A New York (Mag) State of Mind

so close but so far away. I miss you. I miss you in the studio. So today we have Pam Wasserstein coming in UM from New York Media. They own brands like New York Magazine, Vulture, The Cut, the Strategists, Intelligence, are lots of other brands. Kind of an amazing story because what I don't think a lot of people know is that they're privately owned company, one of the few

uh still around. You know. Pam has been on board for a few years now as CEO, and they have really pushed and she's really pushed the company to think about and get into very quickly, UH digital publishing. They didn't have what I think a lot of companies have, which is creating brands more organically and in the digital space. Yeah, it stands for a perspective, and there's certainly a sort

of level of premium associated with that. I think that's reflective in the fact that they just created a paywall in front of their content. Um, they're moving into merchandise with some of their brands. They're thinking about, you know, how to take the business offline and really tap into the community and create a closer one to one engagement.

And so even though the brands, the individual brands which you just mentioned earlier are leading UM with their unique sort of perspective and what they're covering, sort of the quality when you step back of what you expect from New York Media backed properties, I think is consistent and it'll be fun to hear um that perspective from Pam. So with that, Pam from New York Media, we'll be

right back. We are back in the studio with Pam Wasserstein, CEO of New York Media, Vulture, The Cut, New York Magazine. What other brands intelligence are the Strategist You guys have so many amazing brands. Welcome Pam, Thank you so much happy to be here. Guys, We're so happy to have you. Laura's calling in from Jersey. Hi. Everyone. So Pam, before we get into the business, we want to talk about

how you came to be CEO of the business. Uh. Well, I definitely did not start my career in media at all. I was a corporate lawyer for several years, and then I worked in private equity on the investment side, totally different world, very very different. And then well, so for me, I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial, something more creative. I ended up working at Tribeca Film which was you know, Tribeca Film Festival, and UM a bunch of other things,

and I ended up leading corporate development there. Stayed for about five years, and then I came over to New York Media, originally as a head of strategy and then UM moving into the CEO position. So what was the kind of for you, the thought process or the kind of passion that drove you into like, yep, this this

feels right, this is right. I always loved media. I was passionate about media, but I was neither a journalist nor an advertising salesperson, and back in the day that was sort of where the opportunities were in the industry, one of those paths typically, right, So I think what changed for me was that the industry changed and then the business changed, and so suddenly there were a much bigger set and frankly for me, a more interesting set

of problems and opportunities to start to dig into. So you know, you suddenly are thinking about and a lot of them tie to the future broadly, like what what is the future um of marketing, what is the future of content consumption and business models? Yeah, for sure, New York was such an incredible brand that was still fresh and vibrant and had a lot of I think opportunity in the digital world and a really loyal, you know, kind of core audience that we could build on. It's

a mainstay. I mean, so I would say, like in New York the Post, in New York Magazine, and you can walk into a New Yorker's home and you'll see both of those publications. It's a mainstay and part of the opportunity for our business, right was moving from that

kind and traditional in print. We're sort of four hundred thousand circulation and New York d m a right, Um, so it does tend to be more regional, and then digitally we're like million monthly uniques on our own and operated sites, and you know, quite national and even international.

What we're able to do when the Internet arrived just kind of take that voice and authority which was always through the fifty year history of New York Magazine sort of ambitious and not really tied or limited to the geography. It was always sort of trying to lead a cultural conversation. But now there's so many new opportunities to achieve that.

One of the things that you all are obviously known for very well is covering things that are central to New York, right but understandably to scale and you know, reach forty five million people with information that obviously goes beyond what's happening within New York City. What was sort of the reason to move into things like the strategists or intelligence or like, what were the insights that said, hey, we need to expand beyond covering or talking about things

just happening specific to New York. So that kind of strategic push toward truly national coverage has been a long time coming. I would spend probably twelve years now since we first started UM one of what we call our our verticals, our our digital brands, which was for scrub Street, which covers restaurants and food, and Vulture came pretty quickly

after that, which covers culture and entertainment. Several legacy print publishers, I think we're more hesitant to publish digitally because you know, concerned about cannibalization of the print model and so forth. We didn't really have that. Yeah. Yeah, for us, it was like, oh, we you know, our audience loves our

cultural coverage. We can do so much more of it, you know, in this arment and like serve our audience better and more with our sensibility, take that lens and kind of mix it with Internet voice and optimized for you know, digital audiences. So it was relatively early, certainly, I think for legacy print publishers that that we were very gung ho about that, and I think on the one the end, there was opportunity to serve our audience

even more. And then on the other hand, the business model encouraged national coverage, so um digitally in an advertising based model, typically local is a tough, tough business, a tough business, right, So, and even when we started grab Street, which was more local and its coverage because it was more service and news around New York restaurant scene. And

then Vulture. What we quickly found was that you know, for sort of the same resources, that you could talk about something with more local interest, you could talk about at the time, gossip Girl or Madman something like that and reach an enormous, really engaged audience and find new audiences. So that was a pretty exciting discovery for us, and we just kept kind of growing, growing and building on that. Yeah, has that impacted the voice of New York magazine? The

need to go national? Do you find yourselves appealing to an audience beyond New York? Do you find that that's changed the way you cover news or politics or style or do you still feel that you have a specific lens at what you're covering things. It's a great question. I think our voice is everything, Like differentiation in the digital world, I think is everything, and so we we try really hard to stay specific and true to that voice. Yes, and you know that that's how we build real loyalty

and connection with our audience. I think just going scale for the sake of scale is not ultimately a winning game. You really need um you do need to achieve scale, but you also need a loyal, engaged audience, and to do that, your brand has to mean something and continue to mean something over time. There does need to be I think of voice and a sensibility, and at least in our case, we're very, very focused on that and kind of think of that as our core asset from

which the business follows. People that are in the kind of cultural no like Saturday Night Live bring you guys up in their skits, and it's this hilarious thing to me, that culture when he's on Saturday Left. But and it's I think happened a couple of times where they like, if you didn't read it in Vulture, then you don't know, like if it's not in Vulture, then it doesn't exist, or something like that. You know, something to that effect.

And I think it's funny because at the end of the day, as a New Yorker, as New Yorkers, we know the SNL is like kind of this, it is the New York Lens, but everyone in the world is watching. It's very very SIMI learned to that, right. Yeah, that's a great analogy actually, And it's funny because I also think there's this halo of that brand, but then there's a core that voice in that perspective that no matter where you are, it's not about geography, it's about mindset

and mentality our audience. We try to understand our audience really well and they it's sort of a psychographic right it is. And the voice is also is not New York the place. It's New York the idea of sort of sophisticated, smart, witty, empathetic and and that's what we're going for and there are a lot of people who are really hungry for that right now in particular, but over years as well. Yeah, So with a further push into digital, you know, obviously you've launched podcast now you

are kind of two days. You've also implemented a paywall in front of your content, So there's a lot of change and use of technology to obviously both build community but now also recognize the premium nature I'm assuming, which is why you have the paywall of the content that you're producing. Can you talk about some of those changes that you're making as we move into twenty nineteen that the marketplace needs to be aware of and sort of

new platforms and why the paywall. So our digital subscription which we launched actually this week, which is exciting and thank you. And on the tech side, we largely built it ourselves. We have a custom content management system that we developed ourselves that we actually license and partner with other publishers on as well, and then so we've built our subscription capabilities into that and it's an exciting next

step for our business. Been a year now that we've been seriously working on implementing the paywall, not not even from the tech perspective, but the messaging and marketing is really goes hand in hand, especially because the subscription goes

across all our brands, which is a great value. And part of the theory is that because there is really a tight DNA around all our brands, and the subject matter and focus is different, you know, that's between Vulture, the Cut, Intelligencer, etcetera, but the sensibility is quite tightly similar.

And so if you are a Vulture reader a Vulture user, you're likely reading about politics somewhere, or you're likely reading about a technology and new ideas somewhere, and you're probably going to love Intelligencer, and if you're not, then kind of tightening to our consumers. The connection among all our brands I think helps bring value to them and introduce them to more opportunities to engage with us and engage with these brands that they will likely really enjoy. New

York Media is a pretty unknown brand. You say New York Meg and people are like, oh, yeah, okay, right of course, right are you thinking about New York Media kind of that brand coming out more or is it stay in the background. Is it just a kind of more of a business brand and you let the kind of individual publications shine through. So that is our corporate name. It was frankly somewhat of an accidental corporate name which

didn't really matter for a while. It doesn't really It almost still it almost still doesn't matter unless it needs to. I think from a like a business perspective, and it depends on where you're taking it, and it depends on how you're thinking about it. Well, we did have some conversation around our digital subscription. What do you call the thing if Vulture, which now has a pretty loyal and independent of New York mag audience, to introduce them to

this subscription, what do you call it? And what we decided is to call it the New York subscription. I love that, but I think it's right. I think it's simple and it has again it's that lens, right. So I think for now New York Media will stay a kind of corporate and not really consumer facing brand. But New York Work is very much a consumer facing brand. So that's the way we treat it. Have you acquired any brands, they've really been you've built, it's been organic. Yeah.

We did acquire Splitsider, which is a comedy focused site and really had a passionate fan base in the comedy community, and we incorporated that into Vulture and kind of made it the heart of the comedy vertical within Vulture. So many of these individual brands have followings, right, They have

these communities. And one of the things that I've enjoyed watching the brand do, particularly New York Mag and The Cut, is the ability to reach the community offline around things like Fashion Week and some of the events that you curry. I think there's this expectation that sort of you get this insider perspective when you're hanging out with New York Mag and The Cut. Can you talk about that sort

of online offline aspect of your business. Look, we are trying to engage our audience and sort of be that trusted, authoritative um friend for our audiences as much as we can be and deep in connections. One way to deepen connection and have a tangible relationship with a publishing brand is through print. It's not the only way, but you know, in an ephemeral world, to have like a thing that you kind of snuggle up with and enjoy is actually

pretty powerful. But another form of tangible connection is around events.

We just did a Vulture Festival in l A a couple of weeks ago, which you know, something like over ten thousand people come to and the programming of Vulture Festival is designed towards the Vulture voice, and it's a little bit like witty and quirky and interesting, and we got stars of the Vulture universe to come and interact with the audience in bringing The Cut to We have a co production with let Media now for the Cuts podcasts The Cut on Tuesdays, which there too, It's like, okay,

how can we deepen our relationship with our audience and be more of a habit for you and be your partner for your life for a lot of aspects of your life, um, help you be informed and help you understand the world, be entertained all of that. Who are some people that you're following in things that you're thinking about to expand not just the brands, but expand their footprint, expand the kind of offline online relationship where you guys

show up our brand. The Strategist is a little bit different from the restaurant brands in the sense it's a product recommendation site. The tagline is shop Smartly, or we have another tagline that's an obsessively curated internet emporium and it's doing really well and has all these like passionate fans who basically come the Strategists to help navigate internet shopping. So there too, we took authority that we had historically

in the case of shopping. New York Magazine from day one in nineteen sixty was publishing something like best Bets and telling you cool new things to buy, what's a deal, what's what's beautiful, what's different? I'm always looking for the what's different, and that's kind of the strategist sweet spot. UM is there's a sense of discovery and it should be something typically that you wouldn't necessarily find on your own.

One of the trends that Alex and I have been monitoring for quite some time has been the idea of personality as platform and the idea that communities galvanized around people's perspectives and opinions. How are you thinking about elevating journalists as talent? I think yes absolutely that. You know, the individual brand in journalism and elsewhere is very much

a trend and a trend that's continuing. Ideally there mutually reinforcing kind of synergistic relationship between the editorial brand and then the individuals where everyone is made better and offers a better product at the end of the day to your audience. Intelligence Or which recently Uh kind of launched in a more ambitious way, has this really cool homepage experience you like slack integration with the editors, right, and so you can actually talk to them and find out

what they're thinking about certain things that are happening. I'm personally just such a fan of that because in my own life, lurking in our editorial slack channels is like, it's just the phenomenal. Yeah, it's so phenomenal, And we wanted to kind of bring a piece of that experience to our audience, and people seem to really love it.

Also in a time where there's some distrust of media, right a thing showing your work a little bit, and I think helping our audiences understand what goes into what we do, proving out kind of why we do have the authority that we have with our audiences is powerful. What are some of the partnerships that you've executed or

are working towards executing that demonstrate where the business is headed. Well, So, one partner that we work with in a lot of front ways is Amazon right this Strategist, which is a truly editorial product, but you know, it's largely an affiliate revenue business, which is of fascinating because we're we're suddenly

in the commerce business. We've done a lot of you know, internal technology work to produce really interesting and useful insights around purchase behavior people are saying, and then actually we're able to take those insights to our grand clients and help you know them build better eCOM experiences or content experiences a around their objectives. What are your thoughts on

the status of print as a media channel. How does that affect the decisions that you're making on the business side, and what would your advice be two buyers in the market, who are you know, deciding whether or not that's a channel they want to think about in their media plans. In I do think it should continue to be an

important piece of a media plan. It's a great brand play, and I think sometimes in the marketing mix, some advertisers have moved too far, too far down the funnel, and you're not going to see the impact of that right away, right. But if you're if you're really like being strategic about your marketing mix, you need the lower funnel and you also need the upper funnel. We agree with that. To agree, Um, you know, it's it's not digital all the time. It's

definitely not print all the time. But it's where those things and how you use those things and the content right obviously matters. And people, you know, print subscribers, they really love those publications, right, and they are an engaged audience. It's a pleasure, it's a treat to I haven't to cuddle up with your favorite magazine. There are a ton of digital brands that you know not to mention away suitcases like DTC brands who are coming out with their

own publication. Yes, I think there's a reason why so many of businesses still go to the New York Times, still go to New York mag to create an impact, right, to make a statement, and to really create sort of a clear, concise communication that's going to get attention in a way that digital I just don't think has the ability to do. So. I am all in on print. Yeah it is. It's a high impact medium. Yeah, I totally agree, Pam. What would you kill? What would you buy?

And then what would you do yourself? What would you what would you kill some of the self reporting fake stuff? What would you buy for both buy and build. I've been thinking a lot about products these days, bringing new exciting experiences to our audiences. How can we developed products like physical physical products? Yeah, The Cut has done these T shirts and collaboration with Amazon. There's a new T shirt every week. We've thought about it as content you

can live in. Basically an Amazon had originally encouraged us to offer a lot of variety and a lot of different skews and you know, different options, colors, etcetera. Like that's typically how the playbook for doing well on Amazon. And we're really just offering this one thing, and it's gone really well to the point where apparently they've been using it as kind of a case study internally, and like, by the way, that's brand right, that's a brand. That's

brand pulling through the funnel right, by the way. Yeah, great, it's a great example. Okay, what would you what would you do yourself? TV? We're interested in TV. Where. Um, that's great explaining I p for TV, Pam. If people want to get ahold of you, how do they find you? I think you can email me. Wow, everybody, get out your pen the pen you bought from the article on the strategies exactly. First go buy a pen from the strategist and then use that pen to write down my

email address. It's Pam dot Wasserstein at and my meg dot com. Pam. This is awesome. Thank you so much for coming by. Big thanks to Pam. Thank you so much for coming by. I think we've been talking about having you on the show at least for a year, so it's been long time coming. Thank you big. Thanks to Dana, our producer. Everyone at Panoply Atlantia will be talking to you in a couple of weeks. Full disclosure Our opinions are our own.