Magazeum

THE (MAGAZINE) DOCTOR IS IN

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Megan Schertler wants to help you make magazines. Yes, you … and you … and you too. But she also wants to ensure that once you make a magazine, you make another one. And then one after that. She wants to make sure that you know it's not easy to create a magazine or to run one or to publish a second one or to sustain a magazine or media brand or to run a business.

Megan is big on print. She’s one of those extremely rare people who’s held dow...

THE PRIME OF MR. NEVILLE BRODY

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“Once you have broken down the rules, literally anything is possible.’”

In the business of magazine design, few names resonate as profoundly as Neville Brody. And, to this day, he lives by those words. 

Renowned for his groundbreaking work and commitment to pushing design boundaries at magazines like The Face, Arena, Per Lui, and others, Brody is a true auteur in the world of design. We talked to him at the launch of his spectacular new monograph, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3.

Nurtured...

BAD BUNNY

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Playboy is many things to quite a few people. We don't have to go into its history, but the thing you need to know is this: it's back. Yes, there will be photos of women in various stages of undress, and yes, there will be sharp writing from sharp minds. But mostly, the people behind it are going to try and build up the media brand, and that's important, because Playboy was arguably the first magazine that used its content at the center of a much larger and much more diverse brand ecosystem.

THE INDUSTRY'S LITTLE SISTER

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In early April, what’s left of the magazine industry gathered at Terminal 5 to see who would win this year’s National Magazine Awards—the ASMEs. Throughout the evening, the usual suspects stepped up to accept their Alexander Calder brass elephants—the ‘Ellies’—on behalf of their teams at The Atlantic, New York, and The New York Times Magazine. 

Then came the award for General Excellence, Service and Lifestyle—a category that covers every food, fashion, and fitness magazine in the business.

And the Ellie went to… content juggernaut Hi...

CHECK, PLEASE

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Thanks for tuning in. Just a note before we get going: This is the 50th episode of The Full Bleed, and I, along with the team here at Magazeum, truly appreciate the time you spend with us.

Waiting is what I consider a perfect magazine. Not because of its design or the writing, though both are stellar. But mostly because it functions as a closed loop. How? The subject and the audience are one and the same. Waiting, you see, is a magazine about creatives in New York’s service industry. And...

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

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Where do magazine designers go after all the magazines are gone? That’s a question we’ve often pondered in recent years.

Well, if you’ve been paying close attention, you’d probably guess, as it turns out, a lot of them go to Cupertino. And much of this migration can be traced to 2014, when today’s guest, AIGA Medalist and Emmy award-winning creative director Arem Duplessis, left his storied job at The New York Times Magazine to go to work at Apple.

You might be ask...

THE INTERNET WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

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The tech industry is easy to dislike, admire, ridicule, resent, need, and all of the above. Look, this podcast doesn’t exist without tech. But there is also no "enshittification" without tech. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow that word has entered the general lexicon with a speed and ubiquity that might make someone like, I don’t know, Shakespeare envious. If he knew what was going on. Which he doesn’t.

All of this to introduce InFormation, a magazine about tech, but more importantly, a magazine about “what tech i...

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 heavily recruited by GQ and Vanity Fair to move to Condé Nast. But, as...

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 younger generations are called. I’m Gen X, and I just know one...

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 global economy was hit by the Great Recession.

But Brûlé was coming out from under a rather lengthy non-compete agreement with Time Inc., after selling his pr...

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. Copy editors and film editors. On and on. It’s uncanny.

Seen is a magazine about the art of film and filmmaking that comes fr...

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 Jezebel was invented to skewer. Rachel, Jezebel was supposed to be the radical “antidote to the establishment”—and it didn’t have to contend with...

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 them produce print magazines as editorial add ons, supplements, not just for reader loya...

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 is just naturally consumed with all things visual. He has been since childhood. (He gets it from his mot...

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 wall where the graffiti artists, punks and poets, filmmakers, philos...

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 cameras in sight, but it’s as if we’re watching a grand entrance and a reality TV sho...

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 no newsstands, at least in North America. And bookstores, well, ok, go to your local books...

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, and brush — and reveling in the thrill of making something, finally, for an audience of one.<...

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, magazines are perfectly positioned as a part of an “analog” wave that is going t...

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 looks and feels and, perhaps more importantly, how it looked and felt.

Di...

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 not yet aware of her groundbreaking work at Raw magazine.

Much time has pass...

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.

And, yes, the magazine is set up as a hotel. Just go to the table of contents a...

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 ago, each issue of Fare explores a single city, using food as an ent...

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 skills as a writer, a fashion editor, a digital editor and a print editor, and, oh yeah, a social-m...

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 neighborhood in town. 

Or you might not even meet a local. Or ever stop looking at the screen on your phone.

You...

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 Magazine. She also worked for the iconic 1990s fashion brand Esprit. 

These days—literally on any given day—you’re likely to find Casey in the wat...

FOOD IS FOR EVERYONE

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That meal your grandmother always cooked. Or your mother. Or your father, for that matter. The odors that permeated a kitchen or the entire house. The first taste. The idea of comfort food.

So much of who we are and what we remember are about food, sure, but also about place, and most definitely about the person doing the cooking.

While many food magazines go beyond food to create the context about the recipes they print, writer and editor Kyle Yoshioka felt they lacked the backstories that ma...

LOST IN TRANSLATOR

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There are more than 7,000 languages in the world and there’s a good chance that you don’t speak or read most of them. Being an English-language speaker is, among other things, a huge privilege in this multilingual world because while it may not be the most widely spoken first language, English is the language that is most widely spoken.

There’s a chance that you can get by in English almost everywhere. And so English speakers tend not to learn other languages. To their detriment. (And to the resentment of other...

AN ELEGY FOR THE ELITE

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Michael Grynbaum is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he has covered media, politics, and culture for 18 years. He’s reported on three presidential campaigns, two New York City mayors—they're always so boring—and the transformation of the media world in the Trump era. He lives in Manhattan and he’s a graduate of Harvard.

His first book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America, was published by Simon & Schuster in June, 2025. In the book, Michael chronicles the origins of the comp...

POP GOES PRINT

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“Today, creativity feels like it’s being squeezed into smaller and smaller boxes. Content is designed to chase likes, rack up views, serve a clear function—a purpose….we’re here—to celebrate creativity for creativity’s sake, no strings attached. Analog isn’t dead; it’s the new rebellion.”

This manifesto is a part of a striking editorial in the first issue of Playground, a new magazine created out of Singapore by Pop Mart, the maker of the Labubu. I honestly never thought I would a) write that kind of sentence in my life...

SHE LOVES HER WORK

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The word ‘unicorn’ gets thrown around a lot these days. But in our book, Sarah Ball is the Real Deal. The editor of WSJ. Magazine is a student of old-guard, in-the-trenches, work-on-a-story-for-years magazine making, which has earned her cred among the Jim Nelsons and David Grangers of the biz.

She’s also a digital native with a flare for experimentation and a new media scrappiness. Sarah spent her career bridging those divides predominantly at Vanity Fair and GQ where she helped those titles join the digital revolution—much more stylishly...

A NEW RECIPE FOR FOOD MAGAZINES

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You may think a magazine called Famous for My Dinner Parties would be about food or entertaining—and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. You wouldn’t be wrong, but you also wouldn’t be right.

Taking its name from Robert Altman’s film, 3 Women, Famous for My Dinner Parties started as a pandemic-inspired digital project among three friends (Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenheim and Yannic Moeken) in Berlin and has evolved into a proper magazine and media brand, and along the way has won an engaged a...

THE GOOD CITIZEN

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This episode is a special one for us here at Magazeum. We even gave it its own code name: “Project Rosebud” (IYKYK). But if you only know our guest as the grandson of the man who inspired the lead character in the film classic Citizen Kane and the founder of one of the largest publishing empires in the world, you are missing out. 

Will Hearst could have done the easy thing, but he chose not to. As the current chairman of the Hearst Corporation, Will balances stewardship of a sprawling media e...

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

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While it’s not true that kids don’t read, it may be true that adults aren’t teaching kids to read. It’s also true that today’s children face issues that those of the past didn’t. And the pandemic—there’s that word again—impacted everyone in ways we’re still figuring out, including kids. Perhaps especially kids.

There are, amazingly, and encouragingly, many new magazines for children of all ages now. One of them is Anyway, a magazine for tweens founded by two mothers—and long-time friends—who gr...

A MODERN FORM OF WORSHIP

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Name the five photographers who, more than any others, defined the dramatic shift in the approach to magazine photography in the late eighties and early nineties. There’s Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel. Richard Avedon, of course. 

Who’s missing? I’m getting to that.

Today’s guest was discovered while still a student at ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, by Andy Warhol no less, whose upstart (and budget-deficient) team at "Interview" couldn’t afford to send a crew to LA for a shoot. His fi...

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

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Josh Jones has done a lot of things when it comes to magazines: Editor. Writer. Maker. Custom publisher. Mentor. Evangelist. All of the above. 

Has Josh helped write a book about hip hop in Mongolia? Yes. Has he sat back and watched Gordon Ramsey mash his face into a sandwich? Indeed. Has he written an instructive how to book that reminds the reader to always lift a box of magazines by bending one’s knees? Yes, again. 

For more than 20 years, Josh has been creating magazines, both f...

GUARDIAN AT THE GATEFOLD

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Today’s guest has become almost synonymous with graphic design and editorial publishing. His career began in the defiant New York “sex press” of the late 1960s, where not-actually-that-surprisingly, as a teenager he was already art-directing magazines like Screw and The New York Review of Sex. That unlikely starting point gave him a rare education in the power of design to command attention and shape meaning.

We’re talking about designer, author, editor, educator, and true legend, Steven Heller.

Heller went on to spend more than three decades at...

THE REST OF THE STORY

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Most people in the world live in what we in the west sometimes dismissively call the “rest of the world.” Depending on where you live, “the rest” probably includes parts, if not all, of Latin America, Africa, and the vast majority of Asia. Much like the tendency of Americans to call the champions of their sports leagues “world champions,” the word “world” is never what it seems.

Except when it is.

Founded as a non-profit by Sophie Schmidt in 2020, Rest of World is meant to challenge the “expectations...

IMAGINE FRIENDSGIVING AS A MAGAZINE

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The pandemic hit New York first and harder and longer than most places. And as a New Yorker, Joshua Glass was appalled by the eerily quiet and empty city that resulted. He wanted to connect with people, any people, but he wanted quality gatherings, as opposed to quantity. 

When restrictions on gatherings began to ease up, he started curating a series of dinner parties around town. And these get-togethers led to the creation of Family Style, a media brand that brought all his interests under a single, and per...

THE ROADS LESS TRAVELED

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Much of travel media comes with a kind of sheen to it. A gloss. Whether you are traveling Italy with a hungry celebrity or cruising Alaska in the pages of a magazine, the photos are big and Photoshopped, the text kind of breathless. And while Afar has plenty of both, it just feels a bit different. It is not a magazine that puts a focus on consumption but on feeling. On the experience of travel.

Julia Cosgrove has been atop Afar’s masthead from the beginning. She comes from a ma...