A conversation with Afar editor Julia Cosgrove

Much of travel media comes with a kind of sheen to it. A gloss. Whether you are traveling Italy with a hungry celebrity or cruising Alaska in the pages of a magazine, the photos are big and Photoshopped, the text kind of breathless. And while Afar has plenty of both, it just feels a bit different. It is not a magazine that puts a focus on consumption but on feeling. On the experience of travel.

Julia Cosgrove has been atop Afar’s masthead from the beginning. She comes from a magazine and journalism family. And despite their warnings about the industry, she joined the family business anyway because what kid listens to their parents? When the founders of Afar Media plucked her out of ReadyMade magazine and told her that no other travel magazine felt experiential to them, she understood and joined the team.

Travel media has changed a lot over the years. One has to ask what moves a media consumer more: a magazine article about a beach in Croatia or the TikToks of numerous influencers on that same beach, extolling its virtues, reaching their millions of fans?

Afar doesn’t care. Because it believes in its mission and marches on, now in its 15th year, inviting its readers to experience the world, by diving in.

Arjun Basu: Tell us a bit about your story and how you arrived at Afar.

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah. I grew up in a household of magazine makers. And journalists, my father was a newspaper man turned magazine editor in New York and Los Angeles. And my mom was a wire service reporter turned magazine editor in New York and San Francisco. So magazines and media were ever-present in my household growing up.

My parents begged me to go to law school after graduating from college. I did not heed their recommendation and instead followed in their footsteps and here I am today, about 22 years into magazine media.

Arjun Basu: What magazines did they edit?

Julia Cosgrove: My dad was a reporter and city desk editor at the New York Daily News. My mom was a reporter at United Press International or UPI, which I think no longer exists, but was similar to the AP and when we moved out to California in the late eighties, my mom was a senior editor at Parenting magazine before Time Inc. bought it. And my dad was an editor at TV Guide.

Arjun Basu: I think it died.

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah.

Arjun Basu: There was a while where everyone wanted to replicate TV Guide because, even though the blocks of things were clunky, everyone understood that language. It was a visual language that everyone understood and everyone tried to copy it.

Julia Cosgrove: And it was a cash cow.

Arjun Basu: Also what people want to copy that part, the cash cow part of it.

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah. So I had this amazing exposure to the magazine business. And when I was in high school and thinking about where I wanted to go to college, there was only one possibility and that was New York and during college in New York, I interned at MTV Networks, dating myself a little here, and BusinessWeek. So I was an ASME intern during the summer of 2001, and landed at BusinessWeek when McGraw Hill still owned it, Steve Shepard was the editor-in-chief, and it was just incredible, it was journalism school. And then the first few years out of college for me, working at Time Out New York, that was my J school.

Arjun Basu: And now tell us about Afar, for people who don’t know it.

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah, so Afar was founded 15 years ago last month. We’re celebrating our 15th anniversary, and it was started by two guys who didn’t come from travel, they didn’t come from media. One was a successful entrepreneur. The other they’d met actually in the other’s Teach for America classroom, Joe Diaz and Greg Sullivan.

And they started doing some trips together. They went all over India and there may have been some beers involved. They felt like there was no travel media company at the time that was really speaking to what they termed “experiential travel.” And what that meant to them was traveling to really get beneath the surface of a place, connect with locals, and find the essence of it.

And back in 2007, 2008, the other legacy titles, travel titles, were very focused on the escapist dream of travel. So lots of beautiful models on horseback, trouncing across a beach, and that just didn’t feel real to them. And they were living in San Francisco at the time, and I had just left my role as managing editor of ReadyMade Magazine, which had recently been acquired by the Meredith Corporation, and I knew it was going to be undergoing some changes.

I thought I was done with magazines. I was going to go get a job at IDEO and do something really different, or maybe, you know, be attached to some sort of tech startup that was coming online in 2007. But I met Joe and Greg and I just said, how could a person say no to trying to start a really different kind of travel magazine based in San Francisco in 2008?

And so I actually helped our initial editor in chief, Susan West, write the blueprint for the magazine and have been here ever since.

Arjun Basu: Your tagline is “travelers who care.”

Julia Cosgrove: That’s right.

Arjun Basu: Much of travel media feels like it’s about consumption. It’s a catalog of things, places, experiences, restaurants, museums, you name it, that you can check off, consume—

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah.

Arjun Basu: —it’s like you have a list. And it leads to a sameness. And I think that’s what you were getting at in terms of the founding of the magazine. And it feels to me like it makes travel joyless. It just feels like it’s missing the point in many ways.

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah, and in the 15 years that we’ve been doing this, when we initially started we said, we don’t want typical travel writing in the magazine. We really wanted to stretch beyond the roster of writers—pretty much who everybody was using at the time—and find writers who were interested in culture, in food, in art, in design, in philosophy, who could go deeper into a place and really tell the story of a place through the people who live there.

And you’re right. I think so much of travel, unfortunately, especially these days is very focused on the transaction of travel. I overheard some women yesterday in a suburb out here in California talking about, “I’m going to do southern Spain next month with my husband.” What does that mean?

Believe me. I’ve probably said it, I’ve probably uttered those words, you’re going to go to southern Spain and hopefully you’re going to go and try to have these experiences that open your mind. Transform you maybe a little bit. Maybe that’s a little too lofty, but give you a broader sense of how people in southern Spain live and the similarities and differences between how they live and how you live. And I don’t feel like—certainly not when we launched—any of the other titles were really doing that. They’re doing more of it now for sure. Airbnb launched around the same time we did, and the “live like a local” I think was used in too many advertising campaigns and in the years between then and now. But it is intrinsic to what we try to do with Afar and the “travelers who care” tagline was developed coming out of Covid. The Covid years were rough for a small independent travel media company, but we made it through.

And I think during that time, we had the opportunity to really reflect on what we were about and what we wanted to be about and double down on this belief that travel really can be a force for good in the world. And when you embark on a trip with that in mind, that the travel experiences you’re looking for really help to enrich the traveler personally, support the communities that you’re visiting, and hopefully make a light impact on the surrounding environment.

Arjun Basu: Speaking of the environment. How do you—because a lot of the rest of the magazine looks the same: It’s glossy, the photos are beautiful—it’d be really hard to create a travel magazine with bad photos, but some manage. It’s a beautiful magazine. But then, more and more travelers are aware of … I don’t like using the word footprint because it’s misleading, because I think we should travel. An environment means different things. It’s not just the fact that you’re flying or going on a ship, it’s what you do on the other end too. So how do you differentiate yourselves on that level?

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah, we’ve published a lot of stories around the environmental impact of travel. We’ve written a lot about companies, travel companies that are focused on ESG goals. I think, again, coming out of this great pause in travel during Covid, I recoiled at the idea of revenge travel. That was a big kind of catchphrase in the last couple of summers, certainly. We know that there are places in the world during certain times in the calendar year that you really shouldn’t go.

There are too many other people there at the same time. You want to go to Venice in July, you’re going to be surrounded by a bunch of other Americans being disgorged off cruise ships and shuttled in and they’re not even really spending money with the small businesses and mom and pop and family owned shops that they should be.

They’re not staying overnight at the hotels. They’re just in and out. And it’s still this sort of yep, Venice? Check. Right? It’s that bucket list mentality. And we try to go the other way and not shame anybody. Not say, “Listen, you’ve never been to Venice. It’s too late. Don’t go to Venice.” Instead, arm readers with the service that they need about when they should go, how they should do it, and why.

And I think that answering that sort of “why” question is something that sets us apart. I hope it’s something that sets us apart.

“We don’t want typical travel writing in the magazine. We really wanted writers who were interested in culture, in food, in art, in design, in philosophy, who could really tell the story of a place through the people who live there.”

Arjun Basu: And then there’s the whole issue, I think, between travel and food, the internet has changed everything. And the whole rise of the influencer economy, especially on Instagram, has changed. How has it changed how you approach a topic, if it’s changed at all? Obviously all media has been disrupted. And print media has been changed forever completely, but I see food and travel as especially challenged. I don’t know if that’s the right word and maybe I’m just more attuned to it because those were the two areas I worked in back in my editing. Am I wrong?

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think certainly food—and I was just Slacking with our editorial team this morning about Gourmet. And, hell, I still own so many copies of Gourmet from the Ruth [Reichl] era. You had the end of Gourmet, you had Adam Rapoport’s Bon Appetit, and that really did hit on a moment when younger people especially were just becoming so, I think, obsessed with food and restaurants and restaurant culture and chefs and we did a little bit of that.

But I would say one thing about Afar is we haven’t really followed the trends as much as some other titles. And in some ways I think that’s helped us. It’s helped set us apart. Because I’m based in California, I’m away from a lot of the New York media that I feel like sometimes can just eat itself.

Before the pandemic, we were headquartered in San Francisco, and that was a very different place to be making a print magazine and doing digital media than Manhattan, I think. And, yes, people use Google for restaurant recommendations and Resy and all of these other sort of ways of getting information, but I still think there’s a lot of value that food titles, travel titles, can bring to a reader about context, expertise, leaning maybe more into sort of the inspiration side of things and then helping people move from “I’m dreaming about going to Tahiti this winter” and then leading them every step of the way knowing that we’re not doing the booking right now, but travel companies need us to help get travelers to that point where they are saying ’I’m buying this trip.’

And without that, there’s some stat that on an average trip that someone’s planning, they’re looking at 47 different sites. That’s crazy.

Arjun Basu: That is crazy. And that just means they haven’t found someone that they trust yet. And that actually gets me into my next—I read this fascinating piece recently in Thrillist and it was about people sharing their Google Docs with recommendations. And almost like very personalized city guides for the most part. And to me, this was about a few things. One, it was the end of the travel guidebook. That, I just remember how big that section used to be in a bookstore and it’s really not there anymore. So a dissatisfaction with travel guides that existed, whether it’s in web or print. The rise of the expert and the influencer. But really just as a trusted source, because people don’t want to go through 47 websites. Some do, and research, you can’t help them. But the absolute disruption of travel again, like not just in media, but how people travel, where they stay, the rise of experiences and personalized tours. Are travelers different now, or are there just more types of travelers?

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah, that’s a good question. I do think travelers are different now. If we look at all of the research, Afar when we started, we certainly didn’t go out deliberately seeking affluent travelers, luxury travelers, that sort of, they self-selected, they found us, but we really wanted to do what I call now conscientious travel as opposed to conspicuous travel.

And I guess that gets a little bit of that revenge travel thing. There are lots of people, mass travelers who do just want to get on a tour bus and say “I saw the Eiffel Tower, I saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I’ve been there, done that.” But there are also a lot of affluent millennials for whom values matter. If they’re going to go to a place, if they’re going to book a hotel, they want to know that the values of that company are good, that they care about the planet, and that they’re doing things to mitigate the climate crisis.

There’s also this kind of huge transfer of wealth that’s happening from Boomers to Millennials that’s happening over the next five or six years. And this subset, travel for better and for worse, travel is a right, not a privilege in certain respects. And so travel is how they live their life. They’re always planning their next trip.

Our average reader age now is 39. Average household income is over $400 grand. And they’re taking 17 trips a year. Now, some of those are weekend getaways, but they’re always on the go and they want to know about the next place that they should go. Because so much of travel is the joy of being there and being in the moment. It’s also the anticipation of the trip. And so to always be planning your next trip somewhere, That brings people a lot of joy, I think.

Arjun Basu: Do you work with tourism boards at all?

Julia Cosgrove: We work with tourism boards.

Arjun Basu: Do you take ‘fam trips‘?

Julia Cosgrove: I, myself, don’t do a lot of fam trips, no.

Arjun Basu: The higher you are on the masthead, actually, the less trips you take. This is the first rule of a travel magazine. But I just find that the tourism boards and the promotional agencies also are really aggressive now, much more aggressive than they used to be in attracting media. And more and more, it does feel like the shortcut is to bypass media and go straight for the influencer types. Because it’s easy to monitor or to measure their hits on Instagram and stuff. And there’s a tricky balancing act that has existed from the beginning with travel magazines in terms of editorial freedom. And there’s a lot of “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” in travel media, which is part of the problem, I think, which is also one of the reasons why those personalized things on Thrillist, for example, on Google Docs, I should say are rising in value and in popularity, and you get these really niche travel magazines now that are even smaller than yours.

How does Afar again deal with that? That reality too, like in terms of, I don’t want to say the word ‘authenticity’ but how do you get beyond that? Because you look at your magazine, there are a lot of pages of sponsored sort of storytelling that looks different from the rest of the editorial well, but it’s there, and that’s a travel bread and butter as well.

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah. Domestic DMOs—destination marketing organizations—they’re one of our biggest advertisers. If you look at our advertising mix and again, especially coming out of Covid. I was actually just with some folks from Visit California and some smaller California DMOs. I think of my role as consultative to them. Like we know what Afar travelers are interested in. We know the demographics and psychographics of our readers. And we know that they are the people who these destinations most want to come to their places because they stay longer, they spend the most.

In terms of editorial integrity, we follow the ASME guidelines, I’m a stickler for that. And anything that we are being paid for is marked. It’s actually done by our marketing team. That’s rare, actually, in travel media these days.

But you’re right. It’s definitely more of a gray zone than it was 20 years ago, there’s no doubt. But I think it’s a dance that you do. And I learned a lot from the Visit California folks about where they’re seeing travelers coming from and for how long.

And so it is a partnership in the sense of, we learn from them, they learn from us, I think. And as far as the influencers go, obviously it’s a huge economy. I think I’ve probably been saying the death of the influencer will come soon for the last decade or so. So it still seems to be going strong.

But for me, I’ve personally gone off of most of the platforms with the exception of LinkedIn. For me, what was great about it when I was on it and I’m mostly talking about Instagram, was the sort of discovery element. So finding new writers, new photographers, who live in the places that we want to do stories about.

And I think some influencers who are able to build not only an audience for themselves, but who actually do have some expertise and some decent chops, they do great storytelling. And on Afar’s channels we’re trying to figure out what the best way is to be working with more of them and figuring that out.

What’s going to feel real to our audience? PR people I’ve spoken to have pretty mixed feelings about working with them, like anything. Some of them are great, others are just in it for the freebies and the press trips. But that was being said of travel writers when Afar launched, 15 years ago. So it’s just sort of part of the mix these days.

“We haven’t really followed the trends as much as some other titles. And it’s helped set us apart. Because I’m based in California, I’m away from a lot of the New York media that I feel like sometimes can just eat itself.”

Arjun Basu: Yeah. What a mix. Where does it go from here in terms of travel? Because in the research for the show, there’s just so many interesting and new—I don’t want to call them niche, because travel is not a niche activity, but they are smaller, their focus is just slightly different. And they’re still happening. So things are created because people want to do them, but because they haven’t found what they need also, and they just figure I’m not alone in this. It’s shrinking and growing at the same time in a weird way.

Julia Cosgrove: I was just on an all-staff call earlier this morning and our fall “Epic Trips” print issue. It’s our highest revenue issue since before Covid. So there’s still not only an interest. from advertisers and travel media, a big interest, there’s also a sense of print, right? And I think what you’re referring to is a lot of the smaller—and they are niche and niches and bad niches—it’s just a good thing. They know who they are. They have their brand identity down. There is still a desire for that. And I guess I’m sentimental about print. It’s obviously just one piece on our whole brand wheel at this point, but I think it’s still our most premium product.

And I know that’s a term that’s being thrown around a lot right now in these circles. I think for Afar for the next 15 years, we will continue to get bigger, and better. And the best magazines that I can think of, and I have, again, a West Coast bent, but are able to anticipate reader’s needs and desires before the reader even knows what those are.

And so we’re talking as everybody’s talking about how AI will change what Afar does. And I do think it’s a tool that travelers will use. Maybe it will help them only visit 14 websites as opposed to 47 websites. But I still think there’s a place that Afar has captured and will continue to capture for people who want, again, that sort of deeper, richer storytelling about how travel can change you and about why travel matters and how it can change how you see the world and yourself.

Arjun Basu: And I just think it just looks better in print.

Julia Cosgrove: I did just hire a new creative director, Maili Holiman, whom I worked with 20 years ago at ReadyMade magazine. She was just most recently the CD at Wired and we’re just having so much fun working on print together again. And there is such a feeling of satisfaction when those final pages leave the building and when you get those first bounds. And I know that probably sounds to some listeners like I’m living in 1999, but the nineties are back.

Arjun Basu: A lot of our listeners are print people, they’ll be nodding their heads now. So you talked about your ecosystem overall. What are the elements? I know you have a website and stuff, but what are the elements of the brand ecosystem?

Julia Cosgrove: Sure. So actually before the print magazine came out, our founders started a non-profit foundation called Learning Afar, and to date, we’ve sent over a thousand high school students and middle school students on trips both abroad and within the U.S. Kids who ordinarily don’t get to travel beyond sort of the six block radius between school and home. And so that set the stage for the values of Afar even before the magazine existed. I’ve always thought travel is the best form of education. You get as many people traveling as possible from a young age, you open minds and hearts too.

Learning Afar, then the print magazine, now published quarterly, you have afar.com, which has gone through all sorts of iterations. We were actually a Q&A site at one point in the early 2010s. And now we’re publishing roughly a hundred stories or so. A mix of travel news and intel and travel inspiration, every month.

We’ve got a team that works so hard on that. And we’ve got podcasts. So we have Travel Tales, which is our narrative storytelling podcast, and we have Unpacked, which is a little bit more of service you can use. How to travel better, how to figure out the tips and tricks and hacks of travel.

And we have a branded content wing that works on sponsored content and also on content that’s licensed and white labeled to clients, and social platforms are ever growing, and newsletters. And I think in 2025, our thinking is, newsletters and very specific features on social platforms will be where we put a lot of time and attention as search declines and as we try to be fortune tellers about what AI has in store for us.

Arjun Basu: And what about things like curated tours or the more experiential stuff?

Julia Cosgrove: Yeah, so in 2012? 2011? Our founders got on a plane to Cairo when Mubarak was deposed and they were, I think, the only two—out of four people—who were staying at the Four Seasons in Cairo.

And they realized that this is a place where tourism plays a very important role in the local economy and they put out a call to see if anyone would like to join Afar in Egypt. And we had hundreds of responses, and we took a group. It was about 60 people, for three days, four days of very intimate gatherings, lectures, workshops, visits to ceramic studios, and discussions with leaders of the revolution, influential architects, and it was just a closing party at the pyramids.

It was a truly incredible trip, and that spawned Afar Experiences, which were trips that we did for a little less than a decade. We haven’t done any since Covid, but we went to Joburg and Charleston and Seattle, Sydney, Dubai, and they were amazing trips.

The margins weren’t great on them, but we do think that there’s probably something in the future for us. Still figuring out what that is. of people who love Afar, love the brand and would like to figure out how to travel Afar-ishly. What that means, we’re still figuring out.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. It just seems like it’s a brand play more and a loyalty device. You’re creating a community of people who are experiencing or sharing experiences beyond the print, which just. That’s what travel is in the end. It’s the experiences. Absolutely. It’s not that I bought that gelato, it’s that I had it and how it felt on my tongue and what it made me feel like. That’s the difference between aspiration and inspiration.

Arjun Basu: You’re in the Bay Area, and You don’t have an office. So where is the staff?

Julia Cosgrove: That’s right. So when we were looking at cost expenditures during Covid and coming out of Covid, we realized we’re a brand that’s all about the entire world. And maybe we should have people be based all over the entire world.

So we’re a fully-dispersed workforce. We’ve got a few folks still in the Bay Area, a handful in the tri-state area, and then as far afield as Nairobi. Los Angeles. Our Singaporean just became an Angeleno. We’ve had folks in London. So we figured out how to work across time zones and actually ship an issue and use the time differences to our advantage.

“I guess I’m sentimental about print. It’s obviously just one piece on our whole brand wheel at this point, but I think it’s still our most premium product.”

Arjun Basu: There is something to be said for having, especially for a travel magazine, having people all over the world as opposed to just continually sending people abroad.

Julia Cosgrove: That’s something that we really have put a lot of attention around in terms of who’s writing for us, where are they based, who’s shooting our stories for us, and where are they based, and the team even has objectives and key results around working with local folks.

It’s very important to me that we’re being really intentional about making sure that we have a broad diversity of voices represented in everything we do.

Arjun Basu: What are three magazines or media that really excite you right now?

Julia Cosgrove: I’m going to use a broad definition of magazines.

Arjun Basu: Absolutely.

Julia Cosgrove: So August, okay. August Journal, which you should absolutely know about if you don’t, it’s a travel and design—I think it’s a quarterly, maybe a couple times a year—and the gentleman who puts that together, Dung Ngo, is just brilliant. Every issue you just want to keep on your coffee table forever, and it inspires you to get on a plane and go.

The other recommendation I would make is Kelsey Keith, who was at Dwell for a while and is just a great design thinker and editor. She has a Substack called Ground Condition, and it’s always full of yummy links to things I didn’t know about in the design world.

And then I have a book recommendation for anybody in an editorial or otherwise, called The Editor, and it’s how publishing legend Judith Jones shaped culture in America. And it’s by Sarah B. Franklin, and it’s a biography of Judith Jones, who was a book editor at Knopf for many years, and who published not only Julia Child, but—you’ll find out if you read the book—saved the manuscript of the Diary of Anne Frank for translation when she was living in Paris in the 1950s. And it’s just a beautifully written, beautifully told book about someone who has not gotten her due and deserves to.