A conversation with Cherry Bombe founder and editor Kerry Diamond.

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT LANE PRESS

Cherry Bombe is a full-course meal. Its founder, Kerry Diamond, created the magazine after working in titles like Women’s Wear Daily and Harper’s Bazaar, and after working for brands like Lancôme. And in the restaurant industry. She worked in restaurants at a time when everything culinary was in the ascendance in the zeitgeist.

That’s also when Diamond realized a key ingredient was missing. None of the brash rising stars at the table were women. She had also been hearing from women who found the going in that world challenging. This in an industry that is difficult for everyone to begin with. Out of this came Cherry Bombe.

Today, Cherry Bombe is a full-fledged and rising media empire. It’s a magazine, sure, but their menu also includes multiple podcasts and a series of wildly-successful events. Their community, called the “Bombe Squad,” meet each other on Zoom, at the events, and form a tightly-connected sisterhood of fans and evangelists for the brand.

Diamond makes it sound like she built all of this without a blueprint, and maybe she did. But just like the best recipes, sometimes the tastiest things are the result of the happiest accidents.

Arjun Basu: What was the paper that you created in the third grade? What was it about?

Kerry Diamond: It was about the students at my school and what was going on at the school, St. Charles Academy in Oakwood, Staten Island.

Arjun Basu: Was it gossipy?

Kerry Diamond: It wasn’t gossipy. My mother saves a lot of things. I bet my mother has it in her basement. So Mom, if you’re listening, maybe you can find it for us. It was not gossipy. The nuns would never have let that pass. But I do have one thing about that paper. They printed it. And this will date me on a mimeograph machine. Remember those?

Arjun Basu: I was going to ask that because you sold copies door to door, and I was going to ask if you actually mimeographed them. And you did. Now we both dated ourselves. So there you go.

Kerry Diamond: Mrs. Zambardi, the assistant to the principal, printed the bound on the mimeograph machine, and I was so upset with the quality—in the third grade—I was upset with the quality and asked if we could redo it. And Sister Janine said, “No way.”

Arjun Basu: Sister Janine, she was like the publisher, controlling costs. And then you would sell them door to door. And then that’s really the start of a long media career. So there’s a lot of twists and turns here, so you may be talking for a while after I ask this, but how did you get here—how did you get to Cherry Bombe?

Kerry Diamond: How did I get to Cherry Bombe? You are correct in that it was very long and windy, and that I knew what I wanted to do as soon as that was a question you contemplated as a child, or adults asked you. I grew up in a home in Staten Island with two parents who loved media.

My parents were very young, but I guess they were that generation where we got Time magazine. We got lots of women’s magazines. My parents were solidly middle class, but we got three newspapers a day. Which is almost unimaginable today.

Arjun Basu: the morning edition, the afternoon edition, the evening. Yeah.

Kerry Diamond: We got the Times and the Daily News in the morning. And my dad would take the Times on his commute. And then we got the Staten Island Advance every afternoon. And funnily enough, I eventually worked for them. It was a Newhouse newspaper.

So, it started back to your question. It just always was around me and I always knew I wanted to write. I loved telling other people’s stories and I loved magazines. I loved newspapers. I loved the Sunday New York Times as a little kid. I still remember reading through that and I was just I guess lucky in a way to be born close to Manhattan.

I think had I been born elsewhere, I’m not sure I would have gotten on the track that I did. In high school, I went to an all-girls high school called St. Joseph Hill Academy. It was very focused on math and science. And so I was miserable, but we were very lucky in that we had a journalism class and we had a school newspaper.

And a guy named Jim Callahan was the teacher of the class. And I’m really lucky Jim took an interest in me professionally and said, one day: “Would you like to have an internship?” I was the editor of the school paper.

And I said, “Sure.” And I had absolutely no idea what an internship was or what it meant.

So Jim had been freelancing for the Village Voice. We took the ferry in and I met with a bunch of the editors there and I wound up weirdly enough with Wayne Barrett and Bill Bastone, two major city politics reporters.

Arjun Basu: And that sort of starts this thing of you working with some very big people, important people. So much of this is persistence and there’s a lot of luck involved too. And I always say luck is luck. It just happens. And just be thankful for it. So what did you do at the Village Voice?

Kerry Diamond: I don’t know that they really called it the City Desk. Bill and Wayne were researching a book about about the Koch administration and Matt Taibbi, funnily enough, happened to be the other intern and they would send us out—there was no internet—they would send us out to Queens to go knock on people’s doors to ask if we had seen mafia activity or other weird things and I really, even back then, I was like, We’re going to be killed doing this. And I would position myself behind Matt and he would be the one who would ring the doorbell. But I really learned what it meant to be a real reporter, and the work and dedication that took.

And I was very lucky to get that. I was very lucky to learn, like you said, luck. I was lucky to learn those lessons as early as I did. It also was interesting because I knew that’s not what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do hard news. I didn’t want to do city politics. I was very interested in the more lifestyle categories.

Scenes from Jubilee 2024, Cherry Bombe’s annual conference for women and cool creatives in the food, beverage, and hospitality industry.

Arjun Basu: Where’d you go from there?

Kerry Diamond: I went to college. It was back when internships didn’t pay. So I was also working at Spring Street Books, in Soho again, dating myself. Some of you might remember when Soho was not this open-air luxury shopping mall and it was all galleries and bookstores and small boutiques.

And it was a really wonderful job. It was run by a guy named Izzy Jarosnowski, and I would just sit at the counter and we had a huge magazine display and I would sit there and read magazines all day and be paid for it. And it just seemed like a magical job. And I’ve been very lucky to encounter certain people over my lifetime. And when I was a clerk in that bookstore, Si Newhouse used to come in.

Arjun Basu: Did you know who he was?

Kerry Diamond: I 100 percent knew who he was. Spy magazine was a thing back then. So I read Spy regularly and he would come in and I remember once he came in, they had just launched Allure magazine and he came in and he bought a copy. And I said to him, I was like, “Don’t you own this?”

And he was like, “Who are you?”

And I said, “You own this magazine.”

And he goes, “I know, but I’m having lunch with friends around the corner.”

And I said, “Okay.”

And then another time he came in, and you probably remember this, but it was when American Psycho came out and Simon & Schuster dropped the book because it was it was just so wild. And women’s groups were protesting the book and Random House picked it up and it was when Si Newhouse owned Random House and we did not have the book in the window.

And back then we had all the hot books in the window. And he came in and he said, “Why isn’t American Psycho in the window?”

And I don’t even know how old I was but I still can’t believe I said this to him. I was like, “Oh, we don’t carry books like that.”

And he goes, “What?”

And I said, “Yeah, it’s not our kind of book.”

And he says to me, “Don’t believe everything you read.” And he walks out. And I thought that was very rich coming from the person who owns Condé Nast and Random House.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, and then? So then you went to college in Plattsburgh.

Kerry Diamond: So I went to college. SUNY Plattsburgh.

Arjun Basu: Which is not the center of really anything except for, I live in Montréal. I remember going to Plattsburgh and going to the malls there getting the forbidden American stuff we couldn’t get up in Canada. The Pyramid Mall. I still remember that. And you worked at the paper there?

Kerry Diamond: I worked at the bookstore and the mall. Yeah, I wound up at SUNY Plattsburgh a little bit by accident. I had wanted to go to FIT, and I got into FIT early admission. In my high school brain, I thought if you wanted to work for Vogue one day or be the editor-in-chief of Vogue, you had to go to a place like FIT.

I didn’t realize that you should maybe go to a place like Harvard or something like that. Or NYU. So I applied to FIT, thought I was going to move out, have a different kind of life, and then at the last minute kind of chickened out and decided to go to SUNY Plattsburgh, and I loved it up there. I did the school newspaper.

I did college radio. I had fantastic internships and some really wonderful professors. I also had internships every summer. I was at the Staten Island Advance, the Plattsburgh Press Republican and Spin magazine. And that was a fantastic internship because I got to work for Legs McNeil, who’s the punk journalist.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, another big name. And then let’s fast forward to Women’s Wear Daily. How long did you stay there?

Kerry Diamond: That’s a good question. I was there for maybe three, four years. I can’t remember. It was a bit of a blur. I loved it there. I really do feel like you can draw a line in my life, pre-Women’s Wear and post-Women’s Wear.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, so I was going to ask is that where you really did figure things out?

Kerry Diamond: It was.

Arjun Basu: Or start to figure things out. That was the start of the process.

Kerry Diamond: It was. Everything just coalesced for me at Women’s Wear. I just really felt like I had found a home. I loved what I was doing. I loved my colleagues. I loved my bosses. It really was just a magical place. And I got there at a perfect time because so much changed afterward. I think it was right in the middle of ABC Cap Cities owned it and it was transitioning to its ownership with its Condé Nast ownership. I had applied for every single job that Women’s Wear had.

I wanted to work there really badly. I couldn’t believe there was a daily fashion newspaper. That just seemed crazy to me and magical at the same time. So I applied for everything. They finally called me in for one of the beauty jobs and I wound up not getting that job and I was so bummed. I really wanted to break into the fashion world and eventually move to fashion magazines.

So don’t get that first job. They call me again, six months later on my birthday, and offer me a completely different job. It was for the luxury beauty news editor. So I accept that job happily. I really wanted to work in fashion, like I said, and I thought, I’ll work in beauty for a little while and then I’ll move to fashion.

And on my first day, my boss, a fantastic guy named Pete Bourne, says to me, “I hope you’re not one of those people who thinks they’re going to do beauty and then move to fashion.”

And I was like, “Oh, who are those monsters? I am not one of those people.” But, like I said, I really found my home. Patrick McCarthy was there. So many of the people I got to know during that time are people who I still rely on for different things in my career. So I made connections that were invaluable there.

“Everything just coalesced for me at Women’s Wear. I just really felt like I had found a home. I loved what I was doing. I loved my colleagues. I loved my bosses.”

Arjun Basu: Yeah, so that really is the start. And then and then what happened?

Kerry Diamond: Women’s Wear was interesting because it was this HR hunting ground for places like Condé Nast and Hearst. And they were always picking off people to go to the different magazines. And I must have interviewed at Condé Nast a dozen times, and I think I presented really well. I was doing really interesting things. I was making a name for myself, but I think as soon as they saw Staten Island and SUNY Plattsburgh on my resume, they were like, “Okay, next!”

But Hearst didn’t seem to mind that. And they called me for a few jobs. I said ‘no’ to all of them. Until Glenda Bailey called me and wanted me to come be her beauty director at Harper’s Bazaar. Glenda was moving over from Marie Claire to Harper’s Bazaar. I had absolutely loved Harper’s Bazaar, especially Liz Tilberis’ Harper’s Bazaar.

I often think about Liz and just what she would be doing today if she were still around. But I love the magazine that she had done and was really curious to see where Glenda was going to take it. So I said ‘yes.’ And that was another life changing ‘yes’.

Arjun Basu: So that was right at the start of Glenda Bailey’s reign.

Kerry Diamond: Exactly. I think I was her first non-Marie Claire hire.

Arjun Basu: And then you left media for a bit. Did you? Or did you do two things at once, or three things at once?

Kerry Diamond: That’s a really good question. I was at Bazaar for a few years. I was getting a little tired. I was going through a lot. The shine had worn off a little bit for me. I was tired of writing lipstick blurbs and moisturizer essays. And trying to think what happened next. I was getting a little tired.

I started ghostwriting some books on the side, which was a lot of fun. And Lancôme took me out for lunch one day and asked me right at lunch if I would take over the PR department. And I had no idea. I had no warning that they were going to ask me this. I hadn’t solicited this in any way. Never imagined I would go work in public relations.

But they said to me, “We really want you to just rebuild this department from scratch and do PR the way you think it should be done. It’s too old fashioned right now.” And then they told me the salary and that really clinched it. And I said, “Yes,” and left the lunch and I was like, “Oh my God, I have to go back and tell Glenda Bailey I’m leaving.”

Arjun Basu: And was this a job in New York or was it in Paris?

Kerry Diamond: It was in New York, but I was in Paris a lot and they were true to their word. They really expected me to come in and do PR completely differently. And I thought a lot like a PR person, so it wasn’t a tough job for me to master.

The hard part for me was when they said that they wanted me to do PR “my way,” they forgot to tell the marketing department. So the marketing department basically wanted to kill me for the first six months that I was there because they were not all about this new and different way of doing PR.

Arjun Basu: Now so when you went to Paris for that little while, were you like Emily in Paris?

Kerry Diamond: I was Emily in Paris, yes.

Arjun Basu: Are you not partially—

Kerry Diamond: To blame?

Arjun Basu: Exactly—let’s be nice about it—to blame for Emily in Paris?

Kerry Diamond: I am partially to blame for Emily in Paris. I don’t know that Darren Star has ever said this on the record, but yeah. So I’m at Lancôme, there are some things I really have absolutely no idea how to do, like celebrity PR. For example, I don’t know how to get someone in People magazine. I don’t know how to get someone on CBS Sunday Morning, but those were really coveted spots when you had major spokespeople like Lancôme did.

We had Kate Winslet and Julia Roberts and Clive Owen and oh my gosh, on and on. They really went on the celebrity shopping spree when I was there. I had a budget to hire outside freelance. I hired this incredible woman named Marcy Engelman, who really is just brilliant at celebrity PR.

She represented Julia Roberts for ages, and also happens to be best friends with Darren Star. So Darren was looped in on all the craziness that was going on at Lancôme. It was an amazing job. World class brand. I got to work with world class people and incredible photographers and talented folks.

But as you can imagine, an American working in France with all these Parisians, a lot of hijinks ensued. Darren was privy to all that and I think interviewed me a very long time ago. I had no idea it would one day be Emily in Paris. I think there are a lot of Emilys. I’m one of the Emilys, so I apologize to everyone in France.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, the French are going to hunt you down now. Okay, so let’s skip forward to some aha moment where you decided, I need to create what became Cherry Bombe. What was that?

Kerry Diamond: So I had started dating a chef and opened a restaurant with him. And I had never worked in a restaurant. I really do not recommend owning a restaurant before you’ve worked in a restaurant. And I really got my ass kicked on that job. We put our own money into it. It was backbreaking. It took everything I had. Restaurants can be weirdly isolating. I don’t know, Arjun, have you worked in restaurants before?

Arjun Basu: Yeah, I was young and stupid and I know it’s terrible.

Kerry Diamond: And I had absolutely no idea. So I get thrown into this. I had come from this world of women. My bosses were women, the customers were women, everybody. And it’s a very bro-y time in restaurants, and it was the time of David Chang, and Anthony Bourdain, and Mario Batali. And we were doing a lot of events.

So I was planning these for my restaurants and for my boyfriend. And every time I asked “Who are the other chefs participating?” They would tell me. And there literally wouldn’t be any women. And I would say to them, “Hey, do you guys know there are no women in your lineup?”

And they would always say, “Oh my God, we know. Do you know any?”

So I started behind the scenes suggesting, “Why don’t you book this person or book this person?” And I think it just was weighing on me so much at the same time I was craving community. I was also missing media the way I had been doing it previously. And I really don’t know the aha moment, but something just popped in my head, fully-formed, that we would do this magazine called Cherry Bombe.

And it was the only name that ever came to me. It was the only name we ever considered. And I thank the universe that it came to me fully formed with that ‘e’ at the end. And we worked on it for a year. And also at that time, you had food playing a much bigger role culturally than it ever had. Food and fashion was coming together. Food and art. Musicians were super-interested in the food scene. So it was also commentary on what was going on culturally in food.

Arjun Basu: That was 11 years ago, about.

Kerry Diamond: The magazine launched 11 years ago. Yeah. But like I said, we had worked on it for a year, quietly, at night.

Arjun Basu: And when did you realize you had something—how quickly did that happen?

Kerry Diamond: It was right away. The magazine came out in May, 2013, and it really was this wild rollercoaster ride that started almost immediately. It came out and a lot of women were like, “Finally! Finally we’re being seen. Finally, people are recognizing what we’re doing.”

And it was so interesting because food media was really vibrant back then. But yeah. Yeah, there just wasn’t interest in telling women’s stories. And at the same time, you had all these women who wanted to work in food, but had to find their own path through food. Like, literally, some restaurants would not hire women, and that sounds like something from 50 years ago, but that wasn’t the case. We’re talking about a decade ago.

So they found their own way through food and we found these women incredibly fascinating, women who had just figured out a way to work in food, but do it on their own terms. And those were some of the women we were spotlighting.

“Some restaurants would not hire women. And that sounds like something from 50 years ago, but that wasn’t the case. We’re talking about a decade ago.”

Arjun Basu: So Cherry Bombe is obviously a big brand now. Describe the ecosystem of Cherry Bombe.

Kerry Diamond: We’re very diversified. It makes me happy that you say we’re a big brand. I sometimes still feel like we’re a little indie publication, but we’re not anymore. We diversified early on. almost by accident.

We started with the print magazine, barely had a website. I don’t even think we had subscriptions in the beginning. And the first thing we did was we expanded and did a podcast. Someone had come to us and said, “Could I do a podcast for you?”

And I honestly said to her, “What’s a podcast?”

I had done college radio. And loved things like WNYC, but did not know what a podcast was. So we were recording out of a shipping container in Bushwick at Roberta’s Pizza. And it was the home of Heritage Radio Network, and they had a few dozen food podcasts, and we would schlep out there every week and do the podcast. And Alice Waters would come out and other incredible people. And it was really magical, and I felt like I was back in my college radio days, and I absolutely loved it. The original host quit pretty soon after, she said, “This is so much work.”

And I was like, “I know, but it was your idea.”

So I took over as host and now we’re celebrating our 10-year anniversary of podcasting. But so we did the podcast. We then expanded to events. An article came out from Eater called—it was like, Women are being left out of food conferences around the world.

And I remember Eater, I remember reading that and thinking I knew that. Inside me, I knew that was happening, but I didn’t have any data to go along with it. And all of a sudden here’s this Eater article that’s filled with pie charts and information, really specific information about how and why women were being left out of these conferences.

So I was like, “Okay, somebody should do a conference and if they do, we’ll help them.” And then no one did a conference and we wound up launching something called Jubilee. Which is now the largest gathering in the US of women in the food space and an event that I’m very proud of.

We just did the last one in April and had almost 800 people there from, I think, like 37 different states and five different countries or seven different countries, something like that. And that’s become a really beautiful day where we bring the whole community together and celebrate lots of different people. But it all happened very organically, like something would happen in the food world that was interesting ,or pissed me off, or I wanted to celebrate and we would respond to it.

Arjun Basu: So not a strategy, just growing organically out of that original insight, which was validated by the Eater article. But, you’re, I don’t know what to call them, fans, membership, it’s almost like a loyalty program, Cherry Bombe. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Kerry Diamond: We call them the “Bombe Squad.”

Arjun Basu: Yeah. And the Bombe Squad loyalty—loyal people engage and are evangelists for that brand. And you cultivate them not by doing anything magically different or anything, just by giving them what they think they might need.

Kerry Diamond: I’ll actually stop you there because I do think we do it differently. I remember a time in media when people would send in letters to the editor and people on staff would make fun of those letters. It was a very uncool thing to send a letter to the editor.

And when I was the beauty director at Harper’s Bazaar, I would be sent out, I don’t know, to a beauty counter somewhere in the country. And you would actually be sent out and they would tell you things like, “You really don’t want to know who the reader is.” And I think that a lot of that attitude is what led to the downfall of media.

Arjun Basu: Disconnect.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah, it was a real disconnect. And there was disdain. There was a one-way communication and we started Cherry Bombe with a mission—our mission was to spotlight and celebrate women in and around the food world. And I don’t think I ever worked anywhere with an explicit mission.

I think the mission was always at the end of the day to make money for your bosses. It’s not an easy thing when you have a company to come up with a really clear and explicit mission. And the fact that Cherry Bombe has one, I think is what has gotten us through this very difficult time. tumultuous time in media.

Arjun Basu: It’s like a polestar.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah, it’s our north star. And definitely, the pandemic was really hard. It was hard for everyone—it was hard for most people, but really hard on media. And definitely hard on us.

But the fact that we had this north star the whole time helped us— it might sound cheesy to some people who don’t think of media as mission-based. But for us, it definitely is.

We skipped over—I worked at Yahoo! Food, also under Marissa Mayer, and Yahoo! struggled to come up with its mission statement.

Arjun Basu: There are a lot of jokes right there. Because, Yahoo!, yeah, that makes sense. In hindsight, that makes a lot of sense.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah. You can assume what the mission is for these brands, but do you have a clearly articulated mission? We do. And I’m grateful that we have that. And it’s, it’s our “why” for everything. Everything we do is community first, even the fundraising round that we did recently was community first, and that was, that was very deliberate.

Arjun Basu: So you did this fundraising round and I’m surprised you bootstrapped this thing for so long. So now you have the fans. As owners, what a great thing you pulled there.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah. We did it through a platform called WeFunder and I learned about WeFunder because a friend’s restaurant Gage & Tollner had done a WeFunder and that was my first exposure to it.

And it’s not a Kickstarter. You can do one of two things. You can take the money as a loan or people are literally investing in your company and that was the route that we went. And I just felt if we were going to make money, our community should have the opportunity to make money because everything we did was about community.

I also, and you’ve seen this, you all talk about this on your shows all the time. As soon as you take money from venture capital or certain people, things change. And they don’t always change for the better. And I think that has resulted in the death of many a media outlet.

Arjun Basu: The death of many things. Yeah.

Kerry Diamond: I’ll give you an example. I remember talking to one, this one company that wanted to maybe purchase us one day. This was a long time ago. And they said to me, “You won’t be able to put people like Ruth Reichl on the cover anymore.”

And I was like, I was so taken aback by that because Ruth is such an important person to our community. And I thought, Wow, if I take money from these people, they’ll start dictating who’s on the cover. And I just wasn’t really ready for things like that.

Arjun Basu: The one thing I’ve been struck by—and now that we’ve spoken, it makes sense to me—is the consistency of everything you do, like the covers. The cover architecture has stayed essentially the same. You put a wall of covers up and you’re like, Wow, they really have not changed that cover at all. And I can see most magazine rebrands just happening because the staff gets bored with it. And you just, it’s not because the readership is clamoring for it. They just happened because of staff boredom and mostly it’s on the art side. Let’s admit it. But the consistency—you have, what, 20-something? 30?

Kerry Diamond: We’re working on 26 right now. And the cover has not changed. The cover has not changed. We probably will do a little refresh later this year. Part of the problem now is we do have so many people who want to be on the cover. This is a good problem. So many people who want to be on the cover and they want that Cherry Bombe cover.

“If anything’s going to kill print magazines finally, it’s going to be shipping, not advertising.”

Arjun Basu: They want the treatment.

Kerry Diamond: Exactly. They don’t want something new and different just because I’ve decided it’s time to do something different and shoot outside or, shoot somewhere else.

They like the consistency. And probably for the past year, every time we’ve shot, we have shot a second possible cover outside, but just in case outside the studio. Not just in case a sort of let’s just have some options to lay out. And every time we lay it out, it just doesn’t feel right.

Arjun Basu: Look, National Geographic’s had that yellow border on forever, and Time still has the red border. If it’s part of the brand and it works, I don’t see any reason to change it. And your covers are light and lovely, actually. And the mission, which is also something that hasn’t changed, is front, just, it’s there, it’s obvious, right on the cover. And it is also, when you go to the website and the podcast, there’s a remarkable consistency to everything that you guys do. Which obviously, there’s a hand involved and it’s more than just the mission statement. It’s there, but it allows the loyalty to grow.

Kerry Diamond: I think our audience is limitless. I didn’t used to think that way. Like I said, I loved being an indie publication. I came from a world where I loved indie music and indie film and everything indie, but now, I’ll meet someone who doesn’t know Cherry Bombe and I’ll explain to them what it’s about.

And they’ll be like. “Women and food. Oh my God. That’s huge!” And it really is, when you think about it, women are half the world. Everyone loves to eat. I sometimes think that I’ve thought too small about Cherry Bombe, and I think for this next phase of Cherry Bombe, it’s really how many more people can we reach without compromising what we’re about because I think the message that we spread is so important right now. We really spread a message of optimism, of joy, of inspiration, not aspiration, on, on a lot of people.

On the Print is Dead podcast they talk about aspiration and how magazines in the past were all about ‘aspiration.’ And that was always a word that made me uncomfortable because often what you were aspiring to was being richer. It wasn’t necessarily maybe some magazines were trying to get their readers to aspire to be smarter, things like that.

But for the most part, I think it was about aspiring to a different lifestyle that required a lot of money. And I really reject that these days. I think you can put out a media product that is inspirational, not aspirational and still succeed.

One thing that’s weighed on me a lot over the past two years since we’ve been talking about it, this epidemic of loneliness as well that we hear a lot about. And I think media can do a lot to combat that. And the community part of Cherry Bombe—a lot of what we do in that respect in terms of our events and our messaging is bringing people together in person if we can’t do it in person to really just try to build community however we can.

We still do a lot of virtual events. I know a lot of people have abandoned virtual events, but we have a monthly member meeting on Zoom and always have over a hundred people come to it, which is incredible. You would think everyone’s exhausted by Zoom these days.

Arjun Basu: They are. They’re exhausted by Zoom because most of the Zoom experience sucks. Because you’re in a place you don’t want to be, and you’re talking to people you don’t necessarily want to talk to. But if it’s a community, you will do anything to talk to those people or to just experience that.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah.

Arjun Basu: So the intersection of food and culture, it’s such a rich vein to tap. Cookbooks, obviously, are obvious things, but beyond the events I just think there’s these pop ups you can do with up and coming chefs and it just seems like there’s an endless array of things that can feed and without having to change.

Kerry Diamond: I agree. It’s limitless what we can do. And that’s why we finally raised money. I think I brought on a really amazing CEO, Kate Miller Spencer, in 2022. Kate joins us from Vox. And when she came on board, she said, “I want us to run this company seriously and grow this company. And that means raising money.”

And I said, “Absolutely.”

And that’s helped us hire more people for exactly what you’re talking about. You start talking to anybody about Cherry Bombe, they immediately have a ton of ideas for us, and they’re always like, “Have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about doing that?” And the answer is, “Yes,” in most cases. It’s just you’re limited by money and people, that’s, that’s always the case.

Arjun Basu: The bandwidth is always either financial or physical. So are you letting go a little now?

Kerry Diamond: Oh, that’s a good question. It’s hard to let go, but yeah, Kate is amazing. And I—how do I answer that question? I’m not letting go. I still work as much as I always have, but I’m really happy to have a partner in Kate. Indie media is not too dissimilar from restaurants. It can be a little lonely.

Sometimes, I had someone reach out to me and she said, “I don’t feel like there’s a lot of community around indie publishing.” And I thought to myself, That’s because you have to work around the clock if you are an indie publisher. There’s really no time to go bond with your fellow indie publishers.

But no, I’m not. I’m not letting go overall. But I am letting go in different ways because we now have more people and I give them the room to do their jobs, of course. So with more people and someone who is looking after the financial aspect of things and raising money, you must be thinking about the future of the brand a lot.

*Cherry Bombe* inserted this poster of food influencer Molly Baz in a recent issue.

“That’s the blessing—and the curse—of Cherry Bombe. There are a million things we can do and it’s, What do we do next?”

Arjun Basu: And what is the future of the brand?

Kerry Diamond: That’s a great question. When you raise money, you’re always asking about your exit. And I always thought, Okay, I’ll just do this until I’m old and gray one day.

Arjun Basu: And that’s not what they want to hear.

Kerry Diamond: That’s not what they want to hear at all. They want to hear your exit plan. So I have a few exit plans. I certainly would not mind the company being purchased one day by another media outlet by another company. I think the interesting thing about media right now is the company that buys us may not even exist right now.

LVMH just launched a media division. I love The New York Times. It’s interesting watching the evolution of Condé Nast—who knows what Condé will be like in a year. I’m also used to working in corporations. I was at Lancôme, which was part of a huge brand at Lancôme, which was part of a huge company, L’Oreal.

I was at Hearst. I was at Fairchild. I definitely see the value in working and being part of a bigger company. But at the same time, why can’t we build our own Condé Nast? And do it differently and start with, I don’t know, some of the brands that you’ve featured on this podcast.

Arjun Basu: That sounds aspirational.

Kerry Diamond: As opposed to inspirational. That definitely is ‘aspirational.’ So yeah, there’s building our own Condé Nast, but then at the same time, there’s growing Cherry Bombe.

Arjun Basu: That’s what I’m more interested in, like in terms of growing Cherry Bombe, what does that start to look like?

Kerry Diamond: Yeah, there’s definitely streaming and television. I love writing. I used to write screenplays for kicks when I was younger. I would love to have the time and focus to do that in an intentional way, because I have a ton of ideas for both scripted and unscripted for where you can take Cherry Bombe. And I don’t think people necessarily think of scripted as an extension for food media, but hey, look at The Bear—

Arjun Basu: Look at The Bear. I was just going to bring that up, yeah.

Kerry Diamond: Look at the success of that. So that’s definitely one area we’d like to explore sooner rather than later. Product is always an option. People come to us with different food product opportunities, but I don’t think that’s the right move for us because I don’t necessarily want to compete with the people we write about.

But I love the beauty category. I could see Cherry Bombe launching into, kind of, beauty. I know that area very well, so I would love to do that. And then I think within the existing framework of Cherry Bombe, there’s so much more that we can do.

We’ve had a lot of success in podcasting. We launched a baking podcast last year. It’s now the number one baking podcast in America, despite the fact that we haven’t spent a dime on marketing. So imagine what we can do putting some muscle behind that.

Arjun Basu: Create an entire network.

Kerry Diamond: We could spin it off and have it be its own thing one day. We have a fantastic podcast called The Future of Food Is You that’s about rising stars. I mentioned our Jubilee conference before the pandemic. The plan was going to be two North America—because I’d love to do one, in Montréal and Toronto and Vancouver—two North America each year and one international.

And we’ve just started talking about that again. We’re doing a Jubilee: Wine Country in October, and we’re talking to some folks in Sydney, Australia about bringing Jubilee over there.

Arjun Basu: Wow, that’s a lot.

Kerry Diamond: Oh, and I forgot one thing—one big thing that everyone’s doing and we’re not is video. We don’t have a test kitchen or a production studio. And I would absolutely love to have our own space one day where we can create video, we can develop recipes, we can do the things that all the other food media does. But we don’t.

Arjun Basu: Frankly, I can see a talk show in that space that works like one of those morning shows. But not a morning show or an afternoon show—an evening show that is aimed at your audience with women in food, eating, and enjoying themselves, and just talking. I can see that. That would work.

Kerry Diamond: So that’s the blessing—and the curse—of Cherry Bombe. There are a million things we can do and it’s, What do we do next?

Arjun Basu: It sounds like someone has to write a five-year plan or something.

Kerry Diamond: Can you write a five-year plan anymore?

Arjun Basu: No. And it was always ridiculous. The only people who were good at it were communist bureaucrats—and even they weren’t good at it. It was always, “What do you want to be in five years?” They’re just stupid questions. Don’t get me started on that.

Kerry Diamond: The truth is I want to keep doing exactly what I’m doing right now. This has just been such an incredible ride. And I’m really privileged to have been doing Cherry Bombe for the past 11 years. I pinch myself a lot.

Arjun Basu: But now you have a CEO who’s going to push you a little, maybe just bring a different perspective on doing the same thing all the time. I guess we all need our own CEO.

Kerry Diamond: We do. As I explained earlier, I was very much a student of fashion and a lot of the most successful fashion partnerships were where you had the creative side and you had the business side and they got along, and the relationship flourished, and the company flourished as a result of it.

And that’s what Kate and I have. We’re very lucky. We’ve worked together for a long time, even before she was our CEO. She had been our freelance publisher for several years, and left for Vox for a few years and then came back. So we do have a terrific working relationship, which I am very grateful for.

Arjun Basu: It sounds like it’s all in good hands. Okay, we’re at the question. What are three magazines you’re reading now—or media?

Kerry Diamond: It’s super painful to have to narrow it down to three things, because as you can imagine, I am a voracious consumer of media. I often joke that Casa Magazines in the West Village, that I have spent more money over the years at Casa than I have made. I’m selling my magazine at Casa.

Okay. What do I love? I love While Entertaining. It’s a new media brand founded by a woman named Amber Mayfield. And it’s all about celebrating black creatives and food. And Amber was in her twenties when she started this. She had an events company called To Be Hosted, and similar to what we did with Cherry Bombe, she looked around and she was like, “There’s an entire community that’s not being acknowledged or celebrated.”

And she decided she was going to do that, so she self-publishes, the same as us. But I’m really blown away by her because of how young she is and having started this when she did. I think the sky’s the limit for her—similar to how the sky’s the limit for Cherry Bombe.

I’m obsessed with Puck, the website. I think they do an amazing job. It definitely taps into that side of me that’s a business nerd and they do a fantastic job covering media, and Hollywood, and fashion, and Lauren Sherman in particular has a fantastic newsletter.

She covers fashion and that has quickly become my must-read. And then there is—my God, I’m torn between two. I can’t have four?

Arjun Basu: You can do four.

Kerry Diamond: Can we first do four? Yeah. There’s a zine called Cake Zine that I think is—

Arjun Basu: Yeah, I’m a little obsessed with Cake Zine too.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah, I love Cake Zine.

Arjun Basu: I might try and get them on the show.

Kerry Diamond: I’m jealous that they were smart enough to do something small and portable. The toughest thing, I think, for print magazines today—we didn’t even touch on this—is shipping. Shipping has become a nightmare for everybody. And if anything’s going to kill print magazines finally, it’s going to be shipping, not advertising. I love Cake Zine. I think they’re doing a fantastic job.

And then there is a designer—this isn’t quite an answer to your question—but there is a designer named Evi O., who’s based in Australia. And she does all the top cookbooks there and has created this like incredible creative vocabulary. And I would really love to do a collab issue with her and have her art direct the issue.

Arjun Basu: That’s actually funny because I’ve long said that there was a time where all of the—and it’s still being felt—but all of the food world took their cues from Australian food magazines. And we’re still feeling that now everything on someone’s blog, the way people take photos at a restaurant it all comes from Australia.

Kerry Diamond: 100%. And I think it’s Donna Hay. So much can be traced back to Donna Hay. And you will laugh, Arjun. Yesterday, somebody texted me and said, “Do you want to interview Donna Hay?” I know you’ve always been a fan.

And I said, “Anywhere, anytime.”