Let’s talk about the fiasco with Details, where someone published a story using your byline without your knowledge. You publicly expressed outrage, which struck me as disingenuous, coming from the founding editor of Spy magazine. Where is that whole thing at now?
I don’t know, and that’s not being disingenuous. What I believe is that everyone knows with a 99 percent certainty who did this, and so he got away with it. What enforcement mechanisms should ensue, other than everybody in his professional world presumes that he did this whack-job thing? I don’t know, should I sue the guy? Should I track him down, and say why did you do this? Nah. You know, but I have my special ops guys working on it.
But do you think that was a symptom of the meritocracy–or its downside? I mean, the middle of the masthead has no interest in publishing unknown writers, they want to cover their ass, so they publish a known byline, even if they have to manufacture it.
Yep. But I don’t think that’s how it happened, I think it’s much stranger and more pathological than that. I don’t think the guy who did this was fooled, I don’t buy that. There are too many pieces of evidence that this was not a case of someone being fooled. No, I guess that thing in its weird slightly creepy way was some kind of flattering validation of my brand–[speaking directly into tape recorder] he said, ironically.
You sold Spy, it more or less tanked afterwards. What happened?
Well, it was sold right in the middle of the last serious recession, which is why we sold it frankly. That’s not entirely true– we started selling it before the recession started, but didn’t sell it in time to escape that. It had been this briefly profitable magazine, and obviously quickly became harder as a business, so that was part of it. But mostly, I think–and this is going to sound self-serving, but I think it’s true–it was very difficult, it is very difficult to create a thing like that, whether it’s Suck or Spy, and it’s this fragile little ecology of the right people at the right moment, and it was a long shot when we did it, and it didn’t get easier, just because the magazine, and the name, and the idea existed. It still required the right careful management of people. Maybe it also required the particular kind of “let’s put on a show,” missionary spirit that a start-up has. And then obviously it was a long shot and had difficulties in different ways once it was an established thing with owners in England, and so forth. But do I think it had to tank? No, I don’t. It published for another seven years after we sold it. There’s an alternative history to write, where the right people ran it and did it, and it kept working. Just as there’s an alternative history to write where Rolling Stone stopped publishing in 1974 and went out of business, you know? I don’t think it was fated. I just think it became difficult and in the event impossible.
The popular history says the people who really loved Spy were actually getting comp copies anyway.
Really? I would disagree with that, I didn’t know that was part of the popular history. No, we had 200,000 paying customers–and not discounted paying customers. There may have been other untenable business issues, but I actually don’t think that was one of them.
The costs are so high and the margins are so slim in magazines today, and we live in a media-saturated marketplace. The New Yorker is allegedly in the black again, the Atlantic seems to be hot, Harper’s seems to be making a lot of non-profit right now–but we’re talking about global readerships of around a million at the most. It’s hard to be optimistic about print as a medium when people don’t seem to be reading much anymore. Should we just try to cultivate loyalty in a small, niche audience?
Yes, I think that’s it. Changing times require a readjustment of all kinds of benchmarks. You and I are both too young to have lived in the era of Life magazine when it was this massive print journal. As a writer, editor, cr
eator, one wants impact, and you find your impact by finding the right 200,000 or 500,000 readers, and then you can write however you wish.
Then you have a magazine like Maxim that is sort of in the process of refreshing the screen, creating a readership that didn’t previously exist .
Yes! I hate to say this, but it may well be the Spy magazine of its time, or some kind of inheritor…
It’s a humor magazine, and doesn’t get enough credit for that. Do you read it?
I look at it, occasionally. You know, there’s no place I can look at it unembarrassedly, my children would see it, or my wife would see it, or somebody on the subway would see it. But as I often tell people, look–there’s no naked pictures in here! No, I think it’s been an amazing success. And Blender is pretty good. My hat is totally off to Felix Dennis.
You think it’s all down to him? I mean, it’s British magazines in general. American magazine people can learn a lot from going to a London news agent.
Totally. And also going to a London editorial office, and seeing–as Felix Dennis makes much gloating mileage out of–how leanly those magazines are created and produced.
Most American magazines are way over-staffed.
I totally agree. I mean, not all American magazines are. But that is the main part of the Dennis critique of American magazines, and I’m afraid I agree.
On the other hand, the British have other advantages–easy distribution in a small country, people primarily buy off newsstand. Editorially, too, they take so much more liberty with the language– it’s both more profane and sacred. You look at American magazines from the golden age– Harold Ross’ New Yorker, Arnold Gingrich’s Esquire, even Spy, and look at the things they did with the medium, and you realize that magazines in this country have gotten so entrenched and unimaginative.
I agree. Not trying to reinvent the form. Not saying, “We have this thing, what can we do with it. What new ways can we do it.” I don’t know what is the cause and what is the effect, and if it’s a supply problem or a demand problem, but there seems to be less ambition of that kind in magazines today. The other thing that I’ve heard Felix Dennis say and that I think is right on and true is the degree to which too many American magazines are about pleasing advertisers as opposed to pleasing readers. And it seems simple, like motherhood and apple pie, but it’s a really crucial distinction about thinking about what you’re doing every day. I think the pressures to please advertisers are overwhelming for most magazines.
Then again, you’re not pleasing advertisers if you’re not getting 40 percent sell-through. Maybe there’s an analogy to commercial radio, where you’ve got the tyranny of the numbers–the arbitrons, the Nielsens, the ABC audit.
Right, I think that’s right. I just think as an editor you have to create a magazine that you want to read, that you love, and trust that there are others who will feel the same way about it.
Do you ever pick up old copies of Spy and page through them?
All the time. I mean, not in a sort of pathetic, remember-the-good-old days kind of way. People ask me about particular stories, and I’ll go back to my bound copies and page through them. It’s not like I sit around and page through them hour after hour, but I do look at it. And it still seems fresh and fun. Actually, Graydon and I are considering putting together some kind of retrospective something, so I’ve been looking at it more lately.
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