview with Kanye where he was talking about a particular uncle who had a stack of GQs in the living room that was his height, or some friends that have texted me pictures of each issue of GQ Style saved in chronological order on their shelf; I think with print we are leaving a different kind of record behind in that it is a documentation of a moment.

One thing that I think is really fun about magazines in general is they’re not gone in a flash, but they don’t have the permanence of books either. In a way, you want to pick up a book and feel like it should be as relevant today as it was the day it was printed. A magazine is intended, I’ve called it in the past, it’s semi-permanent. It’s like the semi-permanent documentation. You want a magazine to feel urgent and timely and of the moment, but the stories should also be worth printing in a way that can stay on somebody’s shelf or in an archive.

So, it’s really a balance. I love the immediacy of social media; I love that my Instagram stories go away after 24 hours. They just evaporate. That is really exciting to me. If you’re interested in image making and editorial and all the things that I’m interested, that presents its own unique opportunity. What do I want to say with this image or this short video that’s broadcast out to my followers and then just goes away? That’s an awesome editorial opportunity. With a magazine, it’s only on sale for a month, but then it hangs around longer, that is its own incredible opportunity. And digital in one sense feels more fleeting, but you can Google any story that GQ has published in the last 12 to 15 years and find it on GQ dotcom right now and read it for free. So, there is also digital archiving going on. All of these dials are really fun to play with.

It’s exciting to me that you called out the fact that we’ve shot couples because I just love shooting couples. Basically what I’m looking for in our photographs is for them to strike you visually but also emotionally. And I feel like taking an intimate portrait or going to do a travel story with a couple and they’re not a couple that we have cast and put together for the trip, but they’re actually partners in life, you just get something interesting and dynamic and electric and intimate.

We published a photo of Simon Rasmussen, who is editor in chief of Office magazine and he does some styling for us, he is a really interesting stylist. He and his wife Marz Lovejoy, and their baby Nomi are in a picture together and Marz is breastfeeding Nomi. And it was a cool, young, stylish influential, exciting family in our New York fashion community, let’s put them in the pages of the magazine.

And again, I’ve really been thinking of these early issues as an active community building and that’s just one example. They’re an influential couple in the New York fashion community; Simon works with us, I got to know Marz just a little bit through seeing her and Simon out and about. I’m still getting to know them. I know Simon much better because we’ve done a bunch of shoots together, but they’re interesting people and I want them to think of GQ as an outlet for them and also hopefully it’s a magazine that they can’t wait to grab every month. And that they are super-engaged with what we’re doing online. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, so if a reader in Atlanta sees that cool community being established between GQ and Simon and other people like that, they can be a part of that too from Atlanta. That’s what we’re building.

Samir Husni: What’s the biggest misconception you think people have about you?

Will Welch: There is a funny one, very low-key, it’s not a big one, but we’ve really been evolving the look and feel of the fashion in the pages and because with my first editor’s letter I was wearing jeans and untied shoes, and then I did this other interview about the future of the suit, and so people have been asking if GQ was turning away from the suit, (Laughs) because for years we’ve been the champions of the suit and I would just like to say that I’m wearing a suit right now; I was wearing a suit yesterday. Tomorrow, I don’t know, it may be a suit and it may not. We haven’t turned our back on the suit.

I’m just really interested in exploring all modes of men’s styles, some of them are super-conservative and some of them are super-progressive. So, that’s just one little thing that’s popped up in the last few weeks. Otherwise, I don’t know. I don’t feel misunderstood, I feel like the GQ community and the magazine industry and the fashion industry and the culture industries, music and Hollywood; I feel like people are still getting to know me. As I said, I started working at GQ in 2007 and really it’s been a slow evolution with me having a more public-facing role. I feel like me and the world are just getting to know each other; I don’t feel particularly misunderstood.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Will Welch: What keeps me up at night and the sort of next phase in this new era of GQ is really getting all of the things that we’re doing moving in the same direction. We’ve been working really hard together as a team to articulate exactly what this new vision is for GQ. And I think it’s already pretty dialed in print, because with print you have the opportunity to…each month it’s just blank pages, there is a stop and a start to building each issue.

But with GQ dotcom and our social feeds and our video channels, especially on YouTube, those are always on and they’re just churning and churning. And so to redirect any one of them, you can’t just do it overnight, it has to be a steady evolution. That is really what this next phase is. It’s making sure that all of those pieces, because we are a multi-tentacle brand. We push out so much really cool content everyday across all of these different platforms that we have at our disposal. And I just want to keep refining the vision and keep evolving what that vision means to each of those platforms, because I think you have to be really platform specific, even just within Instagram itself. Instagram stories are best at something that is incredibly different when you really get into it than what works on the Instagram main feed. But you have to think about each of those things as their own editorial idea.

To give you an example, what we do in the magazine is quite polished, but what thrives on Instagram’s stories, what’s exciting and gives you a thrill is something that’s really raw. So, how can this legacy Condé Nast fashion/style magazine that has always prided itself on incredible polish find a raw expression that is going to be in keeping with the environment of Instagram stories?

So, that is what the team and I talk about every day and we’ve already made huge strides, but I do think we have a ways to go still across GQ dotcom, video, social; each minute piece of each of those platforms, such as how can we be using Twitter in a more compelling way instead of just pushing out links. And we’re doing it; we’re doing it every day. I just want to keep refining.

That is the next phase in terms of the internal priorities. In the meantime, I feel like we’re off to the races with the broader vision and this idea of focusing on elevated stylishness. We’ll just keep going with that.

The other thing I would say is just keep having fun. I love this work; I love this role; I love this job; I love this title; I love my team. And I truly believe, and if it sounds a little bit like a Hallmark card, so be it, I don’t care, I truly believe that if we’re having fun making this stuff that our audience will have fun reading it, watching it, and engaging with it. That to me is the key. I am excited to come to work every morning and if the other people on the team feel that way too, I think people are going to be excited to wake up every morning and check out what we’ve been doing.

Samir Husni: Thank you.