29th Street Publishing at the Modern Magazine Conference

29th Street Publishing
“The Modern Magazine”
October 16, 2013

My talk opened the last session of the day, and I remarked that very rarely does a conference with a line-up as
stacked as “The Modern Magazine’s” truly deliver, but I felt it had, and I was honored to participate.

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I was part of the “Indie Magazine” track, but for the ﬁrst six months or so of 29th Street’s existence (this is all prelaunch) we sold ourselves as the “Modern Magazine” company, which was usually met with befuddlement, so we
landed on “The best mobile magazines.” I hope that “Modern Magazine” catches on, because moving the medium
forward is very important to us as a company.

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29pco-for-modern-magazine-slideshare - November 11, 2013

We launched our ﬁrst title - V as in Victor - one year before the week of the conference. Bill Vourvoulias was a lifelong magaziner, having worked at The New Yorker, Interview, ESPN and elsewhere, but he couldn't ﬁnd a job doing
what he wanted. Despite the huge market, there are actually no Engish-language magazines focusing on Latinos in
sports, so he started his own. Since then we’ve helped to launch or bring to iOS and the web twenty magazines some new, some old, and the different shapes & sizes of these magazines will be the running theme throughout my
talk.

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Digital is good for print.

I am somewhat heartened to hear so much pro-digital sentiment today, especially since my company is the only
digitally-focused company represented today. I want to talk a little bit about content strategy today, and I want to talk
especially about how our tools inform the way we read and write on the web. Twitter is an extreme example, but it’s a
good one. All day people have been talking about how Twitter helps indie magazines ﬁnd their audience. It’s a
publishing tool, but it’s not one you’d ever use to make a magazine. It’s an example of a tool that does one thing
really well and has all sorts of applications.

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At 29th Street, we also strive to build tools that are aware of the form they are inhabiting and steer writers and artists
towards content that will work best on a mobile screen. If you consider the rate of change of these tools, like ours
and twitter, and how much time we spend in them today when they didn’t even exist a few years ago, it’s really
remarkable. Every single other speaker on stage today has a publishing career that predates almost every single
digital tool we all will use today.

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Another thing that has changed over the last decade is the arc of a career in publishing. It used to be that you could
get an english or literature degree from a liberal arts school, get an internship at an established publishing house,
and parlay that into an associate editor job by the time you were in your late-20s. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it
was a good life. Now that is gone. There are many fewer paying jobs, and almost all of the most successful magazines
you have heard from today are the product of teams of 4 or 5 people. In fact, if you didn’t know this was a publishing
conference, you’d think it was a start-up conference. And that’s to the heart of my point today - that magazines need
to think more like start-ups, and of course most of the great ones already are.

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Richard Turley recently told the stack that “you can’t stumble upon an iPad magazine,” and he is entirely correct. But a
magazine lover on the web can spend hours reading about new work on-line. Just reading Bob Newman’s archives on
SPD is the equivalent of, if not better, any design 101 class you can get in school.

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And here’s 29th Street’s own Tim Moore, talking about the fourth edition of Letter to Jane. So the web enables us to
stumble upon not only great art, but great artists as well. SPD is where I ﬁrst learned of Tim’s work, by the way, and
now he’s our creative director.

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And obviously you heard from Penny Martin, the editor-in-chief of the Gentlewoman earlier today. When Natalie and I
were browsing a newsstand in the Fall of 2011 we came upon this issue of the magazine, and we were struck not just
by the design and content (which continue to inspire us) but how each subsequent issue iteratively improved on the
last one. The Gentlewoman is a more effective start-up than most start-us. And as you heard Ms. Martin say earlier
today, they only have four full-time employees to publish this magazine with a near six-ﬁgure circulation.

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We are building a publisher-centric publishing system.

So at 29th Street we are taking what we love about the web and our favorite magazines and building a publishercentric publishing system. One of the themes that has been running throughout the day is that great publishers have
a passion for serving their readers. So we are building tools that can help publishers do exactly that. We know that
publishers know their own readers better than we do although hopefully we can help get to know them and serve
them better.

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So now I’m going to show some of our work. This is the cover of our Creative Direcotr Tim Moore’s newest issue of
Letter to Jane.

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Here’s a photo by Jeff Luker, which accompanies an interview with the photographer. In contrast to a lot of other iPad
apps, you can see Tim’s attitude to photography: If you want to showcase the work, the best thing to do is to get out
of the way.

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On the left, you can see screenshot of a chapter section lead in his app. It looks like it’s a busy page, but like a
magazine, doing almost anything on this screen will lead you to the next page. And on the right, I just wanted to
show off that we care very much about the ability to copy & share yet. It’s a simple thing, but obviously something we
don’t want to take for granted.

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This is the cover of Harper’s Magazine, one of the oldest magazine (if not the oldest magazine) still in circulation
today. We’re launching their iOS & Android versions in the next month.

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The Harper’s Magazine app will qualify as a replica of the magazine, so it will count towards their circulation
numbers. But of course we used everything we learned in other apps about navigation and the user experience. But
the thing that make Harper’s Harper’s, the blue, the type, and of course the content itself, are all there exactly as
you’d ﬁnd them in the print edition.

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I wanted to include these iPhone images because this is where there’s the biggest advantage over the more literal
replica editions in market. No one should ever shrink a print product down to the size of an iPhone screen, it simply
makes no sense. We designed the iPhone edition so that the photography & text would work as well as they do on the
iPad or in print.

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And ﬁnally I want to talk about Emily Gould and Ruth Curry’s project, Emily Books. Emily Gould also works with us, as
our editorial directory. Emily and Ruth knew there were great books that weren’t getting found by the right readers,
so they started an e-bookstore to solve that problem. They didn’t found an app company, they founded a book store,
and electronic distribution turned out to be the most convenient.

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In addition to the books content, there are interviews and essays, some of them commissioned for these editions, that
accompany the work.

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I went to an e-book conference last year and in one of the sessions, designers from very large publishing houses
were lamenting “the death of type.” I understand where this is coming from - many of the biggest and most popular
e-reading apps either put the type decisions in the hand of the reader or make it impossible for the publisher to
choose the type at all, but for us, it was important to offer type features so that the publisher could include their font
of choice.

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We are building “The Modern Magazine.”

From start-ups to established magazines we are trying to ﬁgure out what the Modern Magazine should look like for
the mobile viewer. Here are two screenshots of the newsstand, where most of our magazines live right now. There are
a lot of things that are good about it, but when you step back and look at it from this context, especially in
comparison to the web or real-life newsstands, you get a feeling for how far we have to go.

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Thank you!
@29pco / http://29.io

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29th Street Publishing is: Natalie Podrazik, David Jacobs, Timothy Moore, Nozlee
Samadzadeh, Emily Gould, Alaina Browne, Duncan Regan, and Greg Knauss.

Thank you.

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29th Street Publishing at the Modern Magazine Conference

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