This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's me. Powered by Digital Media. Today's sponsor is SoFi. SoFi finds great people to invest in, backs them for life. Besides great rate loans, they offer career services and events for every member. Find out more at SOFI.com. Terms and conditions apply at Sofi.com. Today's show is also brought to you by Mac Weldon, which makes a bunch of cool stuff, including the socks I am wearing right now. They also make shirts, underwear, hoodies. I've worn them on stage at Code Media. Troy, can you... What those socks would look like? They were awesome. The floral pattern? Yeah. Amazing. They were awesome. They're super comfortable. They're antimicrobial, which means you can wear them a bunch and they won't stink i'd still wash them if i were you if you want you can go ahead and order a pair and if you don't like them you can keep them for free and when you do order them use the promo code recode you get 20% off that helps me keep making more podcasts just like the one we're having right now troy how'd you like that ad native. It felt native. This is Troy Young. Troy, what is your title at over at Hearst? President of Digital at Hearst Media. What is it? President Hurst Digital Media. You can't even remember. Well, it's this, I mean, I know what my job is, Peter. This is the reason I'm asking. We had a version of this conversation before at the co-media conference, I said you're like one of eight guys who has a digital title over at

Hearst. It's a big company. It's a big company. So describe in plain English what your job is at Hurst, one of the story publishers in America. So I'll kind of, I'll go through a list of things. I think my job is to accelerate change in the company digitally.

I think my job is to build digital revenue and profit. I think my job is to build better

digital products and to essentially accelerate the change of a magazine business into a very, very

different type of business that lives by the moment and lives across a multitude of channels that define our media landscape. All right, we're going to break that down into dumber persons, English. That kind of I can understand. Hurst publishes a bunch of magazines? Hearst has essentially five divisions, one of them's a magazine business. And you work for that group? I work for the magazine division, yes.

So that's Cosmo, Esquire, Popular. Al-Harticazar, Pop Mechanics, Carlin'Driver, Road and Track, Good Housekeeping, Red Book. And so your job is not to take those and create iPad versions of those magazines. I mean, maybe you do some of that, but that's not the core of what you do. group of people to do that.

But my job is to make those magazines relevant in a different media environment. Right. So this is why I wanted to have you on because it's an interesting idea, right? Because normally when we talk to someone who makes magazines, the traditional question, I asked David Remnick this a few weeks ago, Kara asked Joanna Coles, why does one make a magazine? So you don't have to really justify that answer, but we can talk about it. But your job is to say, these guys are... You know what? I think it's an excellent question. Good. And it would actually broaden the question. Let's do it. Let's do it. Because I think the question is, what is magazine media in the future? What is magazine media right now, right? there's two things. There's the actual magazine. Right. And then there's stuff that comes under the brand of the magazine that you might find on a website or other places now, including a tablet version or a Snapchat channel. All the digital stuff is your job. 100%. Okay. So we got to that part. So, okay, you want to go in the magazine media of the future? No, I just think it's an interesting concept because, you know, why did it exist before?

And I was personally interested in this and I investigated it.

Yeah.

And it took me back to around 1730.

There was a publication, I think one of the earliest examples of a magazine called Gentleman's Journal.

And I think it had a lot of the attributes of what magazine media did

ultimately become. And it was as follows. It was a targeted to a very specific type of person

and intellectual, educated man of that era, you know, had a kind of curatorial foundation in that it

made 200 broadsheets that existed in London at the time into something that people could make sense of.

It was really iconic in that they had the same image of St. James Gate on the front page every issue.

And I think there's a lot in that.

And that format, more or less...

Last a couple hundred years.

Up until now. And still exists. I think it's going through, like, the thing is that I am without any bullshit,

incredibly optimistic about the times we are in for magazines.

And I think that why that is worth saying is because I think if you flash back maybe five

...