Magazines Must Move Faster in the Age of Apps, Says Hearst’s Troy Young
“There’s always a shit-ton of work to do to build a new media brand.”
Amelia Krales for Re/code
For hundreds of years, curated periodical magazines thrived and survived — the “cockroaches of the media world,” as Hearst’s Troy Young once heard them described. Now, Young’s mission is to build a better cockroach.
Speaking on the latest episode of Re/code Media with Peter Kafka, Young explained how he developed a unified digital strategy for the 19 diverse properties under Hearst’s magazine division, where he is the president of digital operations. He said one of the challenges was figuring out how to preserve the spirit of iconic brands like Cosmopolitan while losing unnecessary baggage.
“The muscle that had been developed for decades around a top-down, quality-driven, curatorial process, with extreme focus and detail in the edit … that whole process and way of thinking about content was standing in the way of progress,” Young said. “So we changed it.”
He also praised Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s newsletter, LennyLetter, as an example of celebrity-brand media done right. And he explained how Hearst is using Snapchat Discover through its Sweet and Cosmopolitan channels, the latter of which attracts 2.5 million readers per day, who spend an average of eight minutes per visit.
“There’s always a shit-ton of work to do to build a new media brand,” Young said.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
