He was a stage designer noted for his work in opera when he hit the best-seller list in 2000 with the first in a series of books for children.
Tag Archives: Magazines
I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities
How 21st-century digital culture makes it impossible to read a 19th-century novel.
How to Run a Fashion Magazine in China in 2023
Margaret Zhang, an Australian-born influencer, got the top role at Vogue China in 2021, making her the youngest Vogue editor ever. Will Condé Nast’s gamble pay off?
An Office in Which Screaming Is Encouraged
At the Berlin headquarters of the art magazine Blau International, editor in chief Cornelius Tittel doubles as an instructor of Kundalini yoga classes.
Gawker Is Dead (Again) But Its Influence Lives On
It started with smirk and it ended with a bang, and in between it changed the media universe.
A New Series, ‘In Service of Our Ancestors’
The 1619 Project, which has been adapted into a podcast and a book, premieres as a documentary on Hulu this week.
Victor S. Navasky, a Leading Liberal Voice in Journalism, Dies at 90
Witty and contrarian, he was the longtime editor and later publisher of The Nation and wrote an acclaimed book about the Hollywood blacklisting era.
David Brooks Announces the Sidney Awards for Best Essays
David Brooks honors some of the year’s best essays.
Hamish Bowles Lists His High-Design Village Co-op for $2.9 Million
The longtime Vogue editor has moved to London, leaving behind a duplex that still has traces of his “objects of affection.”
Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
The literary journal attracted great names. Its issues sold well. And then it was over — a fate that offers insight into the tenuous place of literary magazines in the American publishing landscape.
How Not to Be a Character in a ‘Bad Fashion Movie’
Laura Brown lost her job as a top magazine editor in 2022. That’s OK.
How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom
She wasn’t a political expert. But her Trump-era angst found a following among Democrats — and even the White House is interested.
Will Welch Leads GQ to ‘the New Masculinity’
When he got the job as top editor, a friend told him, “Yikes.” Now, with an assist from Brad Pitt, he has remade the men’s magazine for the post-#MeToo age.
Edward Enninful Also Wears Prada
The star fashion editor has reinvented British Vogue and written a memoir. What’s his next act?
David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80
An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.
Ivana Trump’s New York
In the 1980s and ’90s, Ivana was on a first-name basis with a city transfixed by fame and fashion.
Andreas Anastasis is the man behind Anna Wintour’s famous hairstyle.
Being Anna Wintour’s hairstylist may sound glamorous, but it’s his art practice that gets Andreas Anastasis talking.
Gloria Steinem on 50 Years of Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Movement
Early contributors to Ms. came together on the 50th anniversary of its founding.
What Happened to The Believer?
The magazine, bought by a marketing company, briefly hosted clickbait content. Scandal ensued. After a flurry of negotiation, it is now back with its first publisher, McSweeney’s.
Review: ‘Anna: The Biography,’ by Amy Odell
It depends on whom you ask.
Why Condé Nast Staffers Are Unionizing: ‘Prestige Doesn’t Pay the Bills’
What does it mean when the labor movement is embraced by the so-called media elite?
Patrick Demarchelier, Fashion Photographer, Dies at 78
The Frenchman was famous for his portraits of supermodels and his close relationship to Princess Diana, and his images are a part of the fashion canon.
Why the Sudden Urge to Reconsider Famous Women?
Pop culture has never been more interested in reclaiming women from the recent past, like Pamela Anderson and Janet Jackson. But not every reclamation succeeds.
Condé Nast Workers Form Companywide Union
The union will cover more than 500 employees from all of Condé Nast’s brands, except the four publications that have already unionized.
Supreme Court to Hear Copyright Fight Over Andy Warhol’s Images of Prince
The justices will decide whether the artist’s reliance on a photograph of the musician was copyright infringement or protected as a new, transformative work.
Two Religious Conservatives and a Marxist Walk Into a Journal
Compact, a new online magazine edited by two religious conservatives and a Marxist proponent of “labor populism,” aims to challenge both “a libertine left and a libertarian right.”
Annie Flanders, Founder of Details Magazine, Dies at 82
Her idiosyncratic and fiercely independent magazine chronicled Downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, a combustible mix of art, music and fashion.
Hamish Bowles Enters The World of Interiors
The longtime Vogue editor is putting his stamp on a beloved design magazine.
The Drift Wants You to ‘Examine Your Ideas’
The lit mag of the moment, founded by two women in their 20s, isn’t afraid to say what’s on its mind.
Remembering Grace Mirabella and Her Inventive Magazine
Her namesake glossy challenged the expectations of what a fashion publication could be. Her former collaborators recall how it, and Ms. Mirabella, shaped them.
A Digital Archive of Black Fashion Delves Into Print
Black Fashion Fair is releasing a new publication featuring photography, essays and more ahead of New York Fashion Week.
André Leon Talley, Fashion’s Last Great Editor
André Leon Talley was the last great editor of a lost era.
André Leon Talley in His Own Words
“We’re living in such a vulgar age!,” the unfiltered fashion editor once said.
Grace Mirabella, Who Brought Vogue Down to Earth, Dies at 92
In her 17 years at the helm of the fashion magazine, she took a more practical-minded approach, in line with a rise in women’s participation in the work force.
Condé Nast Knows Faded Glory Is Not in Style
Anna Wintour is the embodiment of the glory days of the magazine dynasty. Now she is pitching its global, digital future.
People Magazine Heads to New Ownership. Again.
Still a hit in print, the weekly chronicle of celebs and ordinary people who make news is set to become the property of a company specializing in informational websites.
Casa Magazines Has Seen It All
The West Village has changed a lot since the ’90s, but this palace of printed matter has remained a pillar of the neighborhood.
Byron Lewis, the Original Black Media Mogul
Byron Lewis knew there was an untapped market for Black storytelling. But it took years for the rest of the country to believe him.
Meredith in Deal With Dotdash
People, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly and more than 40 other magazines would become part of the same company as Serious Eats and Investopedia.
The Trump Prophets Regroup
When you are in the business of prophecy, what do you do when prophecy fails?
How Ibrahim Kamara Found His Place in Fashion
After a journey that began on the war-torn streets of Sierra Leone, the Dazed editor in chief is now one of fashion’s most influential stylists.
At Top Magazines, Black Representation Remains a Work in Progress
Last summer’s racial reckoning brought calls for an industrywide overhaul in fashion. But change is slow.
Mel Ottenberg Takes Over Interview Magazine as Top Editor
The fashion stylist talks about superficiality, Instagram résumés, celebrity and carrying on the infamous Warhol legacy.
Forbes jumps into hot media liquidity summer with a SPAC combo
What a busy week in the world of media liquidity.
That’s a sentence you don’t get to write often. Regardless, news broke this week that Axel Springer is buying U.S. political journalism outfit POLITICO. The transaction was expected, but the eye-popping roughly $1 billion price tag still has tongues wagging. We even got on the podcast to chat about it.
And Forbes announced that it is going public via a SPAC. The business publication’s news follows BuzzFeed’s journey to the public markets through a blank-check company. Hot media liquidity summer? Something like that.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
That TechCrunch is in the process of being sold to private equity, of course, is not something that we should forget. Shoutout to the Verizon bankers who found a way to get rid of us while also deleveraging Verizon’s debt profile. Ten points.
I want to take a quick tour of the Forbes SPAC deck this morning. Our notes on BuzzFeed’s are here, in case you want to run comparisons. This will be easy and fun. Perfect Friday morning fare. Into the data!
What’s it worth?
In corporate-speak, Forbes Global Media Holdings is merging with blank-check company Magnum Opus Acquisition Limited. The transaction will close either Q4 2021 or Q1 2022, Forbes estimates.
The deal itself is somewhat modest in scale compared with other SPAC deals we’ve recently looked into. Forbes reports that it will sport “an implied pro forma enterprise value of $630 million, net of tax benefits,” after its completion. Some $600 million in gross proceeds will be derived from Magnum Opus funds “and $400 million of additional capital through a private placement of ordinary shares of the combined company,” Forbes writes.
The company will sport an equity valuation of $830 million after the deal closes, per its own calculations. That number will change some depending on redemptions ahead of the combination. The gap between the large dollars going into the deal and the modest final valuation of the public Forbes entity is due to some $440 million in secondary transactions for existing Forbes shareholders.
In case you’d prefer all of that in table form, here’s the Forbes investor deck:
Image Credits: Forbes SPAC deck
Is $830 million a fair price? Let’s dig into Forbes’ results.
Ebony Returns to Chronicle a New Moment
A leading publication covering Black life in America has emerged from bankruptcy with a new owner and ambitious plans.
Hiro, Fashion Photographer Who Captured the Surreal, Dies at 90
He juxtaposed the mundane and the exotic, transforming ordinary objects into the desirable — an approach he took in his still-life images as well as in fashion.
Percent raises $5M, aiming to become the ‘Stripe for donations’ to good causes
What with the planet collapsing and democracy under constant attack from all quarters – you know, just the usual – one or two members of the global population have, idly or not, wondered if the private sector might want to step up? I mean, as well as shooting billionaires into space. At the same time, even! Luckily, many businesses want to do better. But there are one or two hurdles. Incorporating “purpose” into their digital offering, such as donating to a non-profit at the end of a moving documentary, is harder than it looks. Businesses don’t have the capacity to build in donation software; they can’t continually verify and audit good causes; and processing donations is fraught with legal complications, compliance, and regulatory risk. What is to be done?
Pennies is one organization that bills itself as the digital equivalent of the traditional charity collection box. However, perhaps what we need is… drum roll… an API?
Step forward Percent. Founded in 2017, Percent provides an API allowing firms to customers to donate to good causes, matching a donation made when making a payment, or rounding up a financial transaction, for instance.
It’s now closed a $5M venture round led by Morpheus Ventures, allowing it to expand in the US, as well as its existing presence in the UK and Australia. The UK’s Nationwide Building Society – also an early investor and customer of the product – is a co-investor in the round.
The company says its API-first platform takes care of auditing and compliance processes to prevent fraud and money-laundering whilst also parsing tax-efficient disbursements of funds into 200 countries worldwide. It says 7 million non-profit causes have been added to the platform and it’s vetted the potential recipients of donations.
Henry Ludlam, Founder, and CEO of Percent, said: “Percent was founded to become the global API-first infrastructure behind all giving. This will be the foundation for a better, fairer future of capitalism in which every financial transaction has social and environmental good built into it.”
In an interview I asked him if the pandemic had accelerated the opportunity: “Because of COVID, suddenly now we have brands that are really desperate to build purpose into their business in a way that they just weren’t doing 18 months ago. It’s really been an amazing shift. We’ve just seen a huge shift in what consumers expect from businesses. Consumers expect businesses to build purpose into what they do now.”
He said that the product could be even built into – surprise! – streaming services: “Say you’ve seen a documentary. And at the end of the documentary, you feel particularly moved, like you watched a David Attenborough or something like that. You could then actually be able to quickly and easily build donations into the end of it. So using our API, it would pull up a list of nonprofits, so right there and then the customer could make a donation. We’re also working with a crypto platform where you can round down your transactions and donate to any nonprofit as well. There’s loads of really cool stuff we are working on which is coming out soon.”
Kristian Blaszczynski, Managing Partner of Morpheus Ventures, said: “With the events of the last several years, it has become more apparent that aligning brands with purpose is driving consumer behavior and spend. However, today, the process of donating to non-profits is incredibly archaic, manual, and inefficient… Percent’s API-first platform abstracts away all of these complexities and automates the processes, allowing businesses to align closer to their stakeholders and focus on their core business.”
Percent could well be pushing at an open door. Kantar Research says that only 22% of people could name a brand they thought was doing a good job addressing issues such as climate change, plastic waste, and water pollution. On the flip side, 95% of businesses think that “purpose” is at the heart of what they do. The disparity could not be more stark.
Is Percent the stripe for donations? We’re about to find out.
Danny Shanahan, Cartoonist With an Absurd Touch, Dies at 64
He drew about 1,000 cartoons for The New Yorker, populated by clowns, snowmen, cats, dogs, Elvis and more. But his career with the magazine ended under a cloud.
Romulo Yanes, Whose Photographs Captured the Beauty of Food, Dies at 62
Best known for his long tenure at Gourmet magazine, he brought a sense of elegant realism to his job and let his delectable subjects take center stage.
Stephen Graubard, 96, Journal Editor and Provocative Historian, Dies
He edited the scholarly journal Daedalus for decades and wrote books on the presidency, sparing neither Kennedy nor Clinton nor the Bushes.