LAUNCH TIME Executive Editor Amanda MacLaren sat down with founder Dan Shannon to discuss the early days of Durham Magazine as we celebrate our 15th anniversary P HOTO GR AP HY BY JO HN MIC HA EL SIMPSON
urham Magazine launched 15 years ago this month, so we thought now would be a good time to talk about our city and how it has changed, as well as how the media landscape has changed. First, starting a city magazine in 2008 was far from a sure thing, wasn’t it? Those were tough economic times with an unprecedented recession.
Yes and no. Durham was already a great city with a fabled past, but there was something special in the city’s DNA – it’s fair to say that everyone could feel something special was happening; Durham would become the most interesting and exciting city in North Carolina, and that’s exactly what happened. I think of then as the beginning days of Durham’s renaissance. Insofar as the recession, we tightened our belts and kept going. What were some of your snapshot impressions of Durham at that time? What were you seeing in the city?
Durham was and is robust, exciting and fast evolving. In the early aughts, downtown was not yet a destination area, but there
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was an enormous amount of investment and number of influential businesspeople in city and county government, Downtown Durham Inc., Durham Chamber of Commerce, Capitol Broadcasting, a nascent American Underground and Duke University pushing, pushing, pushing the reinvigorating of downtown. It seemed overnight that the “new” Bulls stadium and American Tobacco Campus opened, DPAC opened, the fine-dining restaurant Revolution opened, West Village renovated into an upscale residential downtown from the bones of tobacco mills, but it was all years in the works. Time takes time. Look at our city today – sophisticated, arts friendly and still welcoming and neighborhood-centric. There are new professional theaters opening up, there’s Duke Performances, Carolina Theatre and there’s American Dance Festival’s studios, a world-class center of modern dancing. Who expected to find that in Durham? And give DPAC the credit it is due. It is the largest, most successful venue between D.C. and Atlanta. Not only do we get all the Broadway plays, we also get music and comedy. DPAC has become a wonderful, welcoming center for the arts. And you took a bet to start Durham Magazine.
As a business bet, I wasn’t worried. Getting it right so the magazine serves its market is the hard part. Cool things were happening, young people were flooding into Durham. It’s really an organic thing. DPAC opened. Revolution restaurant opened. West Village was still there, and there was the beginning of renovations of old tobacco-legacy buildings. We had such great restaurants – Parizade, Mad Hatter’s Café & Bakeshop, Magnolia Grill. It was so dynamic. And the risk of shouting out names is you’re going to exclude so many others, but our first editor, Matt Dees, publisher, Carl Johnson, and my business partners, Ellen Shannon and Rory Gillis, got us up and going and cannot go unmentioned. Once you put out your first issue of Durham Magazine, what was the response? Oh, the response was so welcoming to the
idea that Durham was getting its own magazine. When we got our first issue off the press, I called Mayor Bill Bell’s office and said, “I’d like to come by and show our first issue and explain what we’re trying to do.” And he said, “What time are you available tomorrow?” The next day, Mayor Bell was enthusiastic and supportive. And anyone who knows Bill Bell knows that he loves Durham. What did he say when he got the magazine in his hands?
You would have to ask Bill his thoughts, but I got to watch him look over the entire magazine. Always a gentleman and honest, Bill said, “Keep going, this is going to be great for the city.” We discussed the importance for a lifestyle magazine to reflect its readership, the mix of