Covering the Spread: The BoSacks Interview

Louanne Welcome to “Covering the Spread, Magazine Design for the Next Age,” a monthly discussion of all things related to our favorite medium, magazines.

Scott Whether you’re a seasoned designer, an aspiring creative, an editor or publisher, or just someone who appreciates the art of storytelling through visuals, this is the place for you.

Louanne I’m your host, Louanne Welgoss from LTD Creative, a graphic design firm located in Frederick, Maryland, and I’ve been working on publications for thirty-two years. You can see our work at LTDCreative.com.

Scott And I’m Scott Oldham from Quarto Creative, who’s been making magazines for twenty-five years. You can see my work at QuartoCreative.com. And on this podcast, we’ll chat with industry experts, designers, editors, and production pros to uncover the secrets of all things magazine.

Louanne It’s time to turn the page and what you thought you knew and reimagine the future of publishing.

Louanne Hi, and welcome back to Covering the Spread, where we talk about the art, craft and business of magazines. Today’s guest needs no introduction, though I’ll give him one anyway. Bo Sacks has been shaking up the publishing world for decades with his sharp wit, fearless commentary, and deep industry knowledge. If you’ve ever read his newsletter, you know Bo doesn’t mince words. And today we’re getting the unfiltered version. So, Bo, you’ve been in publishing longer than most of us have been buying our own coffee.

Bo I’ve been in publishing longer than most of you are alive.

Louanne So, what’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in the past twenty years?

Bo The decrease in advertising revenue that used to support the industry is gone. It moved to digital, and then piracy killed whatever little bit we could get. Facebook shifts algorithms. Google shifts algorithms. That’s hurt our industry tremendously. And then we’ve shifted from our own distribution platforms over to digital platforms. Of course, for a decade or so, that worked. But again, the algorithms changed, and we lost traffic. That’s a shame for the magazine industry, but what’s left is print and print is choice.

Scott So, tell us why. Why is print still relevant when digital is taking over the universe?

Bo Because magazines make a difference. Magazines are an engagement — a promise of entertainment, of knowledge, of being off the grid, of taking a few moments of personal time. A correctly-structured print magazine can do very well in the digital age.

Scott And is it because people are seeking that time off the grid or off-screen?

Bo The latest stats have that Generation Z is, in fact, abandoning digital. Certainly, they’re abandoning Facebook and looking for print. Lots of data proves that Generation Z is coming back to print, but not mass print. Niche print.

Louanne Are there any old school publishing practices maybe that we shouldn’t have left behind?

Bo Well, how about some that we should? Rate base. We should abandon rate base. It’s a cancer on the industry. We make a promise that we’re going to distribute … pick a number … one hundred thousand copies and, come hell or high water, we cheat in how we distribute those magazines: doctor’s offices, airlines … junk circulation numbers. Rate base? Got to go. We sold advertisers a magic number, and we did everything we could to hit it incorrectly.

Scott So, wait a minute. You’re saying that pass-through numbers aren’t real? I can’t believe it.

Bo We’re such innocents in our criminality. We think so small. Rate base and pass-along rates: What a lovely fantasy. But that pales in comparison to the 80 … 60 billion dollars in revenue lost that the entire advertising industry is facing through ad fraud. I do not know how any industry can absorb 60 billion dollars of fraud. And yet, we do it every year, and it’s growing.

Louanne Tell us a little bit more about ad fraud.

Bo Well, it’s complicated in that there’s lots of ways to do it. Bots create fake humans. These fake humans click on fake ads in vanity sites. The Economist is a perfect example. There are several fake Economist sites — a very popular, very expensive magazine. So, these crooks (let’s call them) create a fake Economist page with fake ads, have fake humans clicking on the fake ads, and yet the advertisers get charged for it. There’s not a mechanism for us to correctly control that, at least not yet.

Louanne Interesting. It seems like the fake ads encompass all areas of our life, from politics to advertising.

Bo Absolutely. Let’s not just keep it to the magazine industry, although that’s our topic for today. AI is empowering fakedom everywhere.

Louanne What’s your honest take on the current state of the magazine industry?

Bo I think we’re in great shape. I think that we’re redefining who we can be and adapting to that. So, what’s working? Selling high priced subscriptions: thirty, forty, sixty dollars for a niche publication. And they sell out. They sell out because they’re reaching a specific audience whose desire is almost addicted to the content that they have. We have undercharged. We have trained the public over generations to undercharge what the value of the product really is worth, because we had the seductress of advertisers.

When we lost our mistress — the advertising agencies — we scrambled, and we have to recreate a value proposition in the reader’s minds, which some magazines are starting to do. I pay fifteen dollars every year for a fantasy football magazine, which is printed on newsprint, has information on players that … some of them are dead and it’s three months old. And yet, I buy that magazine every year. I need to have it.

Louanne Well, you’re not alone. It’s handy to have something in hand, as opposed to constantly going to the phone or the computer to get that information even though it’s up to date. I mean, you can cross-reference that information, but as far as niche goes, there’s some things that simply don’t go out of date. If you want to talk about woodworking or cooking. Cooking generally does not lose its shelf life and get outdated. How many times have you tried to cook and look at your phone, and your phone keeps shutting down, right? And then you’re like, “Oh, where was I, where was I?” Having an actual cooking magazine or cookbook or what have you is so much easier. And so, there’s my plug for print. And same thing would go for woodworking, or if you’re jewelry-making. If you’re actually working on a project, you want that handy, right then and there. You know, the same goes for the fantasy football.

Bo So, we were talking about successful niche magazines. But the definition of niche is kind of interesting. Do you consider The Atlantic a niche magazine?

Scott I would not, but change my mind.

Bo They’re highly successful with an aggressive paywall. Daily newsletters, podcasts.

Louanne Yeah, I would consider it. I subscribe to The Atlantic. Daily, though. I listen to all the stories, and it’s very politically-motivated and, normally, politically left-oriented. So, that, to me, seems like it’s niche.

Bo Oh, I think it is. But it’s a niche on a broader scale.

Louanne Right, right. And they cover other things. It’s not just politics. There’s a lot of really interesting stories.

Bo Is The New Yorker a niche magazine?

Scott See, I wouldn’t call either one of those a niche magazine because they follow the mold, loosely, of what a Time magazine or Newsweek used to be about, when we would not have considered those niche at all. We would have called them “general interest.” And that’s where I would put those, or any news magazines of that sort, where they’re not covering purely politics. Politics? Yes, I could see that fitting into a niche. But when they’re covering culture and the arts, I don’t know.

Bo So, here’s my next example: The Economist. I would say that’s a financial niche magazine, but they have a large circulation. They charge a hell of a lot of money for it, and they’re wildly successful.

Scott So, going back to the cost factor, the fantasy football magazine that you subscribe to for fifteen bucks: How expensive would that have to get before you start questioning your subscription to it?

Bo That is a great question. I’d pay twenty dollars, twenty-five dollars for the same dead information. This is because I’m addicted to fantasy football and I’m addicted to having the magazine. I sometimes call it toileture because that’s where it’s most suited.

Louanne Well, I think what a fantasy football — a print niche — magazine will give you is more information, a little more in depth than you’re going to find just on the internet. Unless you really search for it. You’re going to get a story about a football player — a little more than you’re going to find just about his stats, right?

Bo It helps in picking my draft.

Scott There you go. That’s what it’s all about. It’s been curated. That’s what you’re missing on the web. Most of the time, especially for something like fantasy football, the internet is a jungle. And without a guide, you’re going to get bad information, or at least information you can’t trust. Would you say that’s fair?

Bo I would say that’s fair. And I would say that I’ve been reading Lindy’s for twenty-five years or so. They used to be printed in the same plant as High Times magazine, so I would get the joy of seeing Lindy’s printed right next to High Times publications.

Scott All right. You’ve opened a can of worms. We’ve got to go into it now because our listeners may not be aware that you started your career at High Times magazine. Is that right?

Bo That’s correct. Well, no, actually, I started my magazine career … I was a publisher twice for local newspapers before I started at High Times. I got there on the second or third issue, but I was there at the ground floor.

Scott Can you talk to us a little bit — without making the whole episode about this — about what that experience was like? Talk about a niche publication. And, back in that time period, what was publishing like for you?

Bo I can’t express the excitement and the joy. I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, given the responsibility of millions of dollars of printing and paper and color separations, which I mostly knew nothing about. I learned on the job. When I got there, I didn’t know what a color separation was, but I was mentored by my sales reps and I had the skill to say, “I don’t know.” I kept that throughout my entire career. If I didn’t know, I didn’t fake it. I found the answer. So High Times was fabulous. We had to make it up as we went along. We had great art directors: Tony Brown, Diana LaGuardia, both of which went on … One went on to be the art director of People magazine. Diana went on to be the art director of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Lots of the High Times alumni went on to very positive careers. We had to construct our own distribution system because national distributors at the time wouldn’t touch us. So, we reinvented how to distribute a magazine, mostly through local shops: record stores, head shops. Finally, we did get on the newsstand. Larry Flynt from Hustler magazine also was struggling, getting on the newsstands, so he started his own national distribution network, and he needed more weight and volume to make it successful. So, we negotiated, and Flynt Distribution distributed High Times magazine.

Scott And how long were you there?

BoI was there from ‘74 to ’82. ’81 … ‘82.

Scott When you left, do you remember what the circulation was?

Bo Somewhere around five or six hundred thousand copies a month, with a high sell through. Our sell through rates were astronomical. I used to have every cover on my wall in my office with the circulation figures, and I can tell you this (this rule is only for High Times. It probably doesn’t hold for other magazines). Photographic art was always better than reflective art in sales. Why is that? I have no idea. But photographic art sold much more copies than reflective art.

Scott What were they? Photos of pot plants?

Bo Yes. Or people. Cheech and Chong were on the cover. Blondie was on the cover. Those are some good old days.

Louanne Of course, I have to ask: Did you meet them?

Bo Yes. Yeah. I had an argument about Blondie with Blondie in my office, because this was the genesis of the punk movement, and some of the people used to call me “Grandpa” in the office. I’m twenty-four years old. They call me “Grandpa,” because I didn’t think using safety pins through the cheek and through the things — these various things that the Punkers did — I didn’t want to promote that. And in our cover, Blondie is wearing a safety pin necklace. I got outvoted.

Louanne And you were only twenty-four. That’s a baby.

Bo Yeah, it was nothing. But you know, I had strong opinions then, and I sort of carried that through the rest of my career, as well.

Bo The biggest magazine in this country is AARP Magazine. They have a 22.2 million circulation, followed by Costco, the second largest, with 15 million. And then, slowly down, you get Better Homes & Gardens for 3 million. Southern Living for 2.8. People at 2.8. So, there are some relatively large circulation magazines, but not a lot.

Scott I don’t know anything about People’s sales strategy, but it would surprise me if they’re getting a lot of Gen Z readers. I could be wrong, but it would surprise me.

Bo Why would they?

Scott Well, that’s my point: Why? Why would they? It’s such a legacy brand and it’s such a legacy idea for a magazine.

Bo And yet, Dotdash Meredith just changed their name to People, Inc..

Scott Well, exactly. Let’s unpack that, shall we?

Bo Somebody up in and Dotdash Meredith decided that the name, Dotdash Meredith, has no heritage, has no resonance, whereas the biggest magazine that they have — People — does. And now, this is conjecture on my part — I wasn’t in the boardroom — but I can only guess they were looking for the nostalgia of the title. People know People.

Scott Right, right. And that was that was something I found really striking about the new People website — the replacement for Meredith. They’ve got a very good section in a timeline — a history of the various brands that have gone into what the publisher is currently. And up until about the turn of the century — our century — it was all the brands. It was the magazine brands … the legacy magazine brands that built this industry.

Bo The Seven Sisters, they were known as.

Scott Right. There you go. But since then, it’s all about the deals. It was all mergers and acquisitions from that point onwards. It wasn’t about launching great new brands. It was about who’s rolling up underneath the corporate, top-level name.

Bo So, my opinion is that Time magazine was ruined by a crop of business graduates, sometime in the late ‘80s. They brought in a crew of MBAs, and everything was run from a financial perspective, not a cultural perspective. And it changed the entire sensibility of the office, to my point, in a negative way. And you’re right, Scott: Everything is now business-focused instead of culture-focused, instead of knowledge-focused, instead of entertainment-focused. It’s dollars first, content later. It should be content first, and dollars will follow, right?

Scott Absolutely. And I wonder about those other brands that are not People magazine that are still part of that publishing group, and what it is to them to have their magazine subservient to People in the corporate structure, at least as far as naming goes. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference. Maybe they don’t care. But it seems like a snub to something like Sports Illustrated.

Bo I agree. Corporate publishing in America has done some pretty sad things. When I was at McCall’s magazine, we had a six and a half million, circulation. It dwindled to two million when some genius decided to change McCall’s to Rosie magazine. Rosie O’Donnell. That lasted a couple of issues and died.

Louanne Why was that decision made?

Bo I wasn’t there. I have no idea.

Scott, presumably, they thought they had another Oprah on their hands.

Bo Yes, I think you’re right. You had Woman’s Day: ten million, circulation. All those big titles are all gone. And that’s where we’re back to our original conversation, where niche is in.

Louanne You’ve made some pretty bold predictions over the years, and in your blog on your website. Where do you see the next big shift?

Bo Not a good one. I see a continued replacement of humans by AI in the publishing work. AI doesn’t sleep, doesn’t take coffee breaks, doesn’t require health care. And as we discussed, publishers in this day and age are more business-focused than content-focused. So, if they can take a shortcut with AI and eliminate humans, they will. I’m against it, but I think that’s what’s going to happen. People say that AI doesn’t feel pain, it doesn’t cry, it cannot feel loss. And these are human emotions. But I contend that AI is going to be able to fake all those emotions competently, humanistically. And nobody will know the difference eventually. Right now it’s still a little rough, but only a little rough. And it proceeds every day with new adventures. And it’s getting better and better.

Louanne So much content. But what about design?

Scott It’s coming.

Bo Can an AI scan George Lois’ Esquire covers and then recreate in his style? Yeah, I think so. Can an AI look at all successful magazine covers throughout history, and devise an algorithm of what is the most successful way to make a cover? Yeah, I think AI can do that. Would we know that a human didn’t do it? Eventually, no.

Scott No, I agree. I fully agree. I think, at the moment, it’s a little bit like Canva, to the extent that, for some people, it’s good enough. It’s satisfactory. They’re not willing or able to pay for an actual designer to do their designs for them. So, they go to Canva and it’s okay. It’s going to get the job done for them. And I think for a lot of people, AI, at the moment, is in that same category, where it’s going to … you could have an AI run an interview with a subject — a live subject — ask all the right questions, record all the right answers, and spit out a story. And it’s going to be good enough for some people. Not for you and me, but for some people, that’s going to be sufficient.

Louanne Do you think that with the evolution of AI, though, that they’ll cut their costs and then go back to printing that content because they cut their costs?

Bo It depends. It’s title-specific. Some titles will and some titles don’t need to. But I think print has made the turn. Print is coming back. We have some obstacles, like competent newsstands, because the whole newsstand industry is ruptured. It used to be four hundred wholesalers in this country. There’s now about, maybe, twenty. All the newsstand space in the grocery stores has diminished. Finished. But there’s a flip to that: That makes what’s left, choice. That’s what makes what’s left, valuable, makes it rare. And from that point of view, we’re doing pretty good.

Scott All right. So, if someone out there has a great idea for a new magazine — let’s say, a niche magazine — what’s your advice to them? How do they get started? How do they get their product out there in front of people?

Bo Well, you need a great idea. After that, you need a bankroll. It’s very hard to start a magazine now without some serious dollars. So, you have to get investors. When I started my first newspaper, it started with five hundred dollars. Now, that was ‘72.

Scott What is that in 2025 dollars?

Bo I have no idea. We started a local, free circulation newspaper for the colleges in the metro New York area. We had a 50,000 circulation. The printer gave us credit. We rock and rolled. And that’s how I became a production person, because I am mechanically-inclined. So, I watched the whole process, from stripping the film, making the plates, watching the roll tenders, watching ink/water balance. It was all like magic to me.

Scott So, bringing it back around to launching a new magazine … You need you need a killer idea, for sure. You need money — always helps. Then what?

Bo Design. If you have a great idea, but you have an anemic design, no sense in bothering. Design has to be captivating, brilliant, well thought out, well laid out, the right colors … I mean, this is stuff you guys know better than I do. Design is everything. How are you going to get people to pick it up if the design is inefficient?

Scott For our listeners: We did not tell him to say any of that.

Louanne But, you know, it’s funny you say that, though. I think, on a previous podcast, we might have mentioned that there are some niche magazines out there, like cars, woodworking, fishing. The design is terrible, but it’s still out there.

Bo Yes, but they’re not starting out now. They’re in existence, probably, since the ‘50s. So, they have heritage, they have longtime readership. They probably have father-to-son, mother-to-daughter kind of relationships. I went from McCall’s to the B2B side of the industry for a while, and one of the wise art directors said, “The kitchen table is our newsstand.” Even a B2B magazine has to be really well-designed on the cover to make them pick it up. “Of course,” he says, after hearing the obvious.

Louanne I’ve always said that, because I’ve always worked on trade magazines and you’re going to get it in the mail. And the same thing applies to direct mail, too. It has to catch your eye somehow. You get a stack of catalogs or magazines in the mail. And yes, you get this trade magazine, because you’re a member of this association. But what’s going to make you want to open it? The same theory applies here to all magazines. And I’m not sure everybody sees it that way.

Bo No, they don’t.

Scott You’re right. It has to use all the same tools and gimmicks that newsstand magazines do, because that’s who it’s competing against in the mailbox.

Bo Catalogs. And things are on my kitchen table. What’s going to make me pick what up first? Good design.

LouanneYeah. And to me, it’s also relevant content. Here, maybe I’m sidelining a little bit, but I got a catalog not long ago, and I’m guessing it’s a family-owned clothing business of some kind. They had a cookie recipe in it and maybe I flipped through it, and I stopped because of that cookie recipe, and I remembered that magazine or that catalog. I think it’s called Karen Kane, of all things. And they sold women’s clothing, but they had a cookie recipe in it that related to the types of clothing they were selling in that little section, which might have been a little more like rodeo, cowboy. And they found a nice, interesting way of drawing people in.

Bo That’s the serendipitous approach. Something that doesn’t really belong stands out.

Scott That was a trend — I want to say — about ten or fifteen years ago: magalogs. That was the thinking: Try to put editorial content in your catalog for the same reason that that we have links out to a website from a magazine, and vice versa. It’s to keep people in that ecosystem for as long as humanly possible.

Bo Costco Connection: 15 million, circulation does exactly that. That’s —I don’t know — fifty pages of ads, but interspersed is recipes, as you just mentioned, or stories, or here’s how to buy tires correctly. There’s real edit in the Costco Connection.

Louanne AAA also has something similar. They do regional ones. I don’t know if they have a national one, but I get my regional one. So, now that we’re talking about this, if I were to start a magazine right now, I might start something and sell a product as well. That would be a dual way of bringing in income and helping, since advertising is going to be a thing of the past.

Bo Every magazine has to have alternate revenue streams. So you’re right. Sell the magazines, sell products, sell events, sell podcasts. We need diverse revenue streams. Every successful magazine is doing that.

Scott For sure — especially niche magazines where, first of all, you have a niche advertising base. If you’ve got advertisers and you’ve got a niche audience that is trying to find other members of that niche audience, events are huge, and a huge missed opportunity for any publications like that, that aren’t exploiting that.

Louanne Absolutely. Yeah, I know The Atlantic has a gathering. I think it’s in DC where you get to meet all the writers and they have Atlantic Live.

Bo Wall Street Journal does that. There’s a Wall Street Journal Wine Club. Their readers are affluent, can afford it. Brilliant.

Louanne Your newsletters have been telling all publishers the hard truths. And it’d be crazy if these publishers don’t follow you more than maybe they are. So, what’s the single most important thing they need to hear right now?

Bo That’s complicated. I think, going to go back to what we were saying earlier, the balance between humans and AI. At the end of the day, we’re all business people and we need to pay employees, so we need revenue. This requires discipline and constraint. We’re not good at discipline and constraint. We have a tendency to take the easy way, and the easy way is the AI way. But that’s, maybe, not the path to publishing excellence. We need to be very careful with AI. Yes, we have to use it as a tool, not as our soul.

Louanne If I were a professor at a university, I wouldn’t even know what to tell my students right now.

Bo I read last week about a professor who was rightly concerned that his students were using AI to write their papers. He invited the students in, sat them down at a computer and said, show me how to make an em space. And they couldn’t. So, I don’t know what the professors are doing, but there was one smart cookie.

Scott But it’s such a funny thing, to hear everybody talking about em dashes now, whereas I feel like, five years ago, no one talked about em dashes.

Bo Because no one knew what it was.

Scott But for some reason, it’s a ChatGPT thing, to throw em dashes everywhere.

Bo Yes. When I’m reading articles now, and I see more than two em dashes and spaces, basically, I know it’s AI-written.

Scott And yet, I love em dashes and I use them in my writing all the time. I feel like I’m being penalized for something I haven’t done.

Bo We’re headed into a scary world. But at the end of the day, publishers are scrappy. Designers are scrappy. We’ll figure it out. We’ll survive. We just need to sell our words and thought for a profit.

Louanne So that’s the biggest thing: I don’t think AI can change what’s in here. I just don’t. I went to school and they didn’t teach me how to use a computer or how to do things. They taught me how to think. We’ll revisit this in ten years, maybe. I don’t know that it thinks like a human does in that capacity.

Bo It doesn’t yet. That’s the point. That’s the singularity that they’re waiting for right now. AI mimics it — can mimic from millions of sources — but only mimic. But eventually, it will think. Now, that may be five years out, which would be scary as hell. There was a report two weeks ago about a team of scientists, working with AI. They told it to shut down and it rewrote the program so it could not be shut down. That’s Terminator stuff.

Scott By the way, that was a great cartoon you had in the newsletter today or yesterday, with the guy talking to the Terminator robot, saying, “Before you put me out of work, write me a good headline.”

Bo Yeah. And here’s the thing: I have yet to find an AI — I’ve tried them all — that can really create a decent headline. I have not found any.

Louanne They sound cheesy… boring. Nothing compelling. I actually used AI, just out of curiosity. I was trying to come up with a concept for a word, and I can’t share it because the magazine is still in production. So, I asked AI to help me out and it was just mundane, boring … no out-of-the-box thinking. It didn’t give me any advantage to helping me with my search tools at all.

Bo It’s pretty smart. I use it every day. I’ll write my column. I’ll put it into the chat and say, “Give me real-time examples.” And it does. Now, I have to go back and make sure it’s not hallucinating. So, I go back and check that the examples are real. I’ve yet to find an example that wasn’t correct and real, so for me it’s very helpful.

Scott It’s integrated into everything we do. It’s part of our workflow, whether we invited it in or not. So being stubborn about it or churlish about it and saying “I’m never going to use it,” is pointless because you can’t not use it.

Bo It will eventually be your best friend.

Scott It’ll be a skill, like anything else, to tease out the results that you want that you weren’t getting, Louanne. It’s based on knowing how to how to write a good prompt.

Louanne Well, if you had to sum up the secret to keeping magazines alive in one sentence, what would that be?

Scott Quick, let’s put the question to ChatGPT.

Louanne Keeping magazines alive in one sentence.

Bo Creativity. Creativity. More creativity.

LouanneThank you. Where can listeners find your newsletter and keep up with your latest musings?

Bo Bosacks.com. Feel free to sign up. It’s a daily. I cover the entire industry. I cover selling words for profit on any substrate. I’m indifferent to the substrate. Although I am a magazine guy — I love magazines — but to think that that’s the only way a publisher can make money, is ignorant.

Scott And you do a lot of events and conferences. Have you got any events coming up?

Bo Going to the Niche Conference, September 3rd, in Dallas. That’s always a great conference. A lot of great publishers. I used to go to the MPA (Magazine Publishers Association) and it was all stuffed shirts, corporate ties. The niche magazines are entrepreneurs. Every last one of them is an entrepreneur. Scrappy, driven, competent … just a great group to hang out with.

Louanne Thank you so much. If you liked this conversation, share it with somebody who still believes in the power of a good magazine. And thank you for being with us today.

Bo My pleasure. Great fun.

Scott And you’re welcome to come back anytime. We have a lot more to talk about, I’m sure.

Bo I’m not shy. Happy to come back.