Meet The Grub Street Journal Team in Cascais!
Next week, I’ll be attending my first ever FIPP Congress in Cascais. I can’t wait. As well as the work I will be doing with FIPP, I will be there with my Grub Street Journal co-creator Peter Houston.
The Grub Street Journal is a quarterly print magazine for people who love making magazines.
Peter, who is best known for his work with the Media Voices Podcast, says of the venture, “There are already great magazines, newsletters and podcasts about magazine publishing out there. But their primary focus is on business models, and while we care deeply about magazine strategies, it can’t all be about bean-counting and buzzwords.”
The cover feature for the first issue, published in April, asks: ‘What kind of idiots still make magazines?’ Answers come from a range of publishers including longtime B2B media owner Mark Allen, Decanter editor-in-chief Chris Maillard and the founder of positive parenting magazine Sonshine, Kirstie Beaven.
Other questions posed include ‘Are salespeople born with it?’ and ‘Are designers just colouring-in monkeys?’. The launch issue also looks at the life-saving impact of street papers internationally, magazines in the movies, page-flicking ASMR and why DE&I is everyone’s problem.
“With Grub Street, we wanted to make an industry magazine that magazine people would want to read,” says Peter, “a carefully crafted quarterly with well-written original stories, page design that excites, and all on really nice paper.”
Our mission with Grub Street is to be brutally honest about the challenges faced by everyone working in the magazine business, but to remain relentlessly optimistic about the future. Keep an eye out for Peter and myself at Congress next week. Say hello and let us know what you think they should be covering in future issues.
UK magazine makers can buy the Grub Street Journal here. Outside the UK, it can be ordered from Newsstand.co.uk.
