On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we hear from Kat Craddock Editor-in-Chief, CEO and owner of Saveur magazine, a 30-year old publishing brand that returned to print this year after a 4 year hiatus.
Kat’s announcement that Saveur would be returning to print, is one of the best, most honest explanations I’ve seen of how print publishing has changed. She outlined to readers that the magazine will cost more than it used to, frequency will drop to twice a year and supermarket distribution would be swapped out for sales direct-to-readers through Saveur’s own website.
In this episode Kat discusses her journey from employee to owner, relaunching the print magazine as a premium offering, and prioritising scarcity over scale. She also explains the differences between running Saveur as an independent publication versus as part of a larger company, and which publishers she thinks are doing print properly.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
What is Saveur?
Saveur is a recently independent, 30-year-old legacy food and travel magazine. We publish global culinary content in print, online and via newsletters and social media for a wide audience of home cooks and armchair travellers.
We’re also very popular and beloved by the food and beverage industry as well. And I’m actually a food beverage industry vet – I was a pastry chef and a bread baker for 10 years before I moved over to the media side of things.
Buying the brand
When Bonnier sold us to Recurrent I paid attention to what was going on and wondered, if a brand can buy a publication, or if a company can buy a publication, can a person buy a publication? The answer then was no, at least not me. But I asked a lot of questions, paid a lot of attention to the logistics of how one brand might be peeled out of another parent company.
Then, in 2022 or so, it was starting to become clear that maybe Saveur was a bit of an odd fit for what Recurrent was doing at the time. They invested a lot into redesigning our website, built back up from the contractions of the pandemic, but it still didn’t quite seem to fit into what they were doing over there.
I love Saveur. I grew up reading it. It has a lot to do with why I ended up going to culinary school and working in the food industry. We’d seen a lot of publications shuttering and getting kind of stripped for parts and sold off. I didn’t want to see that happen to our brand. So I approached the leadership over there and asked if they’d be open to me trying to take it over and they said yes.
Back to print
As soon as we stopped printing, we kept hearing from our readers how much they missed it, and how sad it was to see it go. Everybody that was working on the brand was sad to see it go.
I had the sense that something that was so loved could work and we could find enough people to buy the thing, to make the thing. I don’t expect it to be the most profitable part of the business ever, but we can make a great magazine that is the expression of our brand.
It doesn’t need to be crazy high volumes. We can make enough of them that they sell and it pays for itself.
Digital scale
We see our print product as the couture of our brand. It’s for the superfans.
Print is our marketing tool. It establishes our brand, and it’s a place for us to continue doing beautiful, long form storytelling and commission original photography printed on beautiful paper where it can shine and not be interrupted by ads.
But we also need to be able to have scale on some level to pay our bills. Advertising is important and while print advertising is not a major part of our revenue, digital advertising is. We can reach a lot of eyeballs through our newsletters and through our website. People around the world are coming to us for our recipe content all the time.
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