20: Everywhere
Interview with Todd Lappin, Editor, February 2008
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
Here on Periodical Radio I often ask my guests whether they think online versions of their periodicals will replace the printed issues. The topic of today's show, Everywhere magazine, puts a whole new twist on that question. 8020 Publishing has created a printed travel magazine from content submitted by readers at their web site, everywheremag.com. In the words of Paul Cloutier, CEO of 8020 Publishing,
"Many people believe the web is going to kill off print magazines, but we think just the opposite: By combining the vitality and depth of the Internet with the tactile, inspirational quality of print, we want to make magazines more relevant than ever before."
In my mind they've hit on a great idea. The eclectic mix of reader-written travel stories and photography are very interesting, and the magazine is appealing and well designed.
To discuss the philosophy behind the magazine and what is making it work, my guest is editor Todd Lappin.
Steve: Todd, welcome to Periodical Radio. First of all, can you explain for our listeners who may not be familiar with Everywhere the innovative way the magazine produced?
Todd: Sure. Everywhere is produced in a really unusual way in the sense that it is almost entirely created by the people who read it. So we have an online community at everywheremag.com and it’s both a travel a destination web site and an opportunity for people to submit material that we can actually use in the magazine. In the course of submitting travel photos about a place or writing a caption about a place, or even if you’d like, submitting an article about a place, you’re both creating a travel web site where people can go to find out what’s fun to do if you want to go on vacation, and also you’re submitting material which we then use to create a print magazine. The best of the material that’s submitted on the web site by our community ends up in a pretty glossy print magazine that we then let people subscribe to, just like a normal magazine.
Steve: What was the original philosophy behind turning Web 2.0 content into a professionally produced magazine?
Todd: Basically it turns out that a lot of the things that everyone heard ten years ago about print is dead, the future of dead tree media and so on and so forth just turns out not to be right. It’s true that newspapers are having a difficult time, and the magazine business as a whole is having a difficult time, largely because of some issues having to do with where the advertising market is going. But demand for magazines is pretty solid. One thing that’s really clear is that as the web siphons off a lot of the audience that has to do with data, things that are just about numbers and statistics. That kind of information belongs on the web. But magazines do really well, even now, when they really focus on experience. In other words, when magazines do what magazines do best, which is present beautiful pictures in beautiful layouts and inspire people to get out and do something. That was the thinking, that if you combine the best of both worlds, allow the web to be about data, let the web site be a place where people can submit lots of gory detail about any particular travel destination, but then we can take the best of that and turn it into print. A print travel magazine isn’t really about data. You’re not really picking up a travel magazine to find out what the phone number of a hotel is. What you really want is a beautiful picture to make you realize that’s probably a place you probably want to find out more about. So we use the print magazine to be all about inspiration; we let our web site be about data. That’s sort of how the division of labor works between the two.
Steve: What are the advantages of using reader submissions instead of having paid travel writers?
Todd: Oh, there are so many advantages, the list goes on and on. Most obvious of those is the fact reader submissions tend to have a lot authenticity than travel writers. The simple fact is that travel writing is sort of a racket in a way. The writers themselves don’t really pay for their experience, they’re just supposedly bringing some expertise to the thing which is supposed to be helpful. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of people would rather hear from somebody who was doing it on their dime, and who is just genuinely excited about something. There’s just so much more inspiration out there than any travel writer or any editor sitting behind a desk can possibly capture, and this is just a great way for surprising, interesting and authentic experiences to end up in print.
Steve: As an editor, what do you have to do to turn that very eclectic mix of submissions into a coherent issue?
Todd: That’s a good question. It’s sort of guidelines that we use in our own heads. We don’t every really say them explicitly in the magazine, but when you look at the current crop of travel magazines, most of them out there, it’s pretty obvious that they tend to bifurcate along two lines. I wrote about this in our first issue. It seems like you’re either going on trip to Tuscany, looking for some sort of pretty high end vacation, or you’re going backpacking in Alaska for three months. In other words, you’re an outdoorsy type. The more we thought about it, that just seems kind of ridiculous. That distinction between high and low is pretty arbitrary. The fact of the matter is, most of the people we know, regardless of their income or their purchasing power, tend to do a little of both in the course of a typical travel year. Wealthy people might do it a little more often, but really at the end of the day they don’t travel all that differently. That’s kind of what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a range of experiences that capture the gamut of the kind of travel people do, which is to say that some people in the course of a single vacation may spend three days backpacking. I just had some friends who just came back from a trip like this. They spent three days on a backpacking trip in northern Vietnam, and then when they got back to Hanoi they spent three or four days in a four star hotel to sort of unwind after that trip. That’s the kind of diversity and range that we’re looking for.
Steve: How does the reader rating of the stories and photographs work on the web site?
Todd: That’s working, we’re just getting that part of things going, but basically the way it works, it’s not a democracy [laughs]. Just because something gets favored a lot means it ends up in the magazine. What the system does, we use a combination of factors, including explicit votes, views, links, a combination of things that are all fed into an algorithm to generate a measure that we just sort of generically call “hotness.” That is to say, things that people are interested in, measured by active and passive measures of community interest. What that does is it allows the stuff that is the hottest or most interesting to float to the top. In the sea of the submissions we’re getting and from the stuff that floats to the top, I as an editor then go in and curate that and turn it into a print magazine layout.
Steve: How much editing in terms of copyediting and changing the text is necessary? Or is that all over the place?
Todd: That’s a really, really good question. I’ve worked at a bunch of magazines over the years. I worked at Wired at five years, I worked at Time Inc.’s Business 2.0 for five years. In both of those places, you quite often would end up going in and doing some pretty substantial rewriting of the text. Here at Everywhere, my philosophy is that we need to take a pretty light hand, mainly because again authenticity is the most important thing here. The opportunity for people to let their own voices shine is really I think what gives the magazine so much of its energy. What we tend to do is we will often trim things down. People do tend to write a little bit long, which is actually a good thing. We do our own basic fact checking, to make sure references are correct and so on and so forth. You know, tighten things up a little bit, add our own headlines, add our own subheads, and then again just sort of package the thing. And also we do of course send them out to a copyeditor. They do get copyedited. So what we’re trying to do is take the submissions we get, make them as professional as we can without really going in and doing very substantial revisions or editing. If we have a question, we will go back to the member of the community who wrote the article and ask them a little bit here and there. In other words this part didn’t make sense, what did you eat, what was the name of the hotel where you stayed, some basic questions like that. But we don’t do what you would do at a traditional magazine, which is revise a piece wholesale and say to the writer, “Could you just basically do another draft for us?” We don’t really do that.
Steve: So you’re really striving to give the authors their own voice, as opposed to having one voice for the whole magazine.
Todd: Exactly. We’re not at all about having one voice for the entire magazine. Just because the whole point of the exercise is to really allow the enthusiasm of the community to rise to the surface. We want that to be first and foremost. That’s the reason why you would read Everywhere as opposed to any other travel magazine, even independent of the fact of how it’s made. In other words, I think Everywhere needs to work as a magazine on its own, even if you never knew the fact that it’s created by its readers. It just needs to be the kind of thing, that if you pick it up on the newsstand amongst other travel magazines, you’d just instantly say, “Wow, this magazine is different!”
Steve: I’d like to momentarily go back to the peer commentary aspect of it before moving on some of the things about the magazine itself. Some scholarly journals have experimented with open peer commentary, but the problem has been very few articles actually get any comments. In your view, what's the critical mass of folks that you need to make commentary to make peer commentary work, to be a valuable resource?
Todd: That’s a good question. Everywhere is just getting started as a community, so I would not claim that we’ve got it all completely figured out. The community itself just launched in late November, so it hasn’t been in existence for all that long. But from some of the other magazines this company does, this company also does JPG Magazine, which is a photography magazine, and a lot of the general things we see about web community, it is a bit different from the scholarly community. In scholarly communities, there are incentives that come into play in a situation like this that do influence it. Obviously reputational capital is really important, and of course that would come into play in a scholarly environment in the sense that if you’re the kind of person who consistently says smart things, people just start to know your name. You can build a brand for yourself, just through your participation. But there are other things that come into play here. This is an opportunity for people who would not normally get published to get published. Frankly, there’s a huge incentive for a lot of our contributors to be able to say, “Look, Mom, I’m in a magazine!” We see the impact of that all over the place, both in terms of the kind of participation we get online, and actually the kind of newsstand sales we see. We’ve found with JPG at least, Everywhere again is just getting started, but with JPG the number of copies that fly off the newsstand is pretty dramatic, relative to industry norms. Largely because, we believe, the viral effect of “Look, I’m in a magazine.” A lot of the contributor’s friends and family go and pick up a copy. The upside is this is basically there’s a little of an “American Idol” component to a lot of this, which I don’t know if it would be the same in a scholarly context. There’s an openness to it, an accessibility to it, and the opportunity to have your moment in the spotlight. I think that’s really compelling for a lot of people.
Steve: I’m hearing you say that “Look, Mom, I’m in a magazine!” still carries more value than “Look, Mom, I’m on a web site!”
Todd: Absolutely, for all the reasons that we alluded to earlier. A web site is nice, and it’s important, but there’s a sort of gravitas and depth of the experience in a magazine in the context of high color, high gloss print page which just doesn’t translate to the web. Again, this is what the experience of a magazine very different from the experience of a web site. It affects the reader experience, it impacts the contributor experience, and it’s almost subliminal in terms of how we respond to the two mediums differently.
Steve: The graphic design of Everywhere is very appealing, at least in my eye. How did you and your team decide on the look you want for the magazine?
Todd: There’s a bunch of things that have gone on. Obviously there’s the basic identity of the magazine, the logotype itself. I realize this is a podcast, so people can’t see it, but the logotype looks a little bit like an airline route map, with what he we call them jet lines shooting off from the Y in Everywhere. That was meant to be obviously a metaphor for travel, and also a metaphor for the web of people who contribute to the magazine. It’s one of those images that instantly evokes the feeling of travel and exoticism and going somewhere. That was the basic element of the identity. Beyond that, we were just looking for something that looked very contemporary, very simple, but very sophisticated. We also wanted to allow the photos to really shine. In other words, we really want this to be a photo rich magazine, because we get amazing photos from our contributors. It’s just absolutely incredible. We want them to be given as much play as possible. Lastly, the general format of the pieces tends to be relatively short form. We don’t do a whole lot of long form narrative. A long piece for us tends to be about 1200 words. There are a lot of shorter pieces. There’s a bunch of reasons for that. Structurally, some are due to the contributor side. I think it’s a lot less intimidating for people if they don’t feel they have to be Rudyard Kipling and write this amazing opus. You can just sort of jot off something which is a quick thought. Actually that’s enough to get published. We have a whole section of the magazine called “Postcards,” for example, which is nothing more than user submitted photos with about a paragraph of text describing what was going on at the moment when the photograph was taken. The metaphor obviously is a print postcard, the kind of thing you would write on the back of a picture if you were sending it from somewhere else. This is the same idea, except it’s your photo and it’s a digital photo. Tell us what you would have written if this were an actual postcard. That’s an example of how we’re using short form writing and very rich pictures to tell stories in a different kind of way.
Steve: Do you have to get the original photo files from your readers? I wouldn't think uploaded files on your web site would be of high enough resolution to go into the magazine.
Todd: They are. We’re having some internal debate about this, but we have a requirement. We won’t accept any photo that’s less than 2000 pixels wide. So we have a minimum size requirement to upload a photo to the web site. For that very reason, that we just want things that we always know we can use them if we needed to as a two-page spread. You can do that with 2000. Even 2000 is a little small for a two-page spread, but beyond a two-page spread it’s good for almost anything else you might want to do. That gives us a lot flexibility to run photos big, to run them small. Almost every photo we get is of sufficient quality. Again, there’s some debate about whether we should also allow lower resolution photos. While it’s true we do a lot of big pictures, and we’re really into photographs, we also nevertheless do a fair number of photos which aren’t all that big. Like every magazine does, we use inset photos, and collages and so on and so forth. You don’t need very high resolution photos for that. So that would maybe lower the bar for entry for some photographers. But anyway, that’s an ongoing debate we’re having. For the moment it’s working great. We’re getting amazing contributions. My favorite example is we just sent the second issue of Everywhere off to the printer, and the cover came from a reader. It’s a genuine reader submission, was just sitting there on our web site that somebody had given us this fantastic picture, with a journalistic quality to it, taken on the roof of the Standard Hotel by the pool in Los Angeles. It’s this great scene that captures the sociology of the rooftop pool in downtown Los Angeles, and sort of how bizarre that is. It came through the transom from a reader, actually a traveler who was visiting Los Angeles from France. It was good to go. All we really did was a little bit of color correction and there it is, the cover of our next issue.
Steve: Todd, many magazines are launched on a wing and a prayer, and most new magazines fail. But you guys aren't working from your kitchen table, you're obviously playing in the pro league from day one. Can you tell us about the experience your team is bringing to Everywhere, and talk a little bit about what it takes to launch a successful magazine?
Todd: Sure. Being well capitalized helps quite a bit. 8020 Publishing, the company that publishes Everywhere is working with and is backed by Minor Ventures, which is a venture capital firm created by Halsey Minor, who is originally the founder of CNET networks. We start out almost more like a technology startup instead of a traditional magazine insofar as the funding model is concerned, which is nice, because it does mean you can start from the gate and not have to do the kitchen table edition. I know people who have done the kitchen table version and have succeeded at it, and I have phenomenal respect for them. But it is nice to be able to come out with a magazine that from day one looks pretty good. That’s it, but it’s actually a very small company. Even though the company’s doing two magazines and has a web site, the entire team is about thirteen people. That’s basically executive leadership, editorial team, designers, and software engineers, which is not all that many people. That’s pretty much a goal, to really keep the editorial overhead as low as possible, to always try to be as lean as possible and to use technology to drive costs out of the cost of making a magazine as much as possible. Certainly one thing that we believe very strongly is that the business model for magazines is changing, and has to change. Alluding to some of the comments I said earlier, the old billboard model of advertising, if you put it there somebody will notice is clearly not working as advertisers have the opportunity to use more targeted media. They get used to doing that more and more through things like Google and online. So we’re moving more to a circulation driven model, where you’re asking the people who subscribe to the magazine to actually pay the cost of the magazine. In other words, make circulation a profitable enterprise as opposed to something that is subsidized by advertisers to demonstrate demand for the product. On the one hand, the business model on the publishing side looks like that. On the editorial side, the goal is to keep the overall cost structure as lean as possible so you can make circulation profitable, and make the magazine profitable on relatively low circulation numbers on their own basis, independent of having massive amounts of advertising. The circulation and enthusiasm the magazines generate makes them the kinds of things people want, and there’s enough people who want them that they become profitable.
Steve: 8020 Publishing now publishes a photography magazine, JPG that you mentioned a few times as well as Everywhere. What other topic areas do you see as ripe for the reader-contributed, Web 2.0-to magazine publishing model?
Todd: Well, we debate this all the time. I don’t think there’s a huge hurry to launch any more magazines. Right now we’ve got two, and they’re both start-ups. They’re off to a good start, but we really want to make sure that these work before we continue expanding. But, with that having been said, there is obviously a goal to essentially build a platform that we can use to launch to more and more magazines, and to really have that down so it’s just a matter of turning the key and getting the design going. You can repeat the process we’ve created here. There are some obvious categories. There’s a bunch of sort of base level questions we ask when considering a category, along the lines of “Is this a community of people who are extremely enthusiastic about the topic?” “Is this a community of people who self-document, are they already in one form or another on the web commenting on the topic and taking photographs and so on?” If you look at most of the enthusiast categories, they would fit the bill.
Steve: What would be some examples?
Todd: Skateboarding is an obvious example of people who already doing that. Or almost any kind of sport like that: snowboarding, skiing, surfing. These people already do a great job of documenting their sport. There’s a lot of opportunity there. Automotive. There are a lot of car magazines, but there aren’t any user created car magazines, but there’s an awful lot of people who take pictures of their cars and are passionate about cars and write about cars. That’s an opportunity. Fashion is another example, street fashion especially, obviously. Less runway fashion and more everyday street fashion would be an opportunity. Those are just a couple of examples. All of them are united by strong communities of people who are self-documenting. Then it would just be a matter of trying to encourage them to participate in a community where they would have their documentation translated into print.
Steve: Back to Everywhere itself. Thanks, that was very interesting. For Everywhere, do you worry much about the competition? One might think the travel magazine market is pretty saturated.
Todd: You know, I alluded to this earlier. It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong, and this is just pure hubris, I always remain open to that. But I wrote about this in our editor’s letter. Really there is no exaggeration to it, when 8020 first approached me to edit the magazine, I did what you’d do. Head down to your local news stand and sit there and stare at the category, and stroke your chin, and say “What does this tell me?” It was just really, really, really dramatic to me, that there was no travel magazine that did what this magazine should do and can quite naturally do, which is to convey a more authentic experience and convey a more diverse experience than the category does right now. Frankly, I don’t know anybody who gets many of the current crop of travel magazines. It’s not because they don’t travel or aren’t interested, it’s just because the magazines don’t really speak to them. As an editor, I’ve just always loved these opportunities, when you sit there and look at the marketplace and see this glaring gap between the different publications. We know that these sorts of things can work. Some of the magazines we look to for inspiration, I’m friends with most of the people who run these magazines, so there’s a little bit of a brain trust that I can tap in thinking about this. For example, Readymade magazine and what Shoshana Berger did when she took on essentially the shelter category and Martha Stewart and gave it a more authentic voice, a younger voice, and a more diverse voice. What Make magazine, the folks up at O’Reilly have done with the notion of the hobbyist, and what they did with magazines like Popular Mechanics, which in the 1950’s and 1960’s was a kind of thing where Dad would go out into his garage with his issue of Popular Mechanics and build a boat trailer. Make magazine has rediscovered that enthusiasm, but with an electronic and digital edge. Again, really found a niche for itself in a category that has become increasingly sort of abstracted from the actual bit about getting your hands dirty and doing things. You can see these success stories happening, and they’re all very analogous in the sense they are seeing an opportunity in the editorial marketplace and really going after a group of people who are not just interested in being passive consumers of the magazine. They want actively be participants in it. They want to do the things that the magazine can teach them how to do, and they want to take their own interests and channel them back into the magazine, to say “Hey, look what I did!” The travel category seems really, really ripe for that.
Steve: Todd, is there anything else about Everywhere you’d like to tell us before we conclude?
Todd: It’s just an ongoing experiment. As I said, the online community is relatively new, and the kind of submissions we’re getting are completely encouraging. We shipped the second issue largely with user submitted content, and that was fantastic, also very encouraging. We’re just very excited to see where it’s going to go. The job here is to be more of an orchestrator than to really lead the community. We’re excited to see where people are going to take us, what kind of places they want to go, what kind of places they’re going to discover. The opportunity to put those stories into print is pretty exciting.
Steve: Well, Todd, I was very impressed with the first issue, and I wish you great success.
Todd: Thank you so much.
Steve: Thank you very much for being on the show.
Todd: My pleasure.