Magazeum

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

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

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

Seliger had been heavily recruited by GQ and Vanity Fair to move to Condé Nast. But, as he learned, the days of being Fred Woodward’s go-to image maker were over. Once again, he was the new guy. And he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself.

Fortunately, reinvention is Seliger’s middle name. (Well, it’s really Alan, but you get what we mean). For example:

Seliger grew up in rural Texas, but decides to go big and moves to New York City to get into the magazine business. Reinvention #1.

He gets early work at business magazines like Manhattan, Inc. In short time his portraiture lands him a few plum assignments at Rolling Stone. Reinvention #2.

Unforgettable shoots and an immediate connection with Woodward lands him the title of chief photographer, and he picks right up where the legendary Annie Leibovitz leaves off. Reinvention #3.

His exposure at Rolling Stone leads Seliger (along with his pal Woodward) to directing music videos for A-listers like Lenny Kravitz and Courtney Love, and Gap commercials with LL Cool J and Missy Elliott. Reinvention #4.

When Covid hits, and publishing effectively shuts down, he pivots to documentary photography and produces an epic portfolio of an empty and still New York City that becomes the book, The City That Finally Sleeps. Reinvention #5.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, Reinvention #6: Seliger starts writing songs in his free time, and then forms the band Rusty Truck. And at the moment Seliger is reminding Graydon Carter that he knows his way around a cover shoot, Rusty Truck releases its first album, Luck’s Changing Lanes, which is produced by Lenny Kravitz, Gillian Welch, Willie Nelson, Dave Rawlings, Sheryl Crow, T-Bone Burnett, and Bob Dylan.

That’s a lot. A whole lot. But for Seliger, it’s all of a piece. Photography, music, work, life. He says it’s all about following your curiosity. Observing. Not just looking but seeing. “For me,” he explains, “it’s all about storytelling—the storytelling in photography translated well into the storytelling of songwriting. And that exploration leads you to do something that you’d never done before.”

That’s the story of his life.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press.

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

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 thing: there are more of you than there are of me, and there always have been.

I'm saying all this because today we're gonna talk about Geezer magazine, as if any Gen X-er in their right mind would ever call themselves a geezer, because that's Boomer stuff. And hey, did you see we're turning 60? For fuck’s sake. As if.

So yes, Geezer, a magazine by and for Gen X that is both completely irreverent and surprisingly serious and even tender, that balances nostalgia with irony. And while Gen X’s favorite word might be whatever, the secret is we care what you think. We always have. You just have to first extract a whole lot of other stuff, that cold exterior built up as a defense mechanism against a world that is stupid, and that for whatever reason the Boomers keep running. Meaning sure, we like to say never mind, but we also sang “Don’t You Want Me” and “Debaser.”

So just take a chill pill. I promise we’ll talk about a rad magazine on today’s show..

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press.

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

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 previous startup, Wallpaper*, to the American media giant, and he was desperate to get back to the newsroom.

Given the times, and the stream of fading print publications, one could judge Brûlé’s resolve as “madness,” as Don Quixote cried in the opening clip. Digital was all the rage, the iPad was knocking on the door, and the radiation of the frenzied dotcom meltdown was still slowly killing legacy media.

“Madness”? Not if you know Tyler Brûlé. 

In his world, “life as it should be” is rich—a morning espresso in a bustling cafe with a crisp newspaper written and edited in the romance language of your choice, sorting out weekends skiing the Alps or lounging on the Med while riding the night train to Vienna.

And then there’s the print—not only the magazine itself, printed on “upwards of nine different paper stocks, crammed with extremely niche articles about carbon-neutral airlines in Costa Rica and sleek Afghan restaurants in Dubai,” but also special edition newspapers, coffee table books, and Monocle-approved travel guides. 

(Someone forgot to tell Brûlé and his brilliant team of collaborators that print is dead).

In a media culture traditionally obsessed with scale at any cost, Monocle’s modest 100,000 circulation belies a thriving multi-media juggernaut that confidently ignores the lure of social media. “We’re in a very fortunate position that we’re an independent publisher,” says Brûlé, “and we don’t have the commercial pressures of a big parent. And those commercial pressures can be two-fold: One is cost savings, but the other pressures are to go and chase after every new trend.”

In fact, Brûlé thinks of Monocle as a family business.

“We don’t set out to be pioneers, but also we’re a family company, and we can choose to do things quickly if we want to.”

That same culture has manufactured the pressure to establish one’s entrepreneurial cred. You’re not the editor, you’re the founding editor, the founding creative director, the founding director. But when asked about how he thinks of and refers to himself, Brûlé answers simply:

“If I think about ‘What do I do?’ I’m a journalist. I’m out to be a witness. I’m out to absorb, I’m out to interpret, and I’m out to communicate. 

A print-centric media phenomenon, created as a family business, led by a journalist. Surprising? Not for someone who’s been building a life—as it should be.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press.

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

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 from BlackStar Projects, home of an annual film festival in Philadelphia and a creative space that “uplifts the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists.” Seen grew out of the program notes for the festival and it is everything cinema magazines used to be: thorough, intellectually stimulating, challenging. 

Heidi Saman, the editor, trained as a film maker and then worked at Fresh Air for over a decade. She doesn’t come from the magazine world. But she’s a storyteller. And after you listen to our chat, you, too, will see, perhaps, that making a magazine is a lot like making a movie.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press.

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025

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 print and circulation costs that sink bigger ships. When that topples, you have to ask yourself: What era of women’s media are we in now? 

Rachel Baker: That’s what makes it such an interesting time to talk to Stella Bugbee. Ask any 30- or 40-something today about the one women’s media brand that is absolutely a daily must-read, and she will say New York magazine’s The Cut—the site that, starting in 2012, Stella built. The Cut was not just a women’s magazine re-sized for the internet, but a whole-cloth reinvention of the form. Jezebel (which was founded in 2007) was as much its forebear as the Elles and Vogues of the world: The Cut had the irreverence and voice-yness and political savvy of new media and the high-caliber production value of old media. And it was built to last: While we may have lost Jezebel, The Cut is still operating, more or less, on the blueprint that Stella created—and going strong. 

Maggie Bullock: What we’ve always found fascinating about Bugbee is that she started out as a designer—she worked at a creative agency and on the visual side of a ton of cool indie magazines (like Interview and Topic) and had a stint at The New York Times before becoming the design director of the original Domino. But then when that magazine folded, she somehow totally switched teams, becoming an editor and a really great writer. I can’t think of anybody else who did that, can you? It's no surprise that The New York Times tried for years to get Stella to come to run the Styles desk. Somehow, the middle of the pandemic—when most of the Times was still working remotely, when she was unable to meet her team in person—felt like the right time for her? 

Rachel Baker: Now I think you can really see the Stella touch in the way they package their stories. Like, a couple weeks ago, when the section ran a cover story titled, “Ozempic vs. Thanksgiving.” The idea sounds almost obvious, but I’d argue that it’s a masterclass in headline writing—it demonstrates a specific Bugbee-an ability to survey the culture and zero in on the thing everyone is thinking about—like when Styles spotlighted the “girl dinner” over the summer. My group texts are still full of photos of “cheese plates for one,” how about yours?

Maggie Bullock: Totally. So should we stop yammering so folks can listen to what Stella has to say?

Rachel Baker: Let’s do it.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press.

A production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2025