magCulture Live NY24, report
This year’s magCulture Live New York was our most satisfying edition yet, with more people attending the main event and the series of MagMagMag talks leading up to it, and a palpable buzz around the whole trip.
Despite sweltering heat—38 degrees on the day—150 people turned up for magCulture Live to hear 11 speakers discuss their work and processes. Read on for a complete round-up of our time in the city and the day itself.
Our annual trip to New York has always been an enjoyable experience, writes Jeremy Leslie; I love the city and the energy it exudes. But this year something had changed, and I don’t just mean the ability to tap into the subway with your debit card. Print is definitely having a moment in the city. Not that you would know it walking its streets—where once there was a news kiosk on almost every corner, today you have to search down your magazines. All the more reason to draw attention to the world of editorial creativity bubbling away below the surface.
New York has a long tradition of magazine publishing, of course, which was one reason we launched an annual conference there in 2018. Having invited New York editors and art directors to speak at our London edition, we wanted to try reversing that pattern with a live event in their city, which alongside London is the other major English-speaking publishing capital. It worked well, so we returned in 2019 for another day of talks. Something was building.
It took us until 2020 to come to terms with a fundamental fact of New York working life: it’s impossible to take a day off work for a conference. To counter this, we planned that year’s Live for a Sunday afternoon, so that ticket holders could grab brunch before joining us in the afternoon. We had a brilliant venue in Williamsburg lined up and were about to announce it when Covid hit. We postponed that conference (and sadly the venue closed and never reopened) but saved the Sunday idea. Over Covid we moved magCulture Live online, learning about live-streaming in the process.
We returned to New York in 2022, and then again in 2023, with magCulture Live on Sundays. Both these editions landed well, with positive comments from speakers and audience alike. Starting from scratch post-Covid, something was building again.
And so to 2024. We were staying at Ace Hotel New York again, and based during the days at the Vitsoe store near Washington Square Park (above), an ideal home-from-home. Vitsoe have supported us in New York since 2018, when we first collaborated on MagMagMag, a mini-version of our London shop for us to run a pop-up (our London shop is kitted out with the Vitsoe 606 shelving system). While the magCulture Live venue has shifted annually, our Vitsoe base has provided a public space for us to meet people, sell magazines, and hold free lunchtime events. Starting as an adjunct to the main event, MagMagMag has become a crucial part of our NY experience in its own right, offering space, time and local advice. We welcomed many visitors and magazine makers over our week there.
The free MagMagMag talks were three very different events. The first was an open call for wannabe magazine makers to come and discuss their ideas with the magCulture team. A group of five people at very different stages of their publishing journey joined me and Danielle (above) to talk through their ideas; one of their magazines, Do I Need to Know Now, is now sale in the magCulture shop, and they all returned for our launch drinks on Thursday night.
The next day I chaired a conversation between US editor of Monocle Chris Lord and Josh Jones, editor of Huck and several other titles. On the face of it Chris and Josh had litle in common but they turned out to have plenty of common references and experiences. They discussed the role of the modern editor and the relationship between editorial and commercial aspects of contemporary publishing—a vital area for all magazines large or small. Watch the video of the conversation here.
The third and final MagMagMag talk featured Alexander Tochilovsky, curator of the Herb Lublin Archive’s fabulous collection of graphic design work. I chatted with him about the scope and ambitions of the archive, before he did a show and tell of late 20th century US editorial design including iconic titles Flair, Eros, Fact, Avant Garde, Spy and more. Tochilovsky is a brilliant speaker, he shares his deep knowledge with a light touch and completely engaged our MagMagMag audience. Watch his talk here.
Tochilovsky’s presentation was also an ideal introduction to the main event a couple of days later. MagCulture Live New York 2024 took place across the river at a new venue to us, 53 Scott, in Bushwick. Themed Voices of New York, the day opened with an extra, unannounced speaker.
Writer/curator Vince Aletti read an abridged version of his essay about European emigré designer Alexey Brodovitch, which appears in a catalogue for a recent exhibition of Brodovitch’s work. Brodovitch and fellow emigré Alexander Lieberman moved to the US in the 1930’s, bringing with them fresh European ideas of Modernism. Applying these new concepts of space and form to layouts, the two competed to establish what today we take for granted in magazine design and art direction: that specialised visual language combining text, photography and illustration in the service of storytelling. As their work helped establish New York as a publishing and design powerhouse, the two art directors become key voices of New York.
A key voice of NY in more recent decades has been Graydon Carter, the editor behind Spy, Vanity Fair and now Air Mail Weekly. Our first scheduled speakers were Air Mail co-editor Alessandra Stanley and deputy editor Nathan King, who introduced their digital newsletter with grace and humour; Alessandra admitted sharing many commentator’s skepticism about the project even as she accepted a role on 2019’s launch team, while the 30-year old Nathan joked about having been an 80-year old since birth. With our focus on print, we’ve largely ignored digital projects over the years at magCulture Live, but it was clear hearing these two speak that Air Mail is magazine-like in every sense but delivery channel. As Nathan pointed out, ‘If you look up the definition of Magazine, it doesn’t say anything about print. So we consider ourselves a magazine.’ Air Mail now has a series of email newsletters, branded news/gift kiosks in Milan, London and NY, and a rapidly increasing readership (up 111% year-on-year). I’m surprised it’s not had more attention given its success.
A growing area of modern publishing is the brand magazine—one of our partners for the day was movie streaming platform MUBI, promoting their brilliant quarterly movie mag Notebook—and our next speaker was invited on the basis of her editorial design work for NY brands A24 and MSCHF.
If our first speakers staked out important points on the magazine map—historic print and contemporary digital—Shira Inbar demonstrated that print and digital are no longer separate worlds for a new generation of designers. As well as editorial design, Shira designs (and teaches) motion graphics and has helped other designers such as Matt Willey bring to life his designs for TV titles. Her talk was titled ‘Making magazines that live in between’ and she expressed her belief that New York was populated with ideas and places that lived double lives, that, like her, existed between two states.
She opened with her zine designs for A24, the NY film production company that doubles as a publisher. The zines are generally (but not always) linked to a new movie, but aren’t about that movie. Instead they adopt the modus operandi of the indie magazine; the movie is the starting point for a tangential idea that adds to rather than repeats the experience of the movie. Thus the zine for ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ takes the key moment of the film—a tax investigation—and turns up as a guide and history of the US tax system, designed accordingly.‘A lot of the time, the brands know what they want the audience to feel, but they don’t know how to get there. The designer is instrumental in helping them figure that out.’
Shira’s presentation was a rich collage of moving and still imagery, leaning on the language of online memes she picked up as part of Richard Turley’s team at MTV. The design of her presentation and the work it contained—including another magazine series for MSCHF—felt thoroughly contemporary, reminding us that ninety years on from Brodovitch, editorial design continues to develop.
We always try to include a European voice in the lineup, and this time Jackson Howarth, the new editor of It’s Freezing in LA!, joined us. It was great to have him share the by now familiar story of his climate change magazine, introducing it to a new audience: the responsible approach to print and production, the use of illustration—to maintain a human feel—and infographics. He also discussed how articles and writers are selected for IFLA!, how they’ve adopted different publishing schedules to keep the magazine sustainable, and introduced the magazine’s new website. ‘If you’re making an magazine, it has to be fun,’ he emphasised, ‘we always launch with a ginormous party. There’s something radical about joy in the climate space.’ Their 11th issue will be released in November.
We were also keeping an eye on the Euros final as the day proceeded
During a 15 minute break, which included a video round-up of the magazine winners at last year’s D&AD Awards, the audience browsed our pop-up shop and chatted with our partners and friends from Ra & Olly and Park Communications.
The next part of the afternoon was our indie quickfire session, where five speakers from different projects present their work back to work. This ups the pace and is always a buzzy part of the day, a powerful reminder that magazines offer a rich and varied source of creative thought.
First up was Al Mullen, a comedian who launched Public Transport Magazine as an outlet for his humour. The small, black and white magazine can be found around New York’s subway system, tucked behind pipes and sitting on benches. His witty presentation shared his journey across four issues to date, as he discovered why front covers look the way they do, brought in more contributors, and reflected on his influences, before conceding PTM didn’t make money. Despite the anarchic personality of his magazine, his was one of the best structured presentations, with a series of headings that could be usefully applied to any of our speaker’s magazines.
Madeline Montoya works full time at Bloomberg Businessweek, but joined us to present her work for new online magazine Byline. Although launched online, the team have also moved into print and that’s where Madeline began. She described the complexity of creating a visual identity when the magazine itself was still establishing an editorial identity—Byline is a fascinating experiment in creating a totally new editorial platform from scratch—and zoomed in on the detail of type headlines and typeface choices across themed issues. For a magazine with seemingly random and loose layouts (is there ever such a thing?) it was fascinating to hear how much thought went into organising the design system, and the many detailed references, including sheet music for a music issue of the magazine.
Harking back to Nathan King’s comment about a magazine not needing to be a printed thing, our next speaker tested that theory further. Photographer/curator Sade Boyewa El started her non-profit Faces of Harlem project during the pandemic. For three years she curated public exhibitions of photography in Harlem’s parks, displaying 100 images by ten local photographers along fences and railings for walkers to enjoy. The point was to record the local community in the ever-changing (ever-gentrifying) city. ‘I wanted it to feel like someone was walking through a museum, or flipping through the pages of a magazine.’ And they do read like a magazine. Her hope is to get the pictures published as soon as possible as a series of zines.
From imagery to text; Heavy Traffic is one of a series of literary magazines launched in New York in recent years. Founder/editor Patrick McGraw introduced it as a ‘fiction magazine,’ and explained how it had no images, ‘meaning that the writing is the design and the words themselves become images.’ He commissions writing from known and lesser known contributors, and from beyond the writing discipline. ‘Through the curation and editing, we try to create a type of fiction that lends itself to being played with.’ It helps that that play is led by designer Richard Turley and team, who bring the words to vivid life, starting with the first story that opens on the front cover. Inside, the words are deliberately left littered with widows and other mistakes. ‘Our relationship to writing and language has changed dramatically over the past few years. A lot of the writing that we see and produce essentially amounts to gibberish.’
The final quick fire speakers were Sydney Maggin and Maya Valencia, recent design graduates who produce Phase Zero, a zine platforming unpublished art. ‘As graphic designers we are really obsessed with print and how political ideologies and art movements can be expressed through zines.’ The obsession is obvious in terms of zine itself and also in the images they shared showing the making of pages and covers—the only slides showing production all day. Phase Zero publishes submitted work—writing and art—solicited via flyers distributed across downtown New York (below), giving it a unique input of material. ‘We like to say our target audience is people who stop and stare at things in the street.’ Their appreciation of the history of zines shine through on every raw, black and white page, and their understanding of the serial nature of magazine publishing too: each cover carries the same manifesto text, updated with new annotations every issue.
Sydney and Maya’s talk was the perfect foil for our final speaker of the day, shifting from a street level reflection of New York to the city’s publication of record.
The New York Times Magazine has long been a benchmark for other publications to aspire to. At previous magCulture Lives we’ve heard from editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and several times from Creative director Gail Bichler, and this time we welcomed the third creative lead from the magazine. Kathy Ryan has been on the photography team for 39 years, and for most of that time was Director of photography. As she left the magazine to focus on her own photography, we invited here to look back on those four decades through the magazine’s annual New York issue, always a vehicle for great photography. The result was a talk that combined real insight into Kathy’s eye for image-making with a unique visual history of this amazing city. Is there anybody else in magazine making today that has worked so long on a single project to such acclaim?
Kathy’s talk was built from brilliant editorial photo stories, starting with a 1997 Times Square shoot and running all the way through to the pandemic and its aftermath. Along the way we were reminded of the time the magazine turned it’s entire design structure 90 degrees to accommodate a series on the tall buildings in the city, a series of 24 images shot one per hour across a single day, and of course 9/11 and the pandemic. We were taken behind the scenes of 360 degree shoots at the top the World Trade Centre, and heard of the planning behind a helicopter shoot of an image created across a NY plaza.
Those were the big, flamboyant stories of scale that an organisation like the Times can afford. But whether calling in specialist climbers or simply executing a more regular studio based shoot, Kathy’s calling card is the expert assigning of photographers to produce images of every type. Her presentation underscored not only the need to harness photography to the story, but also her brilliant ability at storytelling when sharing her work. Instead of relying on the stunning images, she related the experiences behind each shoot, adding perspective and detail to each example. It was a brilliant exposition. She ended on a high note with the post-pandemic cover story, The City Awakens, featuring the work of 15 photographers under the age of 25.
A quick thank you and goodbye, a few beers on the roof of the venue, and that was magCulture Live New York 2024.
After three back-to-back editions of magCulture Live New York, it feels like we’re helping build a community of magazine-minded people—it was wonderful to catch up with speakers from earlier editions of the event, catch up with our friends at Casa Magazines and meet the Iconic Magazines team and countless magazine makers.
Danielle, Osman and Jeremy relax at the end of the day
Thank you to all our speakers, our partners, and the audience. We hope everybody involved this year will return for magCulture Live New York 2025, and hear from another cohort of formidable magazine makers.
See you there!
A complete video of magCulture Live New York 2024 is available to buy here.
magCulture Live London 2024 will take place on November 7, more news soon.
Photography by Rebecca Smeyne
With thanks to all our partners for their support:
