A conversation with Delayed Gratification cofounder Rob Orchard.

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT LANE PRESS

Given that this is the final show of the season, it is perhaps a bit poetic that our guest today is Rob Orchard from Delayed Gratification. Not that we would plan an episode around a bad pun. Not us.

Delayed Gratification is media created to comment on, and offer a counterpoint to, the media. Rob Orchard and his team met each other, for the most part, in Dubai in the early aughts, working on Time Out Dubai. In that magical place on the Gulf they found—no surprise—lots of money and conditions amenable to journalism of all sorts.

Then Orchard returned to London … and he didn’t like what he found. He and his friends and colleagues were dismayed by the realities of the digital world, the relentless emphasis on quantity over quality, the losing battle between what they wanted to do and the evangelists of SEO and purveyors of click bait, and so they created Delayed Gratification.

Inspired by the Slow Journalism movement taking root around the world, Delayed Gratification is a quarterly publication that values contemplation and time, a curation of the important events of the past three months, along with long-form essays and colorful infographics. The result is a reminder that important information, properly curated or edited, continues to be enlightening, informative, entertaining—and extremely important.

Delayed Gratification is an indie in the truest sense of the word. And probably the only media that suffers existential quandaries around their own social media. Because Rob Orchard and his team are passionate about getting things right. Not getting there first.

“I still find it shocking the extent to which, you know, this industry still is in decline,”

Arjun Basu: Before we get into the magazine, let’s talk about you and how you got here. What led up to it?

Rob Orchard: So I went into being a journalist straight out of university. And I got my first job in Dubai back in 2002 as a restaurant critic for Time Out Magazine. And so I spent three years there eating everything in the city, getting tremendously fat and working with a group of people that I still work with today. So, actually, my co editor on Delayed Gratification was the film critic. Our associate editor was the shopping editor. This group of us stuck together.

And you know what that’s like at the beginning of your career, when you were in your early twenties, you’ve all got no commitments and loads of energy. And you’re getting really excited about journalism and particularly about print journalism, working through the night together, playing stupid tunes and eating pizza at four in the morning and all that sort of stuff. And also being in competition with one another, trying desperately to impress one another with the quality of your writing, and your editing, and so on.

So I did that and then I moved on and became the editor of Time Out in Dubai. And then I had a brief period when I was running a custom publishing company in Dubai. And then when I was just about to turn 30, this group of us who met in Dubai, we all ended up back in London, all sorts of looking out across the media scene, the media landscape and thinking that it looked incredibly bleak.

Everybody was saying that digital was the answer to everything, but nobody figured out how to make any money from it. It was just after the crash. So everybody was being laid off, word rates were coming down, the great, storied titles were no longer doing proper commissions. They were just, like, doing managed decline.

And so we said, “No, this is not enough. This is not right. We love print. There must be a space for beautiful, considered, high-production-value print magazines that are the opposite of all of this.” And that’s when we launched Delayed Gratification.

Arjun Basu: So Dubai is an interesting case because in many ways the money there is so silly that it’s not really the real world. But it’s also full of people from all over the world so the clientele is open to all sorts of media forms because they’re all new in the place. So how different was going from being in Dubai to going back to London and facing the realities that you face there?

Rob Orchard: It was a very abrupt shock. I caught the tail end of the good times, right? People talk about the 80s, the 90s, the heyday of magazines. Now, I think because of exactly what you’ve said, which is that Dubai was, a) behind the times a bit, and b) was awash with money. I think those good times were still there. When I got there, there were still decent sized editorial teams. People were able to go off and pursue stories.

And there was money in it. You could see progression. It was an ‘industry.’ You could see that, there was a career and you could move forward and there were always people coming up below and so on. So that was that. That was quite an abrupt shock to be back in London in 2010, be, like, actually, Where does this go from here? And Time Out was a perfect case in point because, of course, Time Out was built on selling information.

When I was a kid and I would go out in London, if I wanted to see what was on the movies, I needed to buy a copy of Time Out. And what happens to that magazine when actually somebody can then just go onto their phone, geolocate the nearest cinema, look at trailers of all the movies that are playing, and book tickets at a discount on their phone in real time?

How do you continue to sell them stuff? How do you continue to sell them critical reviews of music, which has already been out for a month and which was being reviewed in real time when it was being launched. So that was a fascinating kind of case in point. And it was a bit of a rude awakening then. It was shocking to me.

And it’s still, to be honest with you, still shocking. So we’ve been running Delayed Gratification now for almost 14 years. And I still find it shocking the extent to which, you know, this industry still is in decline: of journalism much more broadly, not just magazine journalism, but journalism more broadly. The funding models that I assumed would have kicked in at some point just really haven’t.

Arjun Basu: So what was the “aha” moment for you and your friends to say this is what we need to do, this is the antidote? Or we’re going to try this and see if it works?

Rob Orchard: So there was a period of a year before we launched the magazine, maybe even longer than that, where this group of us was emailing around a Microsoft Word document which was entitled The Perfect Magazine. And we just piled everything on it because we all love magazines, right? It’d gotten under our skin at a really early age—print in particular. So this perfect magazine list of things to do.

And looking back on some of the stuff, it was ridiculous. It would have been awful. So one of the things was, I know, when you’re revolutionary, you’re going to get rid of everything, right? So we were going to be radically honest. So we were going to print the magazine’s accounts on the inside back cover of each issue. And thank God we didn’t, because it would have been the most depressing read for years and years—like tears streaming down your face as you sent off the press.

So we had this idea, The Perfect Magazine. But then, like all good magazines, we refined and refined, and we worked out what we thought it was that we were for, which is this. To provide an antidote to increasingly knee-jerk, super-fast news production, particularly news production that sort of leans on being sensationalist and partisan in order to get readers and followers and so on.

And so we wanted to do something that was the opposite. We wanted something slow, considered, that looked back on big events with benefit of hindsight, that was print, that was advertising-free, so that it was supported by our readers, because we wanted to draw a line in the sand and say, No, people will support good journalism, but they, you have to give them good journalism first.

So it was all of those things, and it was a big act of hubris. And I suppose the aha moment was working out, okay, we’ll bring it out once every three months and the editorial and design structure will be that it starts at the beginning of the quarter and it ends at the end so that this magazine runs through.

So the new issue that we’re working on covers January to March of this year. And the first story is up early January and it works its way through to the end of March. So that gave us a structure that we could then hang all sorts of lovely editorial components off. And it gave us the philosophy as well, what are you for?

We’re a counterpoint. We’re an antidote to what we see that’s going on out there. We’re print instead of digital. We’re considered instead of knee jerk.

“We’re a counterpoint. We’re an antidote to what we see that’s going on out there. We’re print instead of digital. We’re considered instead of knee jerk.”

Arjun Basu: My follow up question, one, I have to say a magazine with the accounts in it would become a case study, but for all the wrong reasons. And it might become the most favorite magazine for accountants everywhere, just to say, “Look at this,” and business schools say, “Don’t do this.” But what makes you necessary? Because magazines—print is slow, inherently slow. It just is. Outside of newspapers, which are daily but they’re still considered slow now. But print is definitely slow in its production and its shipping. One of our previous guests says, “No one talks about shipping as a problem in terms of print.” Slow journalism has been around for a while as a concept, but slow journalism, Delayed Gratification. Is that a chicken egg thing? And then the infographics? Is that a chicken egg thing? What was first, the infographics or the magazine?

Rob Orchard: So the infographics came in the first issue. So my business partner and coeditor, Marcus [Webb], was a big fan of infographics and he’d been making some in his job that he was working out at the time. And that was 2010 that we were doing our plotting. So it was relatively soon after Information is Beautiful had come out. And that was really the big thing that kicked things off with infographics.

And he was just looking for a point of difference. And he was basically saying that we need to throw everything at this, right? We need long form stories, we need photo features, we need stunning design, we need infographics. And actually, I suppose the extra part of it was that we were very lucky that the art director that we brought in to work on the magazine with us, a guy called Christian Tate, who’s the single best art director I’ve ever worked with, bar none. He turned out to have a brilliant brain for making really good infographics.

So I guess for us it was a point of difference. It was also a way to condense quite complex stories into something that was manageable. It was a way to take the heat out of stories. So actually, If you’re reporting on something that’s very contentious, then the selection of your interviewees and so on very clearly marks out potential bias.

Whereas actually if you’re just drawing on figures from credible sources, that takes it out a bit—not entirely—but takes out a bit. And then the other thing about infographics, in terms of what we were doing, was when you get to the end of a 10-page story about how terrible everything is in Haiti, like we’re about to publish in the next issue, you don’t then want to turn the page onto a ten page story about how terrible everything is in Yemen.

It’s too much. It’s just too much. So actually we’ve used infographics quite often as ways to break things up to give people a bit of light relief, to give them something about sport, or culture, or something else like that. And I’ve always thought the best magazines have got that real kind of planned flow to them, right?

That ebbing and flowing, this light and dark, the humorous and the serious, a leavening of the kind of the darker stories. And that’s what we try to do with a flat plan. We spend such an extraordinary amount of time tweaking it and I always do this thing where I pretend to be opening the magazine (I’m not) right, “This is this ha. Oh, okay that’s a sad one. Oh, what a surprise bit.” And keep going through moving things around till it lands.

Arjun Basu: We called it a book for a reason. Looking at it as a fan, as a consumer, as opposed to being the editor. So is the infographics also a separate business? Do you create infographics for hire?

Rob Orchard: We do. Yeah, we do. Since very early on, we realized that a good way to supplement the income from the readers was to go and teach big organizations how to make infographics. So we’ve taught at UNHCR, we’ve taught at the University of Oxford, we’ve taught at WaterAid—all sorts of interesting places that want to know what to do with the sheer mass of data that there is out there and want to know how to cut through.

And that has been a good sideline for us. We’ve made infographics for other people. Yeah, it’s one of those things that actually, if you’d asked me an issue one or two, I would say, “Yeah, I wonder if this is just a fad. We’re still surfing off the pack of Information is Beautiful.”

The other big thing is that we teach our readers. So we do discounted classes for subscribers on how to make infographics. We do that really regularly. We teach them how to launch an independent magazine, where the first sort of lesson that I give them is, “Don’t launch an independent magazine.”

And then I try and cheer them up after that, but I really want them to think about if it’s a good idea, we teach them how to be feature writers, and graphic novelists, and all sorts of fun things like that.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, when I was working at a custom publisher we started a division that we called Data Stories. It was going quite well before the pandemic hit and things went to shit. So slow journalism as a movement is quite international.

Rob Orchard: Yeah. I always talk about it being a bit like slow travel or slow food. I think you could make an argument that slow journalism is just a way of labeling something that has existed forever in journalism, which quite often is the better sort of journalism. It’s journalism where journalists are given the time and space to go and be on the ground with a story to interview experts, to canvas opinion to try to get some facts together and to pull together their best approximation of the truth.

And I suppose what we were really putting our finger on, what we were seeing in 2010 and early in 2011 when we were launching, was journalists no longer being allowed that privilege. Journalists having to turn out eight stories in a day. At super fast speed, often just having to top and tail press releases, that kind of churnalism thing. Having to write stuff that’s tailored towards SEO rather than tailored towards the reader. And just not having any time to go deep, and do all the stuff that we wanted to do.

I appreciated the days of the 70s and 80s, where somebody would be allowed to go off on tour with the Rolling Stones for six months and then come back and see if they got anything, all expenses paid. That’s all gone. We’re not there, but also we don’t want to be in the world where actually the job of journalists has been so downgraded, so sped up that feasibly you could replace them with AI and people wouldn’t notice.

“We can’t play the quantity game. But it’s hard to monetize the quality game as well.”

Arjun Basu: Yes. So many editors I’ve spoken to for this show have talked about how their publishers have given up on the quantity. It’s impossible to create 80 pieces a day, for example, and think they’re going to be any good. And what does that do to your brand? And you’re right. Anyone could write that. And how is someone going to take the stuff that you’re actually working on seriously?

Rob Orchard: It’s a terrible situation that we’ve got ourselves into. Not us, personally. Journalism more broadly, which is that the funding model for the new digital era was set up in a time when people didn’t quite understand where it was going to go.

So we had print products and then digital came in. And I remember in my earliest jobs, people saying: “Oh gosh, we’ve got to upload stuff to the website.” What’s the point? Nobody wants to read it on the website, and people are being given incentives and bonuses to upload stuff to the website.

So it was there. Then suddenly you’re like, “Oh, actually we can reach effectively limitless numbers of people with this content and we can probably charge more or less the same as we were for print adverts on the website, because there’s not that much marketing space for people. Yeah, we can do all of that and we don’t have to pay for print, you know in the same way. This is amazing! This is money for nothing! And the way to do this is to give this stuff away for free. Let’s monetize it by giving it away for free.”

And as soon as that was put in place and that was, you know, late 90s or whatever, the whole industry was more or less doomed because it sparked this race to the bottom, this idea that content should be free, and that the only way to exploit it as a publisher was to do it at mass scale.

And I was at Time Out when I saw them take the decision to stop the paid-for product and to do a free print product. And at the time they had tens of thousands of subscribers. And a lot of people were saying, and this was Time Out London, a lot of people were saying, “Do you know what, actually, let’s not do that. Let’s double down. Let’s take those subscribers and let’s grow them. Let’s be like The New Yorker, but for London, and if we can’t sell listings, let’s sell content. And that argument was very hard to make at that stage. And it didn’t get made.

But that sort of fundamental struggle still persists. And yes, I think it’s wonderful that publishers are really saying, actually it has to be about quality. We can’t play the quantity game. But it’s hard to monetize the quality game as well.

Arjun Basu: I think if you become a media brand that can differentiate itself through quality. Then depending on your niche, like what you guys have done then, the advertisers will come around, they will support something that’s worth it because they will want to be associated with that brand. Unfortunately, the only advertisers who really think that way are beauty and luxury brands. Which is not yours. But I want to talk to you about your editorial process because you guys curate the news for three months and the magazine has this daily sort of, This is what happened today. If it was a big day, you’ll have two things. Do you guys just read a lot of newspapers, or what do you comb through to come up with this day, this one should go?

Rob Orchard: The editorial team, basically reading the Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, every day is like a basic starting point. And then hopefully reading more broadly, we have a lot of people pitching us stuff. We’re constantly, hopefully out and about talking to people and trying to find out good things. So we have this kind of baseline overview bit, which is called The Almanac, where we look at all of the key stories that happened.

And then we use that as a jumping off point for long form features, deep 6–7,000 word reads, infographic treatments, photo features, and so on.

Arjun Basu: Because reading the magazines, and I read quite a few of them, you come across something on a certain day and you have to stop and think, and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that happened.” And it’s delayed gratification, it’s just there. It happens many times on a single page.

Rob Orchard: That makes me so happy that you’re saying that, because that’s exactly what I want. Exactly! The feeling is “Oh my God, I forgot all about that.”

So this environment that we’re working in, or that we’re living in, all of us, is so intense. It’s so novelty focused. It’s so scary. And then it just stops. And one of the things that we talk about often is how often do you hear the beginning of a story but not its end? How often do you get three or four days of blanket coverage of something, then it drops off the news agenda, and nobody really gets the privilege of asking the question, What happened next?

And you mentioned that magazines are inherently slow. You’re absolutely right. I think the difference with us is just the scale, right? So, like, waiting for three months to look back on big events, it does give you this lovely benefit and advantage. And some of it is practical.

For example: people who are caught up in a big event, like, for example the riots in Dublin back in November. They get interviewed en masse in real time, when it’s still going on, when the building is still burning, when they’re still processing their feelings and emotions, when they’re still trying to work out if they’re going to get compensation and what the whole thing means.

We get this lovely benefit of journalists going back three months later. Nobody else is talking to them. The story has moved on. And their thoughts have settled, and they’ve worked out who was in the wrong, and what were the undercurrents that were going on behind it and so on.

So you get a fuller and richer story. And in a way it’s more straightforward to get. And people are more eager to tell those stories, because they’re not being hassled and chased after by 20 different news organizations at the same time.

Arjun Basu: That’s what a good documentary does. It looks at an event that happened, a well-known event, and just destroys your perception of that event, because it brings the underlying things to light. It almost feels utopian to me. When I was reading the magazine and thinking about it, I just thought Oh, it’s great. But here I am surrounded by notifications of something happening that mean nothing to me, but I’m bombarded with them. Your magazine almost feels aspirational when I read it.

Rob Orchard: I think you’ve absolutely put your finger on it. We’ve always seen it almost as an experimental magazine. Can you fund really good and interesting journalism in a magazine that is completely free of advertising and uniquely supported by its readers?

And the answer is, after 14 years: Yes, just about. You can. But you need to stick at it. You need to be there for the long haul. And I think part of the beauty of this, the thing for me as well, is that it is a bit quixotic. It’s this group of us, all just trying to create and craft something that is beautiful and hopefully smart and leaves people feeling that they understand the world a bit better. And also that they’re not totally depressed. Like they feel a little bit uplifted hopefully, and hopefully amused at times and so on, as well. And I always thought that it was going to be a niche thing. I never thought that we were going to, you know, suddenly get into that old school magazine that was in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies.

It was always going to be niche. But what I hoped was that the people who did get it, a good number of them would have that reaction and be like, “Yeah, I get this. I like this. I’m not really sure how they’re making money, but good for them. And I’m going to continue to support them.”

“Tyler Brulé was asked why Monocle doesn’t do social media. He was like, ‘Because I’ve got a magazine!’ And that’s it: Social media is for people who don’t publish stuff. ”

Arjun Basu: You mentioned two of my least favorite things before. One was SEO, which was the death of a lot of things, in my book. But then you mentioned AI too, which may be the actual death of SEO. What do you think is going to happen?

Rob Orchard: I did a little TEDx talk back in 2014. So it’s just coming up to 10 years later. And I made a load of bold claims, based on the technology that there was then, about what was going to happen to journalism. And it’s getting uncomfortably close. So I want to make some bold claims in a TEDx talk, so I said, “Ten years from now, there will not be a single printed newspaper left in the Western world.”

I think probably I’m likely to be proven wrong, in just a few months time, unless something drastic happens. So I was looking at AI, I was looking out over stuff like the robotization of reporting, and that was really in its infancy. And if you look at what it was back then, it was basically sports stuff. All of the feeds were coming in with the details of sports games, and it was being turned into templated, idiomatic language and being put out.

And that seemed a little bit scary. And there was a lovely example as well, they did it as well for earthquakes. Because the seismology centers would send in reports about earthquakes. But there was this lovely one that happened in the States where they got confused about the data and they ended up automatically reporting an earthquake that happened in 1903. Fun stuff like that.

But now, where we are now, we’re just in the foothills of AI content. We are about to get into a stage where it’s almost impossible to tell whether what you’re reading has been written by AI or by a human. And most people will just accommodate that, and they won’t get that upset about it. Because most people don’t spend so much of their time, as you and I do, thinking about journalism, worrying about journalism, hoping there’s a path forward, like speaking with other worried journalists.

Most people just accommodate that. And actually for most people also, if they can get like a drumbeat of reasonable information, and if it’s provided in a convenient and tailored way for free, that’ll be great. However, I do think that the faster things go, and the more dystopian they become from our point of view, I think the more it opens up to people who are willing to pay for something that’s very obviously of a higher quality, that’s definitely been made by humans, and not algorithms. And that, crucially, brings them stories that they didn’t know they wanted to read.

That serendipity component, which magazines are so good at—and which lots of people talk about on this show—serendipity, that this magazine is a storehouse of ideas, this magazine that’s going to make you think about something in a completely different way that an algorithm never will, because an algorithm is just designed to work out what you like and feed you more and more of it.

Arjun Basu: Yeah I think one of the public facing advantages of AI is going to be actually that it’s going to destroy search. And it’s going to force publishers to stop being so lazy, just hoping that Google is going to pick up their stories. And then the whole quantity/quality thing happens all over again for those who haven’t done it yet. And it’s going to force them to go back to quality and to think about their voice. And we’ll start hearing those old editorial concepts again. And not everyone’s going to go to print, obviously, but I had a guest on just recently who said, “We’re going to have to start thinking about our website again.” But more than that, print is going to be this bulwark against this wall, standing athwart of AI saying, “This was created by humans.” That market is there.

Rob Orchard: I agree with you. And print still has, this is not necessarily correct, but the perception is that print still has an inherent value that digital doesn’t. And I guess that’s probably because we were all educated from the birth of digital to expect everything that was digital to be free.

And I know that there’s been paywalls and so on since then, but fundamentally when you think about those things, you think about it being, you know, like free because it’s not a physical product. And people will still put their hands in their pockets for a physical product. I don’t know if that’s a generational thing and whether the kids that are coming up now there just won’t be that kind of component.

But, you know, like a lot of people I do take heart from the astonishing resurgence of vinyl, for example. You know that kind of tactility. Like, the internet doesn’t smell of anything. Magazines do. The internet doesn’t do nice things to your fingers. Magazines do. The internet is not something where you can fold down a tattered page and hand it to a friend over a coffee and say, “This! You’ve got to read this.” It’s not the same thing at all.

Arjun Basu: You can’t throw the internet at anyone. You can’t hit them over the head with the internet.

Rob Orchard: The internet cannot be used as a weapon. It can obviously, but not as a physical weapon.

Arjun Basu: Not as a physical weapon. So, the fact that you guys are on social media, is that ironic or just something you have to do?

Rob Orchard: It’s something we have to do. And we have these vexed conversations over and over again. Do we get off? Like X is horrible. Do we get off? Instagram seems fatuous and we have to throw money at it if we want anybody to see anything. Do we get off? It was one of those things where it seemed mad not to set it up at the beginning. I don’t really know what it does for us.

Tyler Brulé was asked about this one time. He was asked why Monocle doesn’t have any social media presence. He was like, “Because I’ve got a magazine!” And there is something about that. This is for people who don’t publish stuff. That’s what social media is.

But I don’t know. It feels like a big step to make that final departure from it. But we don’t, in any sense, rely on it. And I’m not sure that it’s ever particularly done anything from us. A couple of times we’ve had things that have gone viral on social media.

Arjun Basu: I can see it for the infographics more than the magazine itself.

Rob Orchard: So we had an infographic that went viral on social media. And it was super exciting because it was really early on. It was 2012. And it was this lovely infographic that we’d done and it got picked up, and it channeled something like 45,000 people to our website in a day. And the first time that Marcus and I knew about it was that our website had crashed because we didn’t have enough bandwidth or whatever it was.

So we rapidly bought some more. We thought, “Ah, we’re going to cash in. This is going to be the big thing. This is amazing!” And 45,000 people through in a day. And obviously that went on for a while at decreasing levels. We sold almost no subscriptions off the back of it.

The mental leap that you have to make between “I’ve just been sent a cool infographic. I’m on the site of the infographic. It’s the site of a print magazine. The print magazine does this. I’m going to put my hand in my pocket and buy it.” It just doesn’t work.

Conversely, anytime that we go on the radio, it’s amazing. We sell 80–100 subscriptions. And in fact, it was a radio station that saved us in our early days, because we put the first issue out and sales were not going well at all. Our projections turned out to be absolute nonsense, not far off that: “All we need to do is get 0.1 percent of the British population to buy the magazine, we’ll be rich!”

Turned out not to be what was going to happen. And I was looking at this magazine after issue one, I was like, “This is going to go under, this is not going to work at all.” And then Marcus, my coeditor, he got onto Radio 4’s Today program. And I was listening to him on internet radio and I was watching our subscription feed. And in the 10 minutes that he was on there, we sold 10 subscriptions.

And that day we sold 400 subscriptions. And that saved us. That gave us the money to print issue 2 and we snowballed from there. You’re right, actually. Virality online—it’s lovely. But it’s actually fundamentally meaningless in terms of selling print magazines.

Arjun Basu: It feels like newsstand. Newsstand was great for being visible, chances are you were losing money on every issue you sold on the newsstand. And I think social media, in general, is that way. You do it just to be visible, but you’re not actually selling anything.

Rob Orchard: I think that’s exactly right. The other way to think about it is, so somebody listens to this podcast and, “Ah, that sounds interesting.” And one of the first things that they’ll do to check us out is go on social media. And actually, if you haven’t got a presence, then they might well think, This magazine is now closed down. It’s almost like you need to do it as a sign of life. And you need to have a basic level of activity just to keep it ticking over.

But we’ve been through so many iterations, so many false dawns, so many silver bullets that turned out not to be made of silver at all. And it’s a bit disheartening in a way. We’ve tried doing big-series stories in bite-sized chunks, and we’ve tried doing lifestyle stuff, and we’ve tried doing, like, all sorts of interactions and competitions and things like that. And, fundamentally, the only thing that really works is throwing money at it. And then your thousands and thousands of notional followers might actually see some of the stuff that you put up there.

Arjun Basu: And even that, basing a business model on something you don’t own, is fundamentally dangerous.

Rob Orchard: We’ve seen a load of big brands over the last couple of years fall to pieces through exactly that. Vice, as I understand it, a lot of what it was doing, a lot of its reach was based on its amazing social media game. And then the algorithms change slightly or people deprioritize news or whatever it might be. But, you go from being a $5-billion company to being done, basically.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. And very quickly too, although, it’s like that old saw about going bankrupt: You’re not and then suddenly you are. How many of your readers are outside of England?

Rob Orchard: Thirty percent of our readership is outside of the UK. Our number one market is the US. And then after that is Germany and the Scandinavian countries.

Arjun Basu: When you look at the list of even just the other slow journalism publications that you list on the website, a lot of them are in Europe. They’re the Dutch, and the Germans, and the Scandinavians. And I’m sure there are more than that. Those are just the ones listed. Is slow journalism like a grouping? Do you have conferences or are you just helping each other out?

Rob Orchard: It hasn’t really turned into that. I’m surprised that there haven’t been more publications. And actually early on, I thought, Do you know what? This is going to be amazing. We’re going to license this magazine all around the world. And very early on, we had a South Korean licensee and we signed a deal with them and we met with them and it was actually fantastic and super exciting.

And then some very strange things happened and they ended up sacking a series of different editors. And then the final editor was sending us photos of the Korean version of Delayed Gratification coming off the presses over Christmas.

And I was sharing the pictures with the team and we were all super, super excited. It was amazing to see what we’ve done, in a different language and with the tweak design and so on. And then he went very quiet and then he got sacked as well. And then the whole deal fell through. And I think I had thought early on that there was going to be this kind of blossoming of them, but it hasn’t really been the case.

But ultimately, I suppose also, part of what we’re doing is trying to do something that kind of slows things down for people, gives them perspective, and context, and hindsight. But part of what we’re doing is just trying to make a great magazine—just a great standalone magazine that can sit there on the newsstand alongside some kind of big, storied, mainstream titles that have been around for decades and hold its head high.

Arjun Basu: Okay. So I always end these things with the same question for everyone. What are three things in media or three magazines that are exciting you right now?

Rob Orchard: A lot of the magazines that I get really super excited about are ones that I have been introduced to by Stack Magazines. Stack Magazines is run by a great guy called Steve Watson and it’s the independent magazine subscription service. He’s been going a couple of years longer than us.

For years we shared an office together in central London that was wonderful and he’s a guy who knows stuff inside out. Sometimes I get one of the magazines and I know almost immediately it’s not for me, but that’s fine. Because there’s always something you get from it.

But there’s three that I’ve gotten from him in the last couple of years that have really stuck with me. So there’s one that’s called Offal. And Offal is just brilliant. I’d like to, if I may, just read to you a little bit from their mission statement because it makes me very happy.

“Upon our hideously wonderful cultural tureen, Offal collects experiments with form, excursions into the avant larde, and fiction offcuts that never quite found their place. It’s afterlife for Overmatter and a fresh start for the orphans of the creative process. So sink your teeth into our haggis of literary culture. Savor our andouillette of oddness and wonder. These are our brawlers, ballers, and bastards. Crafted with love, then flung into the world with reckless glee, guts and all.”

It’s one of those magazines where you can just feel the excitement of the editors—so this is the first issue—the excitement of the editors. It’s a jumble of ideas. There’s a very distinctive aesthetic, this red and white aesthetic.

And, as with all good first issues of magazines, there’s too much in there. They’ve probably got two or three magazines worth in there and they might want to calm it down in future issues, but it feels so alive. And you get so many independent magazines that are just, “It’s a fashion magazine, but with a twist because it’s also about travel.” Or, “It’s a travel magazine with a twist because it’s also about this hipster lifestyle that somehow we’re still aspiring towards.” It’s just nonsense, or it’s about coffee. No more magazines about coffee, please!

When you get a really imaginative one, it makes you stand up. And the one I’ve just been sent, Serviette, I absolutely adore. I think it’s too big. Although actually, I was going to say it’s too big because it’s not going to get through people’s letterboxes, it might just because it’s relatively narrow and long, so it might be okay.

It’s incredibly bold and beautiful, and it smells of effort. Every page reeks of effort. You can tell how much thought has gone into everything. Quite apart from anything else, they have recreated recipe book photo shoots from the 1970s in full color and it’s just delightful. The sort of slop that we used to think of as high-class food just four decades ago, five decades ago. It’s just astonishing, and beautiful, and things like that.

And then finally, I really like a magazine called The Fence. So The Fence is a relatively new magazine in the UK. It’s the sort of magazine that I would probably launch if I was launching a magazine now. It’s saddle stitched cheap to print so you can do lots of them and sell them at a relatively good, good price.

It’s not that, kind of, ponderous, big perfect-bound thing that’s being sold for £25, which, when I see it, I just think, I don’t know that’s going to work. And it’s funny. It’s just funny. Not every single thing in there is hilarious, but they do hit the mark more often than not.

And it’s really quite exciting to see a brand coming up like that. It’s got shades of Private Eye, which is one of my absolute favorite magazines of all time and one of the most successful magazines in UK history. It’s got shades of that. It’s got that same sort of feel. It doesn’t quite occupy the same space, but it’s immediately recognizable to people.

And so I think they're super-exciting because I think they’re actually going to really go places. It’s clearly made by people who know magazines and care about them.