Stack Magazines

"People will give you a million hearts on Instagram, but they might not buy your magazine..." Conor Purcell has been making magazines for a long time. He's spent the last 13 years working on both corporate jobs and his own independent projects, making mistakes and learning along the way, and now he's pooled all that experience in a new book: The Magazine Blueprint. Except he hasn't only written about his own adventures – he's spoken to more than 50 editors, art directors, publishers and magazine sellers to create a comprehensive guide to independent publishing. He dropped in at Somerset House this week to speak about the making of the book, why it all takes so long to go from the idea to the finished printed object, and why he's still learning as he goes.

"I couldn't give a shit what the medium is." Jeff Taylor is the founder of Courier, the London-based magazine dedicated to covering startup culture. But as Jeff explains in the podcast below, print is not sacred to Courier's mission, and while he values it as, "an immersive, evocative but still authoritative long-form format", he is also excited about the opportunities afforded by other ways of reaching people who care about the future of business.

Independent magazines are renowned for their loveliness: the thick paper, gorgeous photography and enticing design are all there to make you want to buy a copy. But what is their own definition of beauty? And how does that compare to the sort of images we're used to seeing in mainstream editorial and advertising? Recorded live on 22 May 2018 at The Book Club in London, this panel discussion brings together the makers of Beauty Papers, Staple and Ladybeard to speak about the ideas and ideals behind their magazines.

"If art is about football it's really boring." Eddy Frankel is the editor and founder of OOF, the self-proclaimed 'art and football magazine'. But as he explains in this conversation, he's really interested in what football can tell us about the wider world, using the sport as a metaphor to explore changing ideas of society, health, corporate sponsorship and more.

"There's still a desire for long-form photo essays." Francesca Sears is Director of Special Projects at Magnum Photos, and in this episode she explains why the legendary picture agency decided to publish its first ever newspaper. Drawing upon the Magnum archives, A Brief Visual History in the Time of Isis takes a long view of history to tell a fresh story about how the group has managed to draw so much attention to itself, and challenges the image that Isis has so carefully created.

"The only thing for sale in this magazine is our ideas." Everyone knows that food magazines are supposed to be full of delicious recipes and gorgeous photography of dishes that you can either buy or make for yourself in your fantastically successful life. But Mold takes a different approach – instead of promoting aspirational images, it questions why we eat the things we do, and how that might need to change if we're going to meet the demands of feeding a rapidly expanding global population. In this episode, editor and founder LinYee Yuan explains the thinking behind her exciting, provocative magazine, and considers what the future may hold for Mold.

"Everyone has an opinion on this..." Exploring conflict and visual culture, Contra Journal wants readers to think again about the images they see everyday on the news and elsewhere. Very few people would consider themselves an expert on the subject, but almost everyone has strong feelings about it, and in this episode three of the editors discuss the ideas and motivations behind the magazine, and explain why the slowness of print is so important to the project.

"We like to go beyond the landscapes we visit." Cartography is a beautiful, photo-led travel magazine that documents not only the people and places it encounters, but also their unseen histories and "holiness". In this conversation, editor and creative director Paula Corini explains the ideas and motivation behind their uniquely spiritual approach to travel journalism.

"The process comes first and the results later." Flaneur magazine is the experimental, reflexive magazine that builds each issue around a single street. The strapline has always been 'Fragments of a street', but for the latest issue, based around Treze de Maio in São Paulo, they've intensified the fragmentation and broken their stories up into numbered chunks that flow through the pages. It's their most ambitious issue to date, and in this episode editors Grashina Gabelmann and Fabian Saul explain how they and the rest of the team made it happen.

"You come for a week and you never leave..." Slightly Foxed is the literary magazine that launched 15 years ago when three friends decided to take a stand against chain bookshops and celebrity publishing. As the magazine grew the team expanded, and in this episode they tell the story of how they became an extended family of book lovers, and why everything comes back to keeping their readers happy.