48 min listen
Dan Okrent (Editor & Author: Life, Time, New England Monthly, more)
Dan Okrent (Editor & Author: Life, Time, New England Monthly, more)
ratings:
Length:
53 minutes
Released:
Apr 14, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Back in April, 1966, Time magazine famously asked America the big question: “Is God Dead?” _____ Thirty years later, as Time Inc.’s Corporate Editor at Large, Dan Okrent posed an equally existential question: Is Print Dead? His answer: An unequivocal “yes.” _____ “Finished. Over. Full stop,” he declared in a 1999 lecture at the Columbia School of Journalism. _____ Despite that, it’d be unfair to call Okrent the Grim Reaper. (Just don’t ask what he said about Detroit in the early 2000s). A lifelong realist, Okrent simply viewed digital delivery as the most sustainable path forward for magazines, thanks to the skyrocketing cost of paper, printing, and postage. Publishers, however, ignored Okrent’s prophecy, and continued to feast on their circulation revenues while treating their digital efforts purely as supplemental to print. _____ “How do you say goodbye to that cash? You don't. And then you end up seeing what happened in the slaughter of the next 10, 15 years. And this was before the smartphone!” _____ Okrent made his name as the cofounder of the highly-acclaimed regional, New England Monthly, in 1984—his first job as a magazine editor. He went on to work at Time Inc., Life magazine, and The New York Times, where he served as ombudsman in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. _____ He’s the author of numerous books, including Great Fortune, a 2003 history of Rockefeller Center that was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. _____ In this episode, Okrent talks about his personal board of advisors and the roles they’ve played in his life, about his career highs and low—including a “humiliating” bake-off he was part of when Sports Illustrated was looking for a new editor, about how he introduced the world to fantasy sports, but didn’t make a dime, and how he later pivoted to fame and fortune “off” Broadway.
Released:
Apr 14, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (46)
Arem Duplessis (Designer: Apple, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, more): Where do magazine designers go after all the magazines are gone? That’s a question we’ve often pondered in recent years. Well, if you’ve been paying close attention, you’d probably guess, as it turns out, a lot of them go to Cupertino. And much of this migration can be traced to 2014, when today’s guest, AIGA Medalist and Emmy award-winning creative director Arem Duplessis, left his storied job at The New York Times Magazine to go to work at Apple. You might be asking yourself, "Why would one of America’s most high-profile magazine designers leave a coveted job at an iconic publication—one that brought him global recognition, countless awards, and deep creative satisfaction—for a famously secretive company known, well, for locking away its talent in a vault of non-disclosure agreements?" But the better question might be, "Why wouldn’t he?" Duplessis is arguably one of the most influential creative directors of by Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!)