The Grub Street Gang was at The International Magazine Centre’s Magazine Street conference in Edinburgh earlier this month. Editorial director Joanna Cummings was there to put together the conference magazine, ‘Word on the Street’ and here she’s sharing the big themes she identified from the interviews she did for the publication and the presentations and workshops held throughout the day.
Community
Community has become a bit of a hype word, and it would be so easy for it to lose meaning. But the magazine makers at Magazine Street all showed what it’s like to genuinely understand and speak to their audiences, whether that’s Eryk Sawicki and his RPG fans or Lewis Blackwell speaking to creatives all over the world, or Kirstie Beaven and the parents who read Sonshine to make a better world for their children.
Marcia Degia’s mag KOL Social has huge amounts of integrity, which its community appreciates. Doni Aldine’s work on Culturs is helping to redefine the meaning of ‘community’ – how do you unify millions of people all over the world with multiple cultural experiences?
Money
It’s tempting to ignore money – it’s almost like a dirty word. We tend to focus on the ideals that drove us to make magazines in the first place.
But ideals don’t pay your printing costs, and I loved that Rory Brown, David Riddell, Lindsey Stephens and Lulu Skantze all focused on actually bringing in the cash, whether that’s ad sales, fostering subscriptions or being creative with your revenue streams. They reminded us that it’s OK to want to actually make a profit…
Diversity and inclusion
It was really great to see more on DE&I, from Sajeeda Merali’s workshop with students who are interested in the mag industry, to Elaine dela Cruz and Gary Rayneau’s session on facing the anxieties we feel around DEI.
When I interviewed Elaine, some of the points she made made me cry. I like to think I’m supportive of DEI efforts – you’d have to be a dick not to be, wouldn’t you? – but like many people, I’m not “doing much”. She reminded me that when it comes to diversity, inaction is an action.
The love of print magazines absolutely shone through, from drooling over the selection at indie distributor Ra & Olly’s pop-up magazine shop to the talk by Leipa’s Sarah Lesting, which reminded us that we can’t live without paper, and we don’t have to.
We know that readers still value print, whether that’s adults needing headspace to process important themes, or children who want to feel ownership over their very own magazine.
