A conversation with Kyle Tibbs Jones, cofounder of The Bitter Southerner. Interview by Arjun Basu
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT FREEPORT PRESS.

**Partners in *Bitter*ness (from left): Dave Whitling, Kyle Tibbs Jones, and Eric NeSmith**

The people behind The Bitter Southerner are many things but they are not, they will remind you, actually bitter. The tongue is planted quite firmly in the cheek here. But The Bitter Southerner is, for sure, like it says on the website, “a beacon for the American South and a bellwether for the nation.”

Sure, why not.

But what started out as an ambitious e-newsletter has evolved now into a … project. Read The Bitter Southerner and you realize how ambitious and radical their business—and message—truly is. This is not just a brand but a movement, a way to talk about the South and Southern things, but through a lens many of us, through our own biases and ignorance, won’t quite see.

And the world is listening. Stories from The Bitter Southerner have either won or been nominated for eight James Beard Awards. And now they are up for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

We spoke to co-founder Kyle Tibbs Jones about the genesis of the magazine, about what it means, about the community it has found and spawned, and about the future, not just of the brand but, maybe, of the South, and where The Bitter Southerner fits into it all.

“We wanted to tell the stories that stare down the past with authenticity and be really honest about what’s happened in this region.”

Arjun Basu: Okay. So how did you get here? What were you doing before The Bitter Southerner entered the picture?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: I was a journalism major—I started in advertising. It’s a very circuitous route, but from advertising to film production to, I ended up in television.

So I was in television news for, I don’t know, 10 years, moved to the coast of Georgia. I was married at the time with my two children. There was no television station, no ad agency. So I started working in PR for a resort on the coast of Georgia. That took me to New York, and calling on magazines, and I would walk through the halls of Condé Nast and just be like, Okay, I need to be here.

And I’m so glad that it didn’t work out at the time, because the way we have produced this company and the way we’ve grown The Bitter Southerner is exactly the way my life was supposed to turn out. But I just remember walking those halls and being on the elevator with everyone at Condé Nast thinking.

Arjun Basu: What time period are we talking about here?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That was the early 2000s.

Arjun Basu: That’s even after the peak, and it was still seductive.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s when it fell apart, right?

Arjun Basu: Yeah, I remember going there when I was in magazines, walking the halls in the ’90s or something.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: I don’t mean it fell apart. I just meant 2008 was a pivotal year.

Arjun Basu: Okay. You get seduced by the vision of these magazine professionals in New York, you’re doing your job as an ad person and then what happens?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: I was on the Georgia coast. Then I moved to New York and worked in PR, luxury travel PR, actually, and then I moved back to Georgia, and I was working for a corporate narrative firm and we were working with big clients like FedEx and Charles Schwab, who wanted to be good corporate citizens.

And so my life shifted at that moment. I wanted to do work that made people better, not just selling a hotel, a luxury, this or that. I wanted to do important work and we were doing that at the firm where I met two of my co-founders and we all ended up leaving and had this idea to start something that you know, it was going to be digital. It was going to be long-form narrative, where we would tell stories that sort of corrected some of the misperception.

We’d all lived in New York and moved back and we all had stories. Someone looked at me one time in a cab, happened to be on an actual date with this person. And he said, “You’re from Georgia and you are, you’re smart”.

And I was just like, “What?”

And so we started this whole enterprise to tell stories, to show the rest of the world that there were plenty of amazing people in the South doing amazing things. Creatives, artists, environmentalists. We did one story a week digitally for many years before we actually started the print magazine four years ago.

So we’re almost 12 years old, but that’s how it started, actually. Arjun, we wanted to tell the world what was going on in the South, but we also wanted to be really honest about the problems of the South.

We wanted to tell the stories that stare down the past with authenticity and be really honest about what’s happened in this region. But we also wanted to show the good things and lift up voices that weren’t being lifted up and talk about all the things that are happening in this region that are good.

And there’s a lot. And in fact, there’s a lot that’s happened for years and years. All the music and the drinks and the food and all the things that come out of this region. Long story short, we were doing these stories and then 2016 came along and I think the entire nation woke up to the fact that this is not a regional problem.

A lot of these issues are not a regional problem. And over the years we’ve grown and grown. The print magazine happened in 2021 and we’ve just recently worked on a media kit and we were looking at our top markets and only three Southern cities are on that list. Atlanta, Dallas, and Nashville. And the rest are Chicago, New York, California, LA, on and on. Seattle.

Arjun Basu: Are those readers people who were from the South, or just people who love the South, or both? The ones who aren’t in the South.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: I think it started that way. I think expats all over the world started reading this. They hadn’t heard this voice from this region. They hadn’t heard this progressive, smart, activist kind of voice in the magazine world from where they’re from. But over time we tell stories that are really just, some slightly told through a Southern lens where we’ve become a national magazine. So some people read us because we’re fighting the good fight.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. It says it on your website, it says in the magazine you’re “a beacon from the South, but a bellwether for the nation.” And it’s interesting to me because it firmly places the South in the larger context of the United States. And that you’re a vocal global community working to make the South and America a better place so that it’s not your obsessions. While they may be blessed by the South, they aren’t Southern.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s so beautiful, the way you just said that. I need to write that down.

Arjun Basu: We do have a transcript.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Ha, that’s exactly right. That’s what we hope we’re doing. We see it in the reaction of our followers and readers and we’re so thankful for the people who have supported us. We have people that have been here since day one. There’s three of us, Arjun! There’s myself, my partner and co-founder Dave Whitling, who’s also the designer. And he is the absolute reason every single thing is gorgeous and beautiful and every t-shirt and flag is—and we’ll get to that later, a little bit about our e-commerce—but he is the reason we are so gorgeous.

And then my other partner, Eric NeSmith is—titles are so weird—we all do everything. We all work on editorial. We all work on everything. But Eric is our business—he’s the publisher. He makes sure we’re making money and staying afloat. And he does a lot more than that. But anyways, it’s just the three of us plus one fulfillment person who’s shipping the things that we sell in our online store.

We are a tiny team and ... what was your question? Arjun, the world is falling apart! Can you believe we’re doing this interview in the middle of just the biggest world crisis ever? I am so distracted. I hope I can stay with you. I’m trying. I’m trying.

It’s interesting. We have a really different business model from most of our peers. But yeah, in the larger context, we are telling stories that really resonate across the country and the world. But over the years we have hired Southern photographers and Southern writers and it’s all been through a Southern lens.

Arjun Basu: So the size of the magazine—you brought up the design, it’s this oversized… It’s gorgeous. It is gorgeous. The paper stock, how did you guys land on the dimensions and the feel of the magazine, even? It just feels so great.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: It’s odd. It’s big. There are other magazines that are this tall, but the squareness of it is a little bit different. I was in New York last week at the new Air Mail Newsstand, and they had emailed and I happened to walk in and the fella, Lionel, who had emailed me was there, and he goes, “What size is it?”

I’m like, “It’s this size, but it’s a little more square.”

First of all, we are known for our photography. We work with the best photographers, but also writers and editors, in the world, in my humble opinion. I just feel like we are working with the best there are. But the photography in this size is just, you can fall into it. It’s just gorgeous. It’s so fun to see it that big.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. Speaking to other people who create oversized magazines, the answer was quite simple. It was like, “I’m commissioning all this money on photographers. Why would I make it small?” These are gorgeous photos.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: This is like a billboard. It’s so big. Now we have—I love Matt Sartwell at Kitchen Arts and Letters in New York City, the renowned culinary bookshop. He is one of the best people in the whole wide world, but he says, “Kyle, that magazine is hard to display.” So it does have its drawbacks.

Arjun Basu: It’s not just hard to display. I’ve read a bunch of press. People trying to describe The Bitter Southerner. You got “the Vice of the South,” which I didn’t really agree with. “Kitchen sink New Yorker.” I’m like, what are you talking about? It’s like they really don’t know. They get it wrong because one, they take their description right out of the South, and two, it isn’t really like anything else. Your last issue, you had this long piece about kumquats and then the next story is an appreciation, a very long appreciation, of Jimmy Carter. And then you get into cake. I don’t think Vice is doing that. And now there’s The New Yorker. No one really quite gets you unless they get you.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s right. That’s so true. In the old days, we used to call it a whiplash moment. We’d do a story about Killer Mike, and then the very next week, we’d do a story about azaleas. We’d do that, and in our magazine, that is the rhythm. It is.

You know, and so many people, Arjun, say that if you’re not specialized, if you don’t have a very specific niche, and I guess our niche is that we are in Athens, Georgia—that we’re broadcasting live from Georgia. But our subject matter is broad. We are known for our music stories—and food, and social justice, and stories about the environment are such a sweet spot for us.

Arjun Basu: On one hand you’re busting stereotypes and yet, you got the food stuff coming and you have six James Beards and—

Kyle Tibbs Jones: —Eight!

Arjun Basu: Talk about not busting stereotypes. And then you have the music stuff. And if there’s two things that people will grant you about the South, it’s music and food. What else? You can’t deny that part.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s right. When we started this—oh! this is what I was going to say earlier when I was talking about our tiny team! I still write every Instagram post. I am, along with my partners, editing and coordinating partnerships and collaborations, all the things that all of our peers do, but I’m still writing every Instagram post.

It’s crazy town, but we have a very specific voice and in the beginning what set us apart, I think, for people all around the world, where they ©were like, “Wait I’ve heard that. That’s how my people talk. That’s what I remember from growing up.” Those phrases or the cadence or whatever.

So we’re talking about really elevated food, culture, the arts, and very important issues around human rights and social justice. But you can hear our accents a little bit in the stories. Does that make sense?

Arjun Basu: It does and that goes beyond obviously the accent because I just find the brand is so well-articulated everywhere. And you know how I really know, it’s the t-shirts in your merch store. We can get to that. I always say that you can tell the strength of a brand or an idea by the quality of the t-shirts. A good brand is going to make a great t-shirt. That’s obviously not all you sell in the shop, the books you create—your books are great, they fit so perfectly within the brand. The ecosystem, the brand, is very easy to see and I think it speaks to the sincerity of the brand and the singular focus, even though it’s wide, it is singular in that sense.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: It is. We are so passionate about what we’re doing that we really could all three have better lives. We should travel more maybe, but we work because it feels like a life mission. I’ve done all those things and I don’t think I even mentioned my whole career path, it was just windy and perfect to get me to this point and to do this for the last 12 years. It was the perfect wind up.

But what I’ll say is I’ve never done anything like this that I lived and breathed. But it is my own. We own this company and we are entrepreneurs and some part of that is that, but most of it is just about the mission of what we do. And a lot of that is on our t-shirts. That’s true.

When we started this we’d all worked in journalism and we knew a lot of people. So a lot of people in that first year wrote for us for free. About halfway into the first year we’re like, this is not sustainable. We’re going to have to figure this out. So we created what we back then named the General Store, but our online e-commerce where you could buy t-shirts and some of them are reflective of our content in the food category. There’s mayo and tomato—

Arjun Basu: —I love that—

Kyle Tibbs Jones: —For the sandwich that we all love, “Collards and Cornbread” or things like that. But mostly we are known for our shirts that have a more protest bent. So “Abide No Hatred,” “Practice Radical Empathy.”

After Bishop Buds or Budde—I’m not really sure how to pronounce her name—but made a plea to our current president a few weeks ago, we had a “Have Mercy” because that’s something Southern people say. We had a “Have Mercy” t-shirt back in 2018 and we were like, “bring that back.” And we sold so many two weekends ago.

I can’t even tell you how many t-shirts we’re shipping out that just say “Have Mercy.” Today, Arjun, we launched one that just says “Gulf of Mexico” because in the past we’ve had “Appalachia,” we’ve had, we’ve had location t-shirts today, we launched “Gulf of Mexico.” People know where we stand.

Arjun Basu: Absolutely. You have flags and people are flying them and I know you guys post them on your website every once in a while. And then the photo books that you publish. The whole publishing program, again, it’s so on brand. It’s singular.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: So many of our books have started as stories, like Waffle House Vistas, Thank You Please Come Again,The Crop Cycle, Shane Mitchell’s new anthology of food stories. All of those started in the magazine.

Publishing and business it’s not easy. We’re not doing it through a distributor. We sell wholesale to shops across the country. We’re not doing it the old fashioned way. We’re just selling it on our site and we’re distributing ourselves. But, like, the Jimmy Carter book? We’ve been working on that for three years. In fact, President Carter wrote the foreword.

And President Carter actually wrote our first “Letter From Home” in the first issue of The Bitter Southerner magazine, the Michael Stipe issue. In every issue we have something called “Letter From Home” and everyone from Ann Patchett to Kiese Laymon to Jimmy Carter have written that letter and Issue 10, which is going to drop at the end of March, Imani Perry is writing it. A lot of those books and the book publishing part of our business have come out of the storytelling we do.

Arjun Basu: The Kate Medley books—her photos are just great, and they’re very “the South,” and her gas station photos are phenomenal. And I think I actually found out about her before I knew that you guys were publishing the book.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Really? She published a story about gas station food I think in 2013, maybe the first year that we existed. Then I had her on my podcast and we talked about it. And I think there’s one more step in there. And then we did the book, but The New York Times ran four full pages in the paper, God bless Kim Severson. That was exciting.

Arjun Basu: Talk about the podcast.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: There’s not much to talk about these days. I think there’s 26 episodes of Batch and because there’s three of us, it’s on pause right now. It’s really fun. I love doing it. Have I told you Arjun that we completely bootstrapped this, like no outside investment?

Arjun Basu: You’re telling us now.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Yeah, I’m telling you now. To look at our product, I don’t think you would know. But the money—in the beginning days, we would sell 40 t-shirts and we’d have enough money to buy 40 more. Do you know what I mean? That’s how small we started. But the e-commerce that we just talked about a few minutes ago, that completely supports our journalism. So when you buy those t-shirts and you buy those flags and you do that with us, you are supporting our storytelling and that’s how the magazine happens. All of that, but—

Arjun Basu: At what point—because like you said, you guys started as a website or an e-zine—at what point do you lose your mind and say, this should be in print? Did someone ask you? Was it an evolution? Or did you just say, actually this would be better if it was in print?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: We’re really cranky. We’re called The Bitter Southerner. So—we’re not cranky. That’s very tongue-in-cheek, the name of our company and the magazine, but what I’ll say—

Arjun Basu: —Does it have something to do with the fact that there were no Southern bars listed—

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s right. In the beginning we talked about bars and so many other things, but didn’t make national lists, when the best bars lists would come out. And yeah. And we joked that we got bitter, but we weren’t really bitter. We just wanted to tell the truth, and talk about where many of those classic cocktails came from: New Orleans.

Arjun Basu: Yes, exactly.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: In the beginning people said, “You cannot put a 7,000-word story online. Nobody’s going to read long-form narrative on the internet.”

And we were like, “Okay. We’re going to try.”

And so we did. And we were one of the first to really go long like that. And it worked and we loved it and we published things. Writers would come to us and bring us stories that no one else would publish. And it wasn’t just about the length. A lot of it was subject matter. Shane Mitchell, I’ve mentioned her before, who has written so many glorious food stories for us.

She’s spent many years in the travel world and in food with Travel + Leisure and Saveur and everyone. Anyway, we published those big, long, glorious stories. During the pandemic, we were all making it through during the shutdown and all of that. And when we finally came out of the shutdown, we all met and we all looked at each other and Dave, who has always wanted this to be a print magazine, looked at us and he was like, let’s do a print magazine. And this is when people are saying “print is dead.”

That’s the name of your podcast—one of your podcasts. So we did it when you weren’t supposed to do it. We did long form online when people said it wouldn’t work, and we went to print when people thought it was on its way out. And it’s not. That’s why we’re talking.

Arjun Basu: That’s what we’re trying to prove here. And it’s not, but it obviously has challenges, and it’s more expensive. You’d already built up a certain audience with the website, but what was the reception of the first [print magazine]. When did you know that you would make a second one?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Immediately. Before we even put the first one online to sell it, because we were just so proud of it. Before we even showed it to one person, we knew that we would keep going.

And I will say that the growth of The Bitter Southerner, from book publishing to e-commerce to our magazine, has really exploded in the last four years since we started the print magazine. In the old days, pre-print magazines, we would launch a story a week. And then we changed our model to launching a magazine two times a year for three years.

And now we’re three times a year, but we’d launch a magazine and then roll out that content from the magazine every week online. So you buy the magazine first, and we’d roll out the content over the weeks and save the cover story for a little bit later in that, so people would buy the magazine. But the growth of our company since we launched the print magazine has skyrocketed.

Arjun Basu: That makes sense. You have filled out your offer in many ways, and the magazine is so beautiful that I’m sure it just sits on people’s tables and advertises itself.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: It does. People are—Arjun, I know that we’re talking about ecosystems, but the single most important part of our ecosystem isn’t one of the properties, isn’t publishing, isn’t the magazine, and I’m going to try not to get teary when I say this to you, but it is our readers.

They, I can’t even tell you how they are evangelists. They get the magazine, and they display it all over social media. They can’t wait. They missed issue number two, or number one, and it’s sold out, and they’ll put up posts saying, does anyone, would anyone sell issue number one to me? They’ve become collector’s items.

They wear our t-shirts around the world. People see each other at the Great Wall of China in a Bitter Southerner shirt and high five each other. The reason people love this magazine, it is beautiful. The storytelling is top notch. The writers we work with are incredible, but I think the core reason that people gravitate to our magazine is more than just the beauty and the quality. It is about what we stand for.

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The merch game is strong down south.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, it’s the brand.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: You don’t see that in our industry very much. There’s not—

Arjun Basu: No, it’s the brand. And you guys, as a brand consultant, I always tell people that your brand is one, if your customers are telling your story for you, which is what a community is, but a lot of communities are really … shallow, let’s just say. But yours seems to run pretty deep.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: It does. That is so rewarding. It’s so rewarding. I told you a little bit ago, I used to work in luxury PR like I have done a little bit of everything in communication and journalism. That’s why this feels like a calling is because, right now in the zeitgeist people are looking to us: “What do we do?”

There’s a lot going on in the world that’s very scary. Very scary. And people want to know who to call and what we can do right now. And it’s nice to be a leader in that world. We didn’t set out to be that, but we are very happy to be there in the middle of it.

Arjun Basu: That leads me to my political question: Does what you publish change at all? And is your voice louder or do you adjust because of the current state of things?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s such a great question. When I think about the trajectory of our content and our stories, when I think about that, forever, people would be like, “I love that Bitter Southerner. You read a story about okra and you get to the end of it and that wasn’t really about okra. There’s a lot more to that story than just a food story. That was cool.”

And we still tell stories like that. That’s our vibe. But when 2016 rolled around and #MeToo, and then a pandemic, and then Black Lives Matter, and so many uprisings, like little by little, we became more—it wasn’t just in a story. It wasn’t just something you sensed. We started to say it out loud. Loudly.

And then probably the culmination of that was during, in 2024, leading up to the election. We were very vocal. But so much has changed. Think about the way we spoke before #MeToo, the way our entire lexicon has changed. And it continues to change and evolve.

And what is happening right now in the political world—not even just political, in the world—what is happening to all of us right now is so shocking and outrageous that the words we use and the way we tell stories is going to continue to evolve because it’s going to have to.

Arjun Basu: You don’t want to be reactive, but you still need to tell your story and maybe even be louder about it, because there’s a lot of noise out there.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: There’s so much noise. Even doing the t-shirts that I spoke about earlier, the “Have Mercy” and then today “Gulf of Mexico.” We’re not going to be a knee-jerk t-shirt company or a knee-jerk story magazine. This is just not who we are. We want to be thoughtful about it. We want to live and survive through this insane time. And if we can, which we’re, I think we’re good at it, celebrate beauty and joy at the same time, you have to find it.

It’s the way anyone who has lived through anything tragic or any kind of, over the course of history, when you read people’s experiences, you have to look for the beauty and the joy and we’re going to keep that mashup going. We’ve got to be loud. We have to talk about it, but we also have to—

“We’re talking about really elevated food, culture, the arts, and very important issues around human rights and social justice. But you can hear our accents a little bit in the stories.”

Arjun Basu: It goes back to the thing I read earlier, like “the beacon of the American South, a bellwether for the nation”, but more importantly, connecting an activated and vocal community working to make the South and America a better place.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s right.

Arjun Basu: And the South is complicated, of course, as you’ve said. And it just adds that layer, but I think that’s why so much good writing comes from the South, because it’s not an easy, simple place, and there’s so many different voices and different stories and different versions. One event can happen and you get a Rashomon-type of thing. One event happens and then you have eight different people telling the story about that one event. What is the future of The Bitter Southerner? What else do you do? Does the store get bigger? Do you add another issue? More books? More t-shirts?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Yes. We want to triple-down on what we’re doing. We want to do more of it. We publish three issues a year. I don’t know that we would go to four—it would be nice to—but we want to do more. Film. We are working on a music project right now that I can’t really, it’s still in the works, but again, because of our business model, like Arjun, when you open our magazine, there are like eight ads in there.

Our business model is that e-commerce funds our journalism and the work we do. And then part of our e-commerce is from our book publishing arm of our business. So it all works together. We’ve done this ourselves. But in order to do more, if we want to activate people and make a difference and make the South and our country a better place, we need to reach more people.

Last year, I think seven and a half million people engaged with our Instagram. For a magazine, our size, that’s nice. It’s a nice number. In our e-commerce store we have a hundred thousand regular customers, but imagine if we doubled, tripled, think about the people we could reach. That’s what we think about.

Arjun Basu: Because the one thing I think that is indisputable about the South is that it’s growing. It’s one of the fastest growing regions in the States. Politically that makes the South very interesting. But that’s your home base, and you are in a place that is not, it’s anything but stagnant. The South is just constantly changing and evolving. Is that something that you can ride?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Yes. Because the ride is never in a straight line.

Arjun Basu: No, it’s not.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: It doesn’t just get better, better, better. It gets better and it backs up. It’s just crazy because we think you’ve made so much progress and then what’s happening now happens. To women, to marginalized groups, to so many. So much is happening right now and you think you’ve made progress.

If we just talk about this region, we’re in Athens, Georgia, which is a little blue dot in a purple-reddish—kind of red this last time—but it has been a purple state. Athens is a little music town. From our window, we can see the lead singer from Cracker, David Lowery, walking his dog. We see Michael Stipe at the grocery store. It’s good. It’s a good place to be. It’s very creative.

The Bitter Southerner’s magazine stories feed their book business.

Arjun Basu: Everyone knows someone from REM or the B52s or something.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: It’s a really fun, creative, arty town college town. And so we’re very happy to be here. We’re happy to still be in the South. It is the whole point of The Bitter Southerner. It’s the way we started.

But I think what’s good for the South is also really good for our country. And so the fact that our audience is everywhere now, it just feels of course, we’re going to continue to talk about these issues and we’re going to tackle it through storytelling and in our products and our books.

But it feels like we’re talking to everyone now. There’s a lot of work to be done everywhere. There’s a lot of work to be done in the South. We’re just going to keep after it. I don’t know what more to say. We’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. It’s how we’ve made our name.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. Because I think every region faces issues and the South is no different. And I just think of the environment, especially as an issue in the South that officially gets short shrift, but the South is getting hit by the changes that are happening in their own unique way. And it’s good to know that someone’s talking about it. And I know it’s not just you guys, but it’s other people as well.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Yeah. It’s just so hard to watch people vote not in their best interest. I know that’s not a Southern thing, but it is just, it’s so painful, and it’s all around us.

Arjun Basu: We always end this with a question about three magazines that you’re loving right now. So what are they?

Kyle Tibbs Jones: I can only do three? Oh my goodness.

Arjun Basu: If you want to do four, I’ll let you go to four.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: That’s so sweet of you. Okay. Because we’ve never done anything the traditional way, we’re over here as we’ve talked about today. There’s some legacy media, I will always worship at the altar of all New York Times products. All the magazines—that Jake Silverstein interview you did, that’s one I listened to twice. It’s just the top of the mountain for all of us here at The Bitter Southerner.

We watch and wonder in awe, at the amount of work they do. But also how they’ve got this whole ecosystem of magazines and they don’t cannibalize each other. It’s just, it’s so fun to watch and the creativity and the level of work. It’s amazing.

We keep an eye on Will Welch at GQ. It seems like every time we have someone lined up for our cover GQ has them on their cover like the month before. Okay, I’m going to tell you two more. These are the new ones. One is Mother Tongue. Have you read it?

Arjun Basu: Yeah, they were on our show last year.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Yes. I’m sorry. I can’t believe I missed that one. I’ll go back and listen, but I’m crazy—I’m like, obsessed. And then the other is, I’m really excited to see what Skye Parrott does at Dossier since they brought that back. I have it here. I ordered one. It’s very glossy and beautiful.

We’re in the trenches at The Bitter Southerner working on some hard issues, often in the middle of all of that. And sometimes when I read a magazine, I want to go read about a really nice meal or a gorgeous piece of architecture or design. I’m very drawn to those things. So that’s why a lot of what I read is in those categories, outside of work.

Arjun Basu: You can’t take the luxury brands out of the luxury brand person.

Kyle Tibbs Jones: Right. I’m ready for it to make a comeback. Bring it back!