Author / Magdiaries

by Magdiaries

I love magazines

I love magazines.  What’s not to love?

Every week, the postal service brings me several beautifully curated collections written by experts in my favorite subjects – with photos!

Today it might be a business magazine.  Tomorrow it could be outdoor adventures.  The next day, martial arts.  Then cooking. Fashion.  Travel. Politics.  Pets.  Technology.  Even about ways to be intelligently optimistic.

Magazines bring me what I expect and they bring  surprises.  They come directly to my home.  I can read them whenever and wherever I want, without a clicker.  I am my own channel guide.

I love magazines and I always will.

Mike Greehan | Partner & COO, Cue Ball, LLC



Grub Street Journal
by Magdiaries

Great power, great responsibility

When I was reviews editor of a computing magazine, an IT director called to ask which laptop to buy, between two models. He was buying 10,000 for £15m; his trust in a 25-year old journalist was both touching and terrifying.

Later, as an editor, publisher and now a dark-arts practitioner, I’ve learned the most influential magazines can even decide whether a product or brand flies or dies.

It’s one of the many reasons I fear magazines having fewer resources: the chance of errors and rushes to judgement increases – with consequences that can last far longer than a publication’s on-sale period.

Clare Newsome | Group Marketing & PR Manager | Computers Unlimited



Grub Street Journal
by Magdiaries

Dodging the grim reaper

“You’ll be dead in three years,” he told me in 2004, as I took editorship of PC Pro.

Not me personally, my ex-colleague hurriedly explained, but the magazine. Information was shifting online and our tech-savvy readers would be first to follow. Ergo, death.

And the intervening years haven’t been easy; several rivals are no more. But PC Pro is still here, still loved by its readers, with many years yet to come.

Why? Because even smartphone-clutching, Google Glass-wearing techies appreciate the curation and craft that goes into a printed product.

And its battery life? Well, that’s just to die for.

Tim Danton | Editorial Director & Deputy MD, Dennis Technology



Grub Street Journal
by Magdiaries

Leaving them hungry for more

I love magazines. I always have since my early days as an editorial designer.

There’s no better feeling than creating a package of intelligently written and beautifully designed pages that readers consume leaving them hungry for more.

When I started in ‘customer publishing’ I wondered if my zest for producing magazines would subside. It didn’t.

In this era of content marketing, we have a plethora of ways to reach our audience. The digital journey is just beginning and a catch-all solution to captivate our increasingly mobile audience is yet to surface.

Maybe ink and paper was the answer all along.

Eric Campbell | MD, White Light Media



Grub Street Journal
by Magdiaries

Amazing, exhausting, inspiring, infuriating

Being in the magazine industry is amazing because you are part of creating something that captures and perhaps defines the cultural zeitgeist.

It’s exhausting for independent publishers like myself because you are effectively the publisher, editor, distributor and marketing manager in one.

It’s inspiring because you examine everything through an editor’s lens – looking beyond the obvious and beneath the surface – and that is where the magic happens.

It’s infuriating because the industry still operates in an old fashioned manner, in its distribution channels and business model, and we have to figure out a way to make it work.

Rosa Park | Editor, Cereal Magazine



Grub Street Journal