For the entire time I've worked in magazines, I've been told that print is dead. But what does that actually mean? And why has the idea endured for so long? I took a deep dive into the death of print to see if I could figure out what's going on, and what that means for the future of magazines and digital media.…

Olivia Crandall and Elena Foraker are editors of Not Here to Make Friends, a lovely, thoughtful, almost scholarly journal about reality TV. In this episode, they speak about wanting to engage completely with their subject matter, embracing both the good and the bad, and using this much maligned television genre as a way of understanding what’s goin…

Erin Rimmer and Simon Doherty are two of the founders of Roughcast, a brilliantly abrasive, punk-inspired magazine that’s here to shake up what it calls the “dull pastiche” of British media. It’s a passion project run by a group of friends, but it also has some big ideas about the way media works, particularly relating to freelancers, and the urgen…

Natassa Pappa is editor-in-chief and creative director of Desired Landscapes, the pocket-sized magazine that brings a fresh and philosophical perspective to travel writing. Natassa is based in Athens, but she was over in London recently for a talk at the Magculture shop, so we met up the following day and went for a walk on Hampstead Heath to talk …

Lina Fadel is one of the poetry editors at The Other Side of Hope, a magazine that centres around journeys in refugee and immigrant literature. It’s partly a literary magazine and partly a community project, because as she explains in this episode, it’s all about bringing people together and providing a platform for voices that wouldn’t otherwise b…

"I was just hanging out with my algorithm and it got a little claustrophobic..." Daniela Rodriguez is editor-in-chief, designer and illustrator of Superstars Only, a brilliantly personal magazine that she makes with her boyfriend Adrian Tiu and a few close friends in New York. As you’ll hear, Daniela is incredibly self-effacing and the magazine its…

Recorded live at the Shifting Landscapes event in London on Saturday 2nd December, this conversation features Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, executive editor of Emergence, and Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters, founders of Studio Airport and designers of Emergence. Emmanuel has been on the Stack podcast before speaking about making Emergence magazine at the …

We don't have many business to business magazines on the Stack podcast, but I'm making an exception for the Grub Street Journal because it's a magazine about magazines, and while it's ostensibly a trade magazine for the print publishing industry, it takes great joy in playing around with the sort of editorial tone that other B2B publishers would ne…

Zweikommasieben is the Swiss magazine that's obsessed with the contemporary musical moment. We delivered their 27th issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and then the following month we invited everyone to join us for a conversation that digs into the details behind the making of the magazine. It was great to catch up with them, and to he…

Recorded live on Tuesday 10th October at The Scrandit in Bristol, this podcast episode features four independent publishers speaking about the challenges and opportunities of combining left-wing politics and print. The conversation was moderated by Eliz Mizon, strategy lead for The Bristol Cable, and it featured Max Jeffrey, art director of Stir to…

I dropped into the Magculture shop in Clerkenwell to speak with founder Jeremy Leslie ahead of next month's Magculture Live event. This will be their 10th year of the London-based conference (they also run it in New York) and it was really interesting to hear his thoughts on the last decade of running the event, as well as the general state of maga…

Osman Bari is founder, editor and designer of Chutney, a magazine that provides a platform for underrepresented voices to tell stories about cultural identity, colonialism and migration. We met up to speak about his ideas behind the magazine, the influence of food on the title, and his own changing status of settler and immigrant, and how being in …

Recorded in August 2023 for our Stack Magazine Club, this conversation with editors Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush explores Cake Zine, the magazine we delivered to our subscribers in July 2023. Telling the story of the literary food magazine so far, they explain how they started in the pandemic with their Sexy Cake issue, then released Wicked Cake …

The first issue of Te was published in 2021 and it caught my eye because it seemed to be doing something clever with food publishing: Its stories are about the different ways that ingredients can travel around the world, or the different values and associations that might be attributed to particular dishes, and so the whole thing seemed to be using…

Recorded at Indiecon in Hamburg, editors Vasudhaa Narayanan and Tarini Sethi speak about The Irregular Times, their playful and provocative newspaper dedicated to platforming the creative work and everyday activities of people of colour across India and beyond.Por Stack Magazines

Recorded live at Indiecon 2023, hear from the team at Solomiya, the extraordinary magazine made by young people in Ukraine who are documenting and coming to terms with what it means to be at war. I’m a huge fan of what the team are doing with this magazine – I note in my introduction that I’ve never seen a magazine like this being made by people wh…

Recorded live at Issues in San Francisco on Saturday 5th November, hear Anja Charbonneau (Broccoli), Victor Gonzalez (Gross) and Michael Ray (Zoetrope) discussing their work publishing independent magazines on the West Coast of the USA.Por Stack Magazines

Recorded at our Independent Magazine Fair on Saturday 14th May, this episode of the Stack podcast focuses on the independent magazine makers that are trying to change the world for the better. Evar Hussayni, senior editor of Azeema; Ellie Jackson, editor of The Movement Movement; and Nina Carter, co-creative director of It's Freezing in LA! all spe…

Recorded live at our Independent Magazine Fair on Saturday 14th May 2022, this panel discussion features advice from the unconventional magazine makers behind Real Review, A Profound Waste of Time and Paperboy.Por Stack Magazines

Recorded at our Independent Magazine Fair, this panel discussion features expert advice from the people behind Delayed Gratification, Season Zine, and The Modernist.Por Stack Magazines

Martha Dillon is editor of It’s Freezing in LA!, the magazine about climate change that recently published its eighth issue, themed around ‘Borders’. I spoke to her a couple of weeks after COP26 came to an end and I was interested to hear her thoughts on the conference, as well as the wider climate change conversation and how greater interest in th…

"We miss having a tactile experience..." Platon Poulas is one of the people behind Dead Slow, a strange new magazine concept that we have in the Stack shop at the moment. He and his co-founder Anunaya Rajhans describe themselves as producers rather than editors, and that reflects the unusual format of the magazine, which is presented as a vinyl rec…

"The world suddenly feels bigger again..." Nelson Ng is founder, editor and art director of Lost, a travel magazine based in Shanghai and published in both English and Mandarin. Of course the pandemic has made international travel much more problematic than it used to be, and that will inevitably have consequences for anyone making a travel magazin…

"We've always loved analogue. We produce records, we make books, we do physical shows – it's part of who we are..." Sean Bidder is editor of Fact, the music and visual art magazine that was relaunched last year as a big, glossy, biannual publication. I spoke to Sean and Zak Kyes, founder of Zak Group and art director of the relaunch, to find out wh…

"A book is different to a magazine – you've got more space. You can take more time..." Rob Orchard is one of the founders and editors of Delayed Gratification magazine, and now one of the authors of An Answer for Everything, their hardback book published by Bloomsbury. Infographics have always been a big part of what Delayed Gratification does, and…

"A lot more love and care goes into it because it's in print..." Tom Preece is one of the founding editors of Yuck, the Manchester-based music magazine that released its fifth issue this summer. Publishing a music magazine is tough when nobody is allowed to go out and listen to live music, but now life is opening up more here in the UK and I was ex…

"I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm proud of my identity as disabled..." Olivia Spring is founder and editor of Sick, the magazine made by chronically ill and disabled people. In this conversation Olivia speaks about her own illness, why she decided to start the magazine in the first place, and how she’s using it as a way to challenge some…

"I just really needed a sense of freedom..." Zena Alkayat is editor and publisher of Bloom, the gardening magazine she started when she moved into a new flat and suddenly became somebody who had a garden for the first time. Unable to find gardening books or magazines aimed at her, she decided to go ahead and publish one herself. In this conversatio…

"Running a Kickstarter is a very overwhelming thing..." Caspian Whistler is creative director and editor-in-chief of A Profound Waste of Time, the beautiful illustrated magazine that’s inspired by video games. He’s one of the independent publishers who has successfully funded his magazine through Kickstarter, and he has a campaign live at the momen…

"We can talk about football as our very own way to experience the world..." Matteo Cossu is editor and co-founder of Uno-Due, the annual magazine about football and culture that he started with some footballing friends in 2014. The first two issues of the magazine were published in Italian but for the third issue they switched to English and produc…

"We wanted people to lose themselves in words..." Marius Sosnowski is deputy editor of Dispatches, a large-format magazine of ideas published out of Berkeley in California, and inspired by that city’s intellectual and counter-cultural heritage. As he explains in this conversation, Dispatches was always intended as a big publication, and they make t…

"The whole magazine itself becomes a piece of art..." Aaron Beebe is the founder and art director of Plastikcomb, a magazine that champions collage, comics, fine art and more, all of it unified by a low brow pop aesthetic. There’s something raw and rough and experimental about Plastikcomb – its pages break out of the orderly grids of contemporary m…

"I don't think we've made the perfect Bum yet..." Lee Marable and Roosa Melentjeff are the editors and designers of Bum, a lovely risograph printed magazine based in Helsinki and dedicated to exploring stories around arts, architecture and design. As they explain in this conversation, the magazine really started because they wanted to experiment wi…

"We put the artist as a human before the work..." Audrey Rose Smith and Vicente Muñoz are the editor and creative director of Balcony, the new magazine that explores art in the everyday. Both Audrey and Vicente work in New York in jobs connected with the art world, and Balcony is the result of their frustration with the way art is commonly discusse…

"I hope it makes people feel good..." Harriet Fitch Little is editor of Kinfolk magazine and editor-in-chief of Kindling, the new title published by Kinfolk to explore the subject of bringing up children. In this conversation she explains how the Kinfolk team ended up making a magazine about raising kids, how the pandemic played its part, and why i…

"American football is a reflection of America – good and bad..." Shawn Ghassemitari is editor-in-chief and creative director of Spiral, the magazine that takes a creative look at American football. I was really interested to hear about his reasons for making the magazine – his parents immigrated to the US from Iran in 1978 and he speaks about the s…

"Things are going to be weird for the rest of our lives..." Peter McCain is the creative director and editor-in-chief of Batshit Times, the New York-based satire and arts magazine that released its first issue in April last year. That first issue was themed ‘Quarantine’, and when I read it I assumed the whole project was conceived in response to th…

"We just wanted to know – what do people care about now?" Lea Kloepel is editor of Synchron, the magazine she launched earlier this year with her boyfriend and art director Johannes Farfsing, and which stands out as one of the strangest and most striking magazine launches I’ve seen for a long time. It's dedicated to exploring contemporary visual ar…

"Juggling is just playing – it should talk to everyone..." Florence Huet is the founder and editor of Yana, an extraordinary magazine about juggling that is on a mission to combat the stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to juggle. It's packed full of geeky references that Florence explains in this conversation, helping to open up even f…

"We all wear clothes – we all have something to say about them..." Abigail Buzbee and Ryan Hunt are editor and art director of Novella, an experimental fashion magazine that takes a handmade, literary approach to its subject. In this conversation they explain why they were so excited to play with the conventions of the fashion magazine, and how at …

"You go mad if you don't do anything here..." Agnese Zile is creative director and editor-in-chief of Nork, the magazine she started as "an ode to the north", but which has evolved over the years to become a broader exploration of the world, though still with a distinctly dark perspective evocative of her adopted home in Tromsø. In this episode she…

"I can't just put this on a hard drive – I have to do something about it..." Mari Oshaug is editor-in-chief and publisher of Bikevibe, the magazine that sets off for a different city each issue and reports on the cycling culture it finds there. Mari started the magazine in 2014 by accident – she was on holiday in Tokyo and found herself taking hund…

Marketa Kinterova is editor-in-chief of Fotograf, the long-running Czech magazine of photography and contemporary art. We delivered their ‘New Utopias’ issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and in this conversation we get into some of the things that I really love about this brilliantly provocative and avant-garde magazine.…

"You can't wait for other people to change things for you..." Afsaneh Rafii is founder and editor-in-chief of Icarus Complex, the magazine that takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding climate change. In this episode we go right back to the start to speak about her initial impulse to make a magazine, through the process of publishing a firs…

"The future is always contested..." Casper Skovgaard Petersen is editorial manager of Scenario, the quarterly magazine produced by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. As you’d expect, he has a lot to say about the various possible futures we might have waiting for us, and in this episode he speaks about the different techniques they use a…

"I think it's striving for... the America we hope we can be." Hannah Hirsh and Natasha Rao are two of the editors behind American Chordata, the literary and arts magazine that recently published its 10th issue, and which we sent to our subscribers in September. It’s always been operated by volunteers as a labour of love, with the team constantly ch…

"We have a sane business model... you don't spend more than you have coming in." Matt Bors is editor and founder of The Nib, the magazine that uses comics to tell stories about some of the big, serious issues facing the world. The magazine launched online first, as one of the sites that were part of Medium in its early days, and in this conversatio…

"It really is like getting a tattoo; for better, for worse..." Asher Penn is the editor and founder of Sex Magazine, a title that publishes brilliantly personal Q&A interviews with artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative people (and no sex). In this conversation Asher explains how the magazine has evolved over the years, and how he has de…

"I didn't want to only do one thing..." Bardia Koushan is editor and art director of Autodidact, the magazine that brings together work by a wide range of artists and creative people. The second issue came out a few weeks ago, themed around the idea of mistakes, and I really enjoyed speaking to him about the different types of mistakes they include…

"The bathing community is something special – if you know you know..." Ekin Balcioglu and Steve Weiner are the founding editors of Hamam, a new magazine that celebrates the art and culture of bathing. Inviting readers inside the world’s bath houses, saunas and hot springs, they're clearly having fun in their new role as bathing ambassadors, but the…