Les Jones, Molly Campbell and Wilf Jones are the team behind Contemporary Collage Magazine, and they're also father, daughter and son. The magazine started as an online publication, but when readers said they wanted to read in print the team also added a real ink and paper version, and in this episode they speak about how they're running it as a fi…

Rob Orchard is one of the founders and editors of Delayed Gratification magazine, and one of the authors of Misc., a new book they published earlier this month. If you’re a long-time listener to our podcast you might remember that I spoke to Rob three years ago, when the first Delayed Gratification book was published, and as you’ll hear, Misc. has …

Magculture Live is coming up fast (Thursday 7th November, at the Vitsoe shop here in London) so I took the opportunity to sit down with Magculture founder Jeremy Leslie and have a long chat about magazine stuff. We spoke about some of the high-profile magazines, like Vice and The Onion, which have recently returned to print. We spoke about changes …

Nicolas Kemper is publisher of New York Review of Architecture, the big, two-colour, newsprint magazine that has become renowned for its long, critical, entertaining essays about architecture and the city. He gave the first talk of the weekend at this year’s Indiecon and I loved his enthusiasm for all parts of publishing – not just the fun stuff li…

Viêt and Jeremy Raider-Hoàng are the founders, editors and creative directors of No One, a new magazine that explores the queer nightlife of a different city each issue. It feels natural to marry the subjects of nightlife and queer culture, and you can tell there are big, serious ideas behind their impulse to document the hedonistic fun they see ar…

For this first episode of the new season I’ve got a conversation with Kat, the woman who makes Moan, a magazine of sensuality and eroticism that prioritises the female gaze. It has a lot of explicit imagery, but it’s definitely not pornographic, and in fact there’s something about the risograph print and production that makes it feel like more of a…

Ellie Jackson is the editor-in-chief and creative director of The Movement Movement, the women’s sports magazine that is committed to broadening our understanding of what sports coverage should look like. Issue one came out a few weeks ago, but that was preceded by issue zero, which came out in 2022, and in this episode she speaks about the delay b…

Steph Chung is managing partner at Racquet, the New York-based magazine that takes a fresh, anti-elitist look at the world of tennis. There have been some big changes since the last issue, with editor David Shaftel and art director Larry Buchanan both leaving the magazine, and a more commercial emphasis across the pages, with a big Gucci photo shoo…

Zuzana Kvetková is executive editor of Backstage Talks, the magazine that grew out of Bratislava’s By Design Conference. Their new issue will be landing in shops very soon, and as she explains in this podcast, it marks something of a watershed. Because after 10 years they’ve decided that it’s time to stop running the conference, which in turn promp…

Yuto Miyamoto is editor of Troublemakers, a new Tokyo-based interview magazine that fills its pages with ordinary people living variously extraordinary lives. It’s a very personal magazine – he makes it with his wife, Manami Inoue, who is the art director, and interviewees are photographed at home, with lots of space dedicated to exploring their th…

Tom Rowley runs the Backstory bookshop in Balham in South London. He was previously a journalist for The Telegraph and The Economist, which he describes as his dream job, but when the pandemic knocked everything sideways he decided it was time to reassess and follow his other dream of running a bookshop. As he puts it, though, he felt the pull of i…

Lucy Roeber is editor and publisher of the Erotic Review, a magazine that became particularly well known as a bimonthly title in the late 90s and early 2000s. It had since switched to publishing online and it was going to close altogether, and in this episode she tells how she set out to bring it back as a fully-fledged print magazine. In her hands…

Conor Foran is editor of Dysfluent, a magazine based on his experience of stammering, which aims to become a publication of stammering pride. Using a custom typeface with letters that get stretched out, or chopped up and repeated, Dysfluent aims to reflect the sound of a stammer, representing individuals' voices as closely as possible.…

For the entire time I've worked in magazines, I've been told that print is dead. But what does that actually mean? And why has the idea endured for so long? I took a deep dive into the death of print to see if I could figure out what's going on, and what that means for the future of magazines and digital media.…

Olivia Crandall and Elena Foraker are editors of Not Here to Make Friends, a lovely, thoughtful, almost scholarly journal about reality TV. In this episode, they speak about wanting to engage completely with their subject matter, embracing both the good and the bad, and using this much maligned television genre as a way of understanding what’s goin…

Erin Rimmer and Simon Doherty are two of the founders of Roughcast, a brilliantly abrasive, punk-inspired magazine that’s here to shake up what it calls the “dull pastiche” of British media. It’s a passion project run by a group of friends, but it also has some big ideas about the way media works, particularly relating to freelancers, and the urgen…

Natassa Pappa is editor-in-chief and creative director of Desired Landscapes, the pocket-sized magazine that brings a fresh and philosophical perspective to travel writing. Natassa is based in Athens, but she was over in London recently for a talk at the Magculture shop, so we met up the following day and went for a walk on Hampstead Heath to talk …

Lina Fadel is one of the poetry editors at The Other Side of Hope, a magazine that centres around journeys in refugee and immigrant literature. It’s partly a literary magazine and partly a community project, because as she explains in this episode, it’s all about bringing people together and providing a platform for voices that wouldn’t otherwise b…

"I was just hanging out with my algorithm and it got a little claustrophobic..." Daniela Rodriguez is editor-in-chief, designer and illustrator of Superstars Only, a brilliantly personal magazine that she makes with her boyfriend Adrian Tiu and a few close friends in New York. As you’ll hear, Daniela is incredibly self-effacing and the magazine its…

Recorded live at the Shifting Landscapes event in London on Saturday 2nd December, this conversation features Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, executive editor of Emergence, and Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters, founders of Studio Airport and designers of Emergence. Emmanuel has been on the Stack podcast before speaking about making Emergence magazine at the …

We don't have many business to business magazines on the Stack podcast, but I'm making an exception for the Grub Street Journal because it's a magazine about magazines, and while it's ostensibly a trade magazine for the print publishing industry, it takes great joy in playing around with the sort of editorial tone that other B2B publishers would ne…

Zweikommasieben is the Swiss magazine that's obsessed with the contemporary musical moment. We delivered their 27th issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and then the following month we invited everyone to join us for a conversation that digs into the details behind the making of the magazine. It was great to catch up with them, and to he…

Recorded live on Tuesday 10th October at The Scrandit in Bristol, this podcast episode features four independent publishers speaking about the challenges and opportunities of combining left-wing politics and print. The conversation was moderated by Eliz Mizon, strategy lead for The Bristol Cable, and it featured Max Jeffrey, art director of Stir to…

I dropped into the Magculture shop in Clerkenwell to speak with founder Jeremy Leslie ahead of next month's Magculture Live event. This will be their 10th year of the London-based conference (they also run it in New York) and it was really interesting to hear his thoughts on the last decade of running the event, as well as the general state of maga…

Osman Bari is founder, editor and designer of Chutney, a magazine that provides a platform for underrepresented voices to tell stories about cultural identity, colonialism and migration. We met up to speak about his ideas behind the magazine, the influence of food on the title, and his own changing status of settler and immigrant, and how being in …

Recorded in August 2023 for our Stack Magazine Club, this conversation with editors Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush explores Cake Zine, the magazine we delivered to our subscribers in July 2023. Telling the story of the literary food magazine so far, they explain how they started in the pandemic with their Sexy Cake issue, then released Wicked Cake …

The first issue of Te was published in 2021 and it caught my eye because it seemed to be doing something clever with food publishing: Its stories are about the different ways that ingredients can travel around the world, or the different values and associations that might be attributed to particular dishes, and so the whole thing seemed to be using…

Recorded at Indiecon in Hamburg, editors Vasudhaa Narayanan and Tarini Sethi speak about The Irregular Times, their playful and provocative newspaper dedicated to platforming the creative work and everyday activities of people of colour across India and beyond.De către Stack Magazines

Recorded live at Indiecon 2023, hear from the team at Solomiya, the extraordinary magazine made by young people in Ukraine who are documenting and coming to terms with what it means to be at war. I’m a huge fan of what the team are doing with this magazine – I note in my introduction that I’ve never seen a magazine like this being made by people wh…

Recorded live at Issues in San Francisco on Saturday 5th November, hear Anja Charbonneau (Broccoli), Victor Gonzalez (Gross) and Michael Ray (Zoetrope) discussing their work publishing independent magazines on the West Coast of the USA.De către Stack Magazines

Recorded at our Independent Magazine Fair on Saturday 14th May, this episode of the Stack podcast focuses on the independent magazine makers that are trying to change the world for the better. Evar Hussayni, senior editor of Azeema; Ellie Jackson, editor of The Movement Movement; and Nina Carter, co-creative director of It's Freezing in LA! all spe…

Recorded live at our Independent Magazine Fair on Saturday 14th May 2022, this panel discussion features advice from the unconventional magazine makers behind Real Review, A Profound Waste of Time and Paperboy.De către Stack Magazines

Recorded at our Independent Magazine Fair, this panel discussion features expert advice from the people behind Delayed Gratification, Season Zine, and The Modernist.De către Stack Magazines

Martha Dillon is editor of It’s Freezing in LA!, the magazine about climate change that recently published its eighth issue, themed around ‘Borders’. I spoke to her a couple of weeks after COP26 came to an end and I was interested to hear her thoughts on the conference, as well as the wider climate change conversation and how greater interest in th…

"We miss having a tactile experience..." Platon Poulas is one of the people behind Dead Slow, a strange new magazine concept that we have in the Stack shop at the moment. He and his co-founder Anunaya Rajhans describe themselves as producers rather than editors, and that reflects the unusual format of the magazine, which is presented as a vinyl rec…

"The world suddenly feels bigger again..." Nelson Ng is founder, editor and art director of Lost, a travel magazine based in Shanghai and published in both English and Mandarin. Of course the pandemic has made international travel much more problematic than it used to be, and that will inevitably have consequences for anyone making a travel magazin…

"We've always loved analogue. We produce records, we make books, we do physical shows – it's part of who we are..." Sean Bidder is editor of Fact, the music and visual art magazine that was relaunched last year as a big, glossy, biannual publication. I spoke to Sean and Zak Kyes, founder of Zak Group and art director of the relaunch, to find out wh…

"A book is different to a magazine – you've got more space. You can take more time..." Rob Orchard is one of the founders and editors of Delayed Gratification magazine, and now one of the authors of An Answer for Everything, their hardback book published by Bloomsbury. Infographics have always been a big part of what Delayed Gratification does, and…

"A lot more love and care goes into it because it's in print..." Tom Preece is one of the founding editors of Yuck, the Manchester-based music magazine that released its fifth issue this summer. Publishing a music magazine is tough when nobody is allowed to go out and listen to live music, but now life is opening up more here in the UK and I was ex…

"I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm proud of my identity as disabled..." Olivia Spring is founder and editor of Sick, the magazine made by chronically ill and disabled people. In this conversation Olivia speaks about her own illness, why she decided to start the magazine in the first place, and how she’s using it as a way to challenge some…

"I just really needed a sense of freedom..." Zena Alkayat is editor and publisher of Bloom, the gardening magazine she started when she moved into a new flat and suddenly became somebody who had a garden for the first time. Unable to find gardening books or magazines aimed at her, she decided to go ahead and publish one herself. In this conversatio…

"Running a Kickstarter is a very overwhelming thing..." Caspian Whistler is creative director and editor-in-chief of A Profound Waste of Time, the beautiful illustrated magazine that’s inspired by video games. He’s one of the independent publishers who has successfully funded his magazine through Kickstarter, and he has a campaign live at the momen…

"We can talk about football as our very own way to experience the world..." Matteo Cossu is editor and co-founder of Uno-Due, the annual magazine about football and culture that he started with some footballing friends in 2014. The first two issues of the magazine were published in Italian but for the third issue they switched to English and produc…

"We wanted people to lose themselves in words..." Marius Sosnowski is deputy editor of Dispatches, a large-format magazine of ideas published out of Berkeley in California, and inspired by that city’s intellectual and counter-cultural heritage. As he explains in this conversation, Dispatches was always intended as a big publication, and they make t…

"The whole magazine itself becomes a piece of art..." Aaron Beebe is the founder and art director of Plastikcomb, a magazine that champions collage, comics, fine art and more, all of it unified by a low brow pop aesthetic. There’s something raw and rough and experimental about Plastikcomb – its pages break out of the orderly grids of contemporary m…

"I don't think we've made the perfect Bum yet..." Lee Marable and Roosa Melentjeff are the editors and designers of Bum, a lovely risograph printed magazine based in Helsinki and dedicated to exploring stories around arts, architecture and design. As they explain in this conversation, the magazine really started because they wanted to experiment wi…

"We put the artist as a human before the work..." Audrey Rose Smith and Vicente Muñoz are the editor and creative director of Balcony, the new magazine that explores art in the everyday. Both Audrey and Vicente work in New York in jobs connected with the art world, and Balcony is the result of their frustration with the way art is commonly discusse…

"I hope it makes people feel good..." Harriet Fitch Little is editor of Kinfolk magazine and editor-in-chief of Kindling, the new title published by Kinfolk to explore the subject of bringing up children. In this conversation she explains how the Kinfolk team ended up making a magazine about raising kids, how the pandemic played its part, and why i…

"American football is a reflection of America – good and bad..." Shawn Ghassemitari is editor-in-chief and creative director of Spiral, the magazine that takes a creative look at American football. I was really interested to hear about his reasons for making the magazine – his parents immigrated to the US from Iran in 1978 and he speaks about the s…

"Things are going to be weird for the rest of our lives..." Peter McCain is the creative director and editor-in-chief of Batshit Times, the New York-based satire and arts magazine that released its first issue in April last year. That first issue was themed ‘Quarantine’, and when I read it I assumed the whole project was conceived in response to th…