As quarterly news magazine Delayed Gratification publishes its 60th issue, we look back at its 15 years of slow journalism with co-founder Rob Orchard.

Top: Rob Orchard, Christian Tate and Marcus Webb

Congratulations on the anniversary! Did you ever think you’d reach 15?
Thank you very much! I did always think we’d reach 15 because I always believed so much in Delayed Gratification and was so in love with making it that I couldn’t see us ever walking away from it, even if it ended up with just my co-founder Marcus Webb and me writing everything ourselves and printing in black and white. And I always thought that a certain group of readers would see it as the publication they had been looking for—something which took a slower, more considered approach to the news and helped them make sense of a world that is becoming ever more complex and less stable.

Issues one and 60 of Delayed Gratification

What do you remember of the first issue?
I’ve launched quite a lot of magazines in my life, and getting the first issue back from the press is always such a wonderful feeling, but it was trebly exciting with Delayed Gratification.

I remember us all unpacking the boxes in the broom cupboard-sized office we were renting in the bottom floor of the old Time Out building on Tottenham Court Road, getting excited about the look, the smell and the feel of issue one (above). Some of the copies had picked up smudges on the cover at the printer, and so we did spend several hours individually cleaning them with rubbers, which was quite mad. And then we had to get the issue out there, delivering it by hand to a load of shops and canvassing feedback. 

Some of it was very positive but people did immediately pick up on the fact that we’d made the font way too small—7.5 point!—in order to fit in lots of features. I always remember a note I got from my uncle saying ‘I think it’s a good magazine but I can’t tell, as I can’t actually read it!’

You’d produced magazines before, but how different was it doing your own? 
In retrospect we were really quite naive about setting up the magazine. The group of us who launched it, and who still run it, were all editors, journalists and designers. We had no-one who knew about marketing, PR, subscriptions management, distribution or accounts and we had to learn about all of that as we went along.

We had a business plan but it was based on such a wild overestimate of first issue sales that it was immediately irrelevant. We did get some great advice from some brilliant people in the industry, including Kerin O’Connor at The Week and Tony Elliott, Cathy Runciman and Michael Hodges at Time Out, but we didn’t seek funding, and I’m glad of that, it meant we’ve never had to service debt or placate investors wanting swifter returns than independent publishing can provide.

Looking back at issue one, it’s notable how the team, the concept and the overall look and feel are so similar to the latest edition. What has changed?
Both a lot and very little! We’ve been through lots of redesigns, in the latest of which we added a new culture section, but the fundamental structure of the magazine—a chronological walk through the quarter, with news in briefs jumping off into features, infographics and photo essays—has remained the same, as it works so well. The philosophy—trying to provide a calmer, more considered alternative to kneejerk news production—remains the same as when we summed it up in our issue one editors’ letter.

The cover concept has stayed, too, with an artwork on each cover. The only artist we’ve had on more than once is Shepard Fairey, who very kindly gave us our cover art for issue one, as well as for our five year anniversary, ten year anniversary and for our new issue, marking 15 years. All the original editorial and design team are still in place—although we’re all a lot more grizzled than we were at launch. I think the big change has been in the ambition of our stories. In the early days it was tough to fund big reporting trips, but as we’ve grown we’ve reinvested in our particular brand of Slow Journalism, resulting in epic features like our 6,000 word long read in the new issue on the Colombian soldiers being recruited to fight for Ukraine, an important story that has not been reported in the UK or US press.

Have there been common themes and patterns to the news over the years? 
The fundamental structures of stories that grab people’s imagination have remained the same, and there are always hardy perennials that turn up every winter (NHS crisis!) and summer (reservoirs crisis!). But the turnover of the news agenda has become ever more rapid, with massive stories now flashing up for just a day or two then disappearing as they are replaced by the next big event.

So anyone trying to keep up with the news is now often left feeling on the back foot. And we have the strong impression that the news has become bleaker over the last 15 years too, which is leading a lot of people to switch off, unwilling to engage with so many huge, systemic, seemingly intractable problems on all sides.

This is where, in our own small way, we try to provide an alternative, picking up on those stories that get dropped and revisiting them to give readers the missing context and perspective, and always looking for news that provide an element of hope, an underdog fightback, a silver lining. The stories we’ve written about medical advances over the years, for example, are enough to put the biggest pessimist into a sunny mood.

The Delayed Gratification team

What’s the secret to lasting for 15 years? 
Having a massive bee in our collective bonnets about the magazine, and being completely in love with the process of making it, which has given us a bloody-minded determination to carry on even when times have been tough.

Working with a small team of people who get along well and have quite a puritanical work ethic.

Having brilliant readers who understand what we’re trying to do and support us. Having current affairs as our subject, something which is always changing and always fascinating (I always think it must be difficult to keep a magazine about coffee going beyond a few issues without running out of ideas). And, crucially, having a very talented art director, Christian, who makes the magazine look so beautiful. 

Has there been a moment when you really thought, ‘ah, we’ve succeeded’? 
There have been some wonderful moments for sure. Marcus and I have won ‘Editors of the year’ at the BSMEs, that was fantastic. We got Ian Hislop to speak at one of our events, tickets sold out in seven minutes, and he was brilliantly engaging as always. Seeing our books, An Answer for Everything and Misc., come back from the printers was brilliant. Any time we met up with readers and they were enthusiastic about the magazine. 

But I don’t think there’s ever a moment where we’ve thought that we have succeeded, there’s always the next issue to create, always more readers we want to introduce to the magazine, always more adventurous and better stories we want to pursue.

What advice would you offer a new publisher?
I run regular online classes in how to launch an independent magazine and my number one piece of advice is to take subscriptions. I worry about people trying to launch magazines and make their cash from newsstand sales alone, it’s almost impossible. With subscribers you’re building your base each year, you’re making it easy for people to get your mags and if they don’t like a particular issue you’ve still got a bunch more opportunities to impress them before their subscription renews.


How do you view the next 15 years in magazines? 
Optimistically! We’ve seen such a wonderful flourishing of independent mags in the last 15 years and I’m sure this will continue. The more AI colonises the online world, the more people will yearn to read—and produce—beautiful, human-made print publications. A lot of these will burn brightly and then fizzle out, but an increasing number will break through and become sustainable, and give us all lots of inspiration and insight for years to come. I really hope that Delayed Gratification continues to be one of those, we’re going to do our best to make sure it does.

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