TIME Travel
WHAT ABOUT BOB? As the iconic founder of Spin magazine and one of the modern publishing world’s most original voices, Bob Guccione Jr. has a few things to say about how the most ailing media companies can reinvent themselves. Listen up!
Welcome back. We hear you're launching a new travel site, Wonderlust. It’s a travel site. “Wanderlust” is cliché—I was far more interested in the sense of wonder one has when one travels. Right now, the bar is kind of low— most travel publications are very generic, with a lot of rewritten press releases and fluff. As far as I’m concerned, travel is very holistic—it’s a combination of a wonderful place to stay, a sense of momentarily borrowed luxury, and a lifestyle that’s probably unreal to consider living all the time. There’s also the exposure to the exotic and the alien—the minute you step outside, you’re in a world that you’re unfamiliar with, and you can go really anywhere. What kind of tone will the site adopt? I don’t want it to be literary—I’m very strident in that, because I think literary is sometimes too much work. Everything should be wonderfully written, impressionistic; I want the sense of place in our articles. I don’t want it to be so grand that you have to prepare yourself to read it. I also want something that appeals to people on a very visual level. Throughout my career I’ve given people a sense of the subject, whether it was science or music and youth culture. As for your team? My girlfriend, Liza Lentini, is my executive editor, and my ex-wife, Camilla Paul, is my managing editor. Liza is an award-winning playwright and Camilla is a wonderful former editorial person. We were married 30 years ago, and stayed great friends ever since. My writers and my editors are not travel people, although we are going to bring in a couple of travel experts. When I started Spin, I had almost nobody with an FA S H I O N W E E K D A I L Y. C O M
industrial knowledge of music—it’s more about a good story and good craftsmanship. How much content do you plan to be publishing? A couple of hundred pieces a month. I would rather put up less that’s good than more that’s diluted and generic. I’m not interested in this mass LIVING LEGEND conveyor belt of content. (Clockwise from top left) I stress to my editors and Guccione Jr. at a screenwriters never even think of ing of Filthy Gorgeous: the word “content.” If you The Bob Guccione Story in 2013; in his office in think in terms of editorial, 1995; with Jane Homlish you remember the magic and Filthy Gorgeous director Barry Avrich at of the words. TIFF in 2013; with the What do you think first cover of Spin in 1985 of the industry’s frantic pace of content production? It’s suicidal. Look at the results: Fantastically large companies like Buzzfeed have never made a dollar. The notion that people are stupid and are merely just standing there with their mouths open, ready to consume whatever you put in it, is ridiculous. Digital media has followed the exact same arc as the magazine business, and before that, the newspaper business. It’s just done it in a matter of years whereas the magazine business had that arc for a matter of decades. The magazine business was fresh in the
beginning, and everything sold, then it got very voluminous. Magazines ran out of ideas, and were too congested on the newsstands, and so they started artificially inflating their circulations. Of course, it killed them because they weren’t getting any money for their product—and eventually the flaws and its inadequacies showed. The same thing has happened with the internet. In the beginning everything was exciting, everything was consumed, linked, shared, and marveled at; now we’ve started to pick and choose. What will happen? We are building a world we can’t live in. I believe that it will implode and it will rain down on us. The future has to be two things: niche and quality. Thirdly, it needs a strong business model, whereas publications and sites don’t prostitute themselves for any advertiser that wants to spend a dollar. It has to have a solid confident sense of itself. Will some of the big media brands go away? Without a doubt. It’s not the same advantage as it once was to be a very well recognized brand. Michael Wolff said to me, “You can disrupt Condé Nast from day one.” My logical assumption is that it has to come down to who is putting out the most interesting product. You can still compete with a publication like Vogue, and you can beat it. Some people are very vulnerable, because they’ve been cruising on momentum for a long time. That momentum is now useless, because the landscape of media is so changed. In the print world, it’s just crap. But I have a great respect for everyone in the business, because I know how tough it is. ß
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BY ASHLEY BAKER