The Secret, Superhero Lives of Magazines

If you’d have told me 15 years ago that I’d be writing again for a publication, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Actually, I might’ve thought you were crazy.

I grew up in the Gilded Age of Magazines – when glossy, absurdly thick magazines were delivered right to me. My sisters read Elle and Highlights while my mom read Time and my dad read Reader's Digest. I devoured Sports Illustrated, Maxim and The Philadelphia Eagles Weekly religiously, and I still enjoy my walks to the mailbox every Wednesday to fetch my New Yorker.

There’s something tactile, something “real” about a magazine. There’s a feeling to them, a texture … and there’s ownership. Forwarding articles to an inbox or Tweeting them to followers just doesn’t hit like handing a gnarled magazine to a friend with a recommendation they check out an amazing story.

After serving in the Air Force, I used my GI Bill to become a proud Florida Gator, where I fell in love with Hunter S. Thompson, Ring Lardner and Tim O’Brien while studying, what else? Magazine journalism.

I was enamored early on by a magazine’s uncanny ability to inform and inspire in such a unique way. Some magazines were read and immediately tossed in the wastebin, while others were the first form of viral media, passed from coffee tables, to back pockets – while some even ended up on walls, in frames.

In New York City, I loved working with the team of talented experts at Inc. magazine, creating an innovative, industry leader on glossy, colorful and perfectly textured paper stock, every month.

In Los Angeles, I enjoyed being a reporter covering the literal brink of what would become the subprime mortgage fiasco while at the L.A. Business Journal. It was there I learned the value created by a good, old-fashioned business story – printed on paper.

Creating and printing a magazine is expensive – but that’s the thing those MBA-editors never understood – you can’t simply type some words into a chatbot or write a check to gain social capital and respect within an industry. You’ve got to earn that the old-fashioned way.

I feel like I’m back in the trenches, part of a team of absolute badasses, doing what everyone else is too afraid or unmotivated to do. A person charging toward destruction always looks crazy … until you realize they’re a superhero.

That’s exactly what we are here at the Catalyst Communications Network (CCN), we’re superheroes.

Superheroes have a long history with magazines. Johnny Law, aka The Tarantula, was a reporter before he became an original member of the All-Star Squadron from Star-Spangled Comics #1. Dick Grayson, aka Robin the Boy Wonder, wrote for his high school newspaper before he was hanging out with Batman … and I won’t even bring up what Spiderman and Superman did when they weren’t fighting the Green Goblin.

I’m excited to join CCN’s team because, just like me, these folks really love magazines, from our well-connected advertising and marketing folks, to our dynamic production and art departments. I have a strong feeling my love of magazines is going to help me fit right in here – I even named my son Lincoln – no, not after that guy, but after the muckraking journalist extraordinaire Lincoln Steffens, who risked his life writing for McClure’s magazine while covering the rampant corruption of the early 1900s.

But, what I’m most excited about here at CCN is that, suddenly, I’m where I never could’ve imagined myself – back in the trenches, covering the stories that shape our world, with my superhero friends, once again, right next to me.