Bad news. Good news.

Staying honest but optimistic

We fired The Grub Street Journal out into the world on April Fool’s Day 2023. When people asked us why we were launching a print magazine, I said ‘Why not?’.

Four issues in I know exactly why not… it costs a bastard fortune!

Every issue of The Grub Street Journal has cost Joanna and I about £2,500 to make. Of course we’ve made money from copy sales, subscriptions and sponsorship, but not enough.

So to get the bad news out of the way: we’re pausing print on The Grub Street Journal for now. There just isn’t enough in the piggybank to print issue 5.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.”

Dr Seuss

The wrong end of the telescope

We’ve learned that launching a print-only publication is the commercial equivalent of looking through the wrong end of a telescope… great creatively, but the audience is way smaller. While we can chuckle ruefully at that reality, we can no longer ignore it.

So, moving swiftly on to the good news… we’re shifting our focus from making a magazine to growing our audience and yes, that means doing digital.

We’re doing digital, not because we think digital is better (it’s mostly not). It’s not even because digital is cheaper (it mostly is). It’s just absolutely the best way to grow our audience to the point that all the other things we want to do become possible.

---

Selling the dream

The very wise Sophie Cross reminded me recently that creators need to spend as much time marketing as they do creating.

So our first job is to sell all of the magazines we have already made. We have four excellent evergreen issues for sale right now and we need to devote time to selling those rather than making a new one.

A key part of our sales effort will be to make the content from every issue available to digital subscribers. This will bring two clear benefits:

• The potential of digital revenue

• A hook to hang our marketing on

We’re also hoping that we’ll be able to engage readers outside the UK, where postal costs have made our beautiful print magazine a very expensive proposition.

---

Inboxes and ears

I’ll be giving this newsletter some much needed TLC - a weekly newsletter that regularly delivers value to the magazine community is the quickest way we can grow our audience.

With a brand new strapline - how to make print magazines work in the digital world - The Magazine Diaries will focus on all the things we’ve learned publishing four issues of Grub Street.

If you haven’t seen the last few issues, here’s the kind of thing you can expect:

• Why people give magazine makers their money

• What we can learn from the vinyl record industry

• Why print won’t just lie down and die

And we’re launching a podcast, mainly because we don’t think there are nearly enough Northern British accents in most of your lives. We’ll bring you behind the scenes chat about the stories in Grub’s first four issues, interview clips and our thoughts on who is doing brilliant things in magazine publishing.

---

Getting the gang together

If Grub Street has been about anything, it’s been about bringing together the magazine-making community.

Magazine Mayday, Macclesfield, May 1st 2024

Back in May, we stunned ourselves by gathering together a group of editors, designers, sales people and printers in a tiny town in the Northwest of England, far away from the magazine industry’s centre of gravity in London.

That unexpected success has inspired us to introduce a series of online get-togethers and begin planning our next in-person event somewhere that’s not London. Glasgow? Cardiff? Newcastle?

---

Those kind of idiots

None of this is about giving up on The Grub Street Journal. It’s about building the commercial foundation that we knew we needed, but didn’t pay enough attention to because it was more fun making a magazine.

In out first issue we asked ‘What kind of idiots still make magazines?’. Idiots without a fully-formed commercial strategy, it would seem.

But we’re all about the learnings, and our print-first start has brought us plenty of those. So, while we’re not stumping up for another print issue right now, The Grub Street experiment is far from over.

As ever, if you have any questions or suggestions, just hit reply on this email or find us on LinkedIn.

The adventure continues…