A conversation with Just Make Your Magazine author Josh Jones

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Josh Jones has done a lot of things when it comes to magazines: Editor. Writer. Maker. Custom publisher. Mentor. Evangelist. All of the above.

Has Josh helped write a book about hip hop in Mongolia? Yes. Has he sat back and watched Gordon Ramsey mash his face into a sandwich? Indeed. Has he written an instructive how to book that reminds the reader to always lift a box of magazines by bending one’s knees? Yes, again.

For more than 20 years, Josh has been creating magazines, both for resolutely indie concerns and reasons, but also custom publications for the likes of The North Face, Red Bull, Interscope and Nike. And while he has no illusions about the challenges the industry faces, he’s also resolutely optimistic about a world that he loves, so much so that his “field guide to publishing an indie magazine” Just Make Your Magazine is, true to its subhead, the “fastest selling self help book.” OK, I don’t know if that’s true. It probably isn’t if I’m being honest.

But still. You speak to him and you become an optimist. And this is not just because, as he says in the book, “indie magazine making has never been more popular.”

It’s also because, and perhaps caught up in the same optimism, I suggest that it’s possible we are over the Print Panic of the mid aughts and the industry, as a whole, is now back on a sustained kind of upswing. That’s an idea we’re going to explore on the show this season. Because there has to be some things that are right in the world, damnit.

Arjun Basu: I want to start by asking a rather open-end question.

Josh Jones: Uh oh.

Arjun Basu: What don’t you do?

Josh Jones: I don’t design. That’s for sure.

Arjun Basu: Yes. I was thinking how I was going to open this, and I just thought that was an easier question to ask because: editor, the books, the mags, the zines, the business, evangelist, drinker of Sancerre. So how did you get here? Where does this love of this world come from?

Josh Jones: So this goes back to the beginning of the century, which makes me sound old. In 2000-ish, I worked at a company called Cake in London, which was one of those very trendy, very creative, very weird companies that just did a bit of everything.

They did events and they did PR and they did stunts, and it was in an old church and everyone was working hard, but no one really had a job it seemed, and I was quite good at writing. So the bosses there, you do writing, write some stuff for us.

And there was a guy there called James Lee Duffy, who was a designer. And we set up a zine called Pavement Licker. It was an art zine, underground art mainly. No one could get published because they weren’t in books or they hadn’t been in magazines. But you couldn’t get published unless you’re in one. So this is like a vicious circle.

No one had websites. And no one had Instagram. So we published this black and white art zine, but we were fortunate enough to know some people in the scene who went on to become quite big. So Jamie Hewlett did some stuff who, obviously, is Gorillaz. And Banksy did some stuff. Benign. David Shrigley.

In 23 years we’ve done 15, 14 issues, which is lazy. But it’s fun. And that sort of sparked the love, I guess. And then, after leaving Cake, went traveling around the world and stuff, and then came back and then got into interviewing bands and reviewing bands and stuff for Music Press.

I was writing about graffiti as well. I was writing for free. I liked writing, but I was writing for free, so I thought I needed to take the next level, going back to university and did a postgrad diploma in journalism.

I got a job for a company called Independence United, where everyone was a freelancer and they’ve got this crazy contract, I guess called the Smirnoff Experience, where they went around the world doing weird gigs in like Russia and China and France and America, and they needed someone to be an in-house journalist in a way.

Eventually I decided to do a book on music festivals across the UK, which they asked me to edit. So I did that three years running. So then I had three coffee table books under my name. And then I left there and ran the OTO Academy TV YouTube channel, it’s basically setting up interviews for artists. So in a way it helped my editorship because I was talking to the music press and setting up shoots and things like that. Which was fun. Then I went to Red Bull to be the music editor for the UK website and the UK studio’s website and I was freelanced there, but I just didn’t enjoy it.

I just realized that websites are never ending. They’re really not fun things. I find them really uncreative because it’s just a screen and I’ve said in a few interviews, no one sniffs an iPad when someone launches a website. But if you give ’em a magazine, the first thing anyone does is hold it to their nose and smell it.

And it goes, Oh, I love print. After I quit Red Bull, I left and I thought I don’t want to do web stuff ever again.

I hate it. I’ve said this to a couple of people with a magazine, you have a certain amount of pages and that’s all you can put in. You can really fill them, or you make them very sparse. But you have that many pages and that’s it. With a website, it’s never ending.

Arjun Basu: The thing about print is it’s finite and it’s constraining. I think a lot of web-first people don’t appreciate that aspect of design or creation in print.

Josh Jones: Yes, I’m with you. It has to finish. You have to send it to print on a certain day and when it’s printed, you can’t ever change it which I love, and there will always be a mistake in a magazine.

But that’s part of what makes it more human. You can’t go back and change the mistakes you’ve made, so I love it.

I went back and I edited a bunch of magazines. So that’s how I got to where I am. I’ve just done sort of my own little thing, bit bored around the outskirts and I live in the indie world, which is a fun world to be.

Arjun Basu: You are Captain Indie and almost like an evangelist for that form. Or that ethos. And other than I will never edit for the web, what’s the one thing you would say you’ve learned?

Josh Jones: I think, I dunno, it sounds like some kind of inspirational gym poster, but it’s just go and do something. A lot of people build their own barrier, I think, like you can make a magazine, you can literally get some printer paper, fold it in half, and you’ve made your magazine.

It doesn’t have to be glossy and perfectly bound. That’s the beauty of indie world, probably because coming from a sort of zine-y world, you’re like, why not? It’s never been easier to make a magazine, but lots of information’s gate kept and - I haven’t done it - but I’m sure people will just make a magazine on your phone. You’ve got enough apps you could literally write and design.

You could retranscribe it all in one phone.

Arjun Basu: You could do it all there. Yeah.

Josh Jones: Apple haven’t come to me actually asking me to do that, just shouting it out there. But you could easily do that. But no one knows how and people are afraid to try.

Arjun Basu: So that segues. The book is called Just Make Your Magazine: A Field Guide to Publishing an Indie Magazine. Did you write it because you want to share your knowledge, which is considerable? Or because you sensed a need because people kept asking you? Or both?

Josh Jones: A little bit, but no one’s really asked me, come up to me. But I did some talks here in the UK with magCulture who do a thing called The Flatplan every year, which is a sort of web-based conference.

Jeremy Leslie, who runs magCulture here in London, he gets a bunch of people who work in the industry to do talks and people watch and ask questions and stuff. So I did that two years running on being an editor and then Steve Watson who runs something called Stack Magazines, I dunno if you know that, but it’s like a subscription and you get an indie magazine every month and you dunno what you’re going to get. I’ve known him for quite a while and he does a couple of in real life evening events.

So I did the same sort of thing and I realized the script I’d written that I could use for the talks. I was like, I could quite easily transfer this into a book. And I don’t want this to be a word-heavy book. I want it to be digestible and not too serious.

And because it’s like when you go on, like, YouTube and you’re, like, how can I draw? Or how can I paint? And you get on there and you realize by doing it is the only actual answer. There’s no secret to being good at art. It’s just practice and do it.

Arjun Basu: Reading your book, I realized I think you actually covered everything.

Josh Jones: That’s good. I’m sure there’s some I do, over my career you learn on the job like most jobs and I just thought, there’s things in here that I’ve been in meetings and I didn’t know what it was, so I’ve flagged it and then Googled it afterwards. So I’ll put these things in.

When you’re doing a photo shoot, you don’t often do big fashion, stylist-based shoots where you’re getting people involved. But when I became executive editor of Marvin magazine, when Marvin Scott Jarret from RayGun and Nylon, when he started his new magazine, he asked me to be exec editor, which was a step up for me for sure. And I learned a lot from Marvin and Gary Quirk, who was the art director, but he died earlier this year, I think late last year. But things like can we get an LOR? And I was like, I dunno what an LOR is. And it’s a letter of recommendation that a stylist needs to go to a brand and go, we’re doing this shoot with X band, X artist.

Can we use your clothes? It’s basically a mild insurance. So it is not someone going and stealing a load of high fashion clothes. Those things are things I’ve learned and it’s very simple to say, this is what it is. And you know what? This is the jargon for various things.

How to write a call sheet, which is who’s involved in this photo shoot or interview. These are the contact details. This is what it’s going to be. This is the timing. So everyone’s on the same page, literally the same page. Things like that. No one really teaches you.

With the book, I just help you. This is what people mean by these things. So that bit’s gone down quite well. Lots of people seem to like that.

Arjun Basu: You mentioned Marvin which I guess in many ways was a big break. How did they find you?

Josh Jones: By then I’d done quite a lot of mags. There’s a hotel in Ibiza called Pikes, which is quite famous for its rock and roll history. Freddie Mercury used to stay there I was doing a magazine for them which was fun because I got to go to Ibiza every year and took these photos and Fat Boy Slim plays like in this tiny little club they have there and PJ Harvey. It’s a cool place. And Marvin had posted on his Instagram and I think I’ve commented underneath, and then he messaged me and said, cool stuff.

And I was like, yeah, you too. He said he thinking he was starting this new thing. Would I like to come on board as exec editor? And it’s a very small team. It was me and him and Gary at the time. And a guy called Jeff, he was like marketing. And COVID hit. I was like, oh man. So coincidentally and helpfully for me: that killed the industry. So Pike’s Hotel wasn’t going to do any magazines for a while. They still don’t do it. They’re still recovering. But Marvin decided even though the world was locking down, he was still going to carry on with it.

I didn’t have the COVID gap of not earning any money, but I went in from Pikes straight into doing Marvin, which was cool. So that’s how we got in contact, was via Instagram.

Arjun Basu: Talk about Huck.

Josh Jones: Huck is funny really because when I left journalism college after doing this diploma, my first ever commission was this new magazine called Huck, which was on issue three or four, I think it was four. And I pitched an interview with this graffiti artist called Arofish, who’s the first western graffiti artist to paint on the, very apt now, wall in Palestine between Palestine and Israel.

That was my first commission, my first proper commission as someone who graduated from journalism college. I wrote on and off for them over the years and then lost touch with them a bit, and then they got in contact with me because they also, they publish a magazine called Little White Lies, which is a really good independent film magazine.

And they also do a magazine called Sandwich. Those are their three in their stable.

TCO London is the name of the publisher. They hit me up asking if I’d wanted to edit Sandwich magazine because it was brand funded and then they’d taken it in house and it’s going to be just an indie mag. So I did, I said that sounds fun.

Arjun Basu: So hold on. Sandwich transitions from being a branded, custom published magazine--

Josh Jones: The first four issues were in collaboration with Sir Kensington’s Mayonnaise.

They did this magazine called Sandwich, which is a brilliant idea, and they use sandwiches as a lens for a focus on culture. Each theme is a different sandwich. So the first one was the BLT, and they had stuff like they grow lettuce in space because it’s the easiest thing scientists can study. And then they did who cleans up after the Tomatina Festival where they chuck lots of tomatoes around. So there’s a photo story. They did a whole thing on this sort of rising trend in the UK of young female independent butchers.

So they did four of those. David Jenkins, the Little White Lies editor, did that. But then when Kensington’s decided to move on TCO London took it in-house as their own magazine, totally independent from brands in that sense. And they asked if I wanted to come do and edit that, take over from Jenks.

because he wanted to concentrate on Little White Lies. And I would say, yeah, of course. That sounds really fun. So my first one was the barbecue brisket issue, which had a guy called DJ BBQ on the cover. And then I’ve also done our Benny Blanco on the cover. We did the ice cream sandwich issue.

And then the latest one was Gordon Ramsey, who did the chef special issue where he was, came in as guest editor.

Arjun Basu: Mashing sandwiches into his face.

Josh Jones: Idiot sandwiching himself. That’s it. You can be a guest editor if you do an idiot sandwich with a sandwich in your own face and he is up for it. And it was to support his show Idiot Sandwich.

After I’ve done one issue of Sandwich. Niles, who was the editor of Huck, moved on, he went to Monocle magazine and Vince Madero, the publisher at TCO, was like, do you want to take over Huck? And I was still doing Marvin at the time.

I’ve done eight issues with Marvin. We’ve just had Trent Reznor on the cover of that, and I thought, this is quite a good time. The LA hours and UK hours are taking their toll. it would be quite nice to go to an actual office where there’s other people rather than just working on a laptop via Zoom.

So I left Marvin.

Arjun Basu: The London to LA time difference is a killer.

Josh Jones: Yes, it was getting brutal because you’re basically working all day and then all night you’re not sleeping. So yeah, after two years of Marvin, I’m very proud of all of this, that is a brilliant magazine. It’s beautiful. So luxury.

And then moving back to Huck, which is a bit more DIY focused lot. It’s a bit broader as well because Marvin’s music and sort of fashion. And Huck is counterculture. It has its roots in surf and skate. You can do what you want. It’s lots of global, random, small things. Doesn’t have to be the big famous person on the cover. So it’s fun. It is a very small team though. There’s no other, there’s no talent wranglers or fashion editors or features editors or anything. It’s very much hands-on. Everyone gets dirty to get it done. But it is a lovely magazine and has a very dear place in my heart.

Arjun Basu: Tell me about Ralph.

Josh Jones: Ralph is my latest thing which started one year ago. An old friend of mine called Chris Hassell owns a company called Ralph, and he’s like, I want to start making fun stuff. He’s sick of the algorithm. He wants attention, not addiction is one of his things we’re just looking at stuff and not learning.

There’s no fun in anything. He’s like, everything used to be fun. Like even work was fun. But now nothing’s fun. We’re being told what this algorithm tells us what to do and it’s just awful. He’s basically making an entertainment brand where he wants to make animations and podcasts.

But he wants to create it himself, but he wanted to start it with a magazine. And so using chaotic energy of the nineties mags, which I grew up reading. Like Loaded Magazine before, early Loaded magazines, RayGun too, with its design. So every theme is pop culture for the fun of it. And it’s lovely. It’s like we just find these cool, funny people.

We’ve got Lou Adler on the cover of this one, who’s 91, and it’s to put a 91-year-old person on the cover. It’s crazy, but he wrote What a Wonderful World with Sam Cook and he also produced Carol King’s Tapestry album and the Mamas and the Papas. He’s married to Darryl Hannah’s sister. He just recently produced Neil Young’s latest album and he’s 91! He brought the Rocky Horror Picture Show to the screen. He discovered Cheech and Chong. His best mate is Jack Nicholson and he owns the Roxy on Sunset.

And you’re like, this guy’s crazy. We did a brilliant cover with him. So it’s just total freedom. We have, I think, 18 features and 126 pages.

Arjun Basu: It is chaotic. As chaotic as you can get in print. When I was editing I the question that my staff hated the most was: why now? I would ask that whenever they pitched something. I’d say, why now? And Ralph’s answer to that question would’ve been, why not?

Josh Jones:So Chris, who’s the publisher and owner, is very much, yeah, let’s do it. And if it doesn’t work, fine. We might not use it, but he’s got a good amount of trust. "Why not" is definitely the Ralph ethos. I really love doing it. And it’s really colorful. It’s on glossy paper. When we started, I sent Chris off to magCulture and I said, what do you like in magazines? We’ll use that as inspiration. And he’s like, all these magazines, they’re just so serious.

If you don’t know who this furniture designer you are reading about is, you feel like an idiot. If you don’t know who it is or the paper’s so beautiful and you turn the page and you don’t want to actually put it in your bag.

You don’t want to scuff it. Chris is like, I want a magazine that you had rolled up and put in your back pocket. It doesn’t matter if you get dings on the cover.

Arjun Basu: Is that why it’s so glossy?

Josh Jones: If you look at a lot of my work, it’s usually always.

Arjun Basu: It’s all glossy. Yeah.

Josh Jones: And this one is the first proper glossy one I’ve done. What I really want to do is get a perfume sachet, like in the nineties, used to get those things, like for cool water or something. I want to bring those back and see if we can get a perfume company to do those.

Arjun Basu: I used to edit an in-flight magazine and we tried to get smell into the magazine but we couldn’t because of the flight attendants union. They had to know the chemical composition of the smells, and of course the factories had made these perfume strips. There’s only a few in the world. They’re like, we can’t tell you what we’re doing. That’s proprietary. And so we didn’t, but it was a whole issue about packaging and how we were overpackaged.

Now that you’re going to create print for brands. The stats back it up: print is the most engaging marketing tool and and the smartest. It’s just an investment and it’s a long-term thing. It’s not a short-term thing.

So how is that going? You have a lot of branded content in your background. You’ve done a lot of it.

Josh Jones: Yeah. Like you said, I did the Nike 1948. It was a London-based magazine for Nike, which we did three or four issues of. And I’ve done a book for North Face and Kampai!, which was actually paid for by Suntory, which was a lifestyle mag for the cocktail industry, which is really fun to do. I’m happy to work with brands in that way. Some people in indie world are like, no, has to be pure. But I made the mistake of launching a company, which I’ve been thinking about for a really long time, called International Magazine Gang. Bloomberg have written about it three times, about luxury brands moving back to print. And some of them are collaborating with an existing publisher like Dazed have done a few with Adidas, I want to say, or Nike. And some people have just on their own, magazines, high-end fashion brands.

But they’ve realized they don’t really want to be spending all this work making these beautiful things. And then, taking a photo and it being on a Twitter advert that’s on a tiny screen. And they want to have control of who sees it. If luxury brands are doing this, high street brands will follow.

This is not to disparage… a lot of creative agencies don’t do print and they haven’t needed to because there’s not been the sort of call for it.

Arjun Basu: They’re staffed by digital natives.

Josh Jones: Yeah, exactly. I did a Riso printing course with a guy called Ben Ditto, who’s a very brilliant creative director and used to run a publishing house, and there were a bunch of kids there from university in their twenties, and they didn’t know what CMYK was because they’ve just not been taught yet. And it really stuck with me. And I thought, brands wants to make a magazine say, and they go to their creative agency and they’re going to charge ’em a fortune and they’re probably not going to do a great job because they don’t have the experience.

I just bring this network of people that I know, freelance editors and art directors mainly, but, photographers, writers, printers so someone can come to me and say, can I make something and then I can either do it myself or I can use a different editor if they’re, more in tune with that sphere of culture.

Arjun Basu: I think I told you I want to be involved.

Josh Jones: I’ve written your name on my little Excel sheet.

Arjun Basu: The age thing is actually interesting, and I’ve heard this over and over, that this awareness is coming from younger people. It’s not a nostalgic thing. It’s actually from the ground up and not from the experienced people down. Everyone I talked to who is younger or who opened a store, I spoke to the people from Issues magazine shop in Toronto, all of their events, they were expecting millennials or boomers or Gen X and they were getting 20 somethings and it became a social thing. And that’s where the pickup was happening. And a lot of the people I’m talking to, they are creating magazines for, culturally, they’re for young people.

Josh Jones: Which was one of the reasons I priced it at £10 because I wanted to make it affordable and students bought it. And somebody in Manchester, the north of England, called Ella Horniman, she messaged me saying, I used my last £10 to buy it. She’s done a brilliant magazine called 1922, which she just needs some funding from a brand to do it.

It reminded me of Sleazenation and those sort of late nineties style mag, it’s all about the fashion of these really young kids coming from a really deprived part of Manchester, just doing it on their own.

But yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if the twenties and down are just rejecting living online all the time. It was on the BBC where they took magazines into a secondary school, which is for sort of 14 to 16 year olds. They gave them magazines and they all gave them back at the end and they said, no, they’re yours to keep, you can have them. And I’ve done this with some talks at universities with zines. So like I keep the zines and people are like, what? I’ve chatted to some people about the BBC report because no one has anything tangible. Even in computer games, you download it, everything’s on a cloud, everything’s on a phone, you don’t hold anything. For people to be like, you can keep it, like just have it and you can read it whenever you want and go back to it.

They’re like, it’s incredible just for their brains to work that out. So I guess people are like yearning to have tangibility. It’s a good thing. It’s human.

Arjun Basu: Luxury brands and fashion brands have always gravitated to print because it is tangible and they’re dealing with tangible things, even if it’s experiences, even if it’s hotels.

The hotels live on more than just vibe. You have to pull it off when you walk into the room. They’ve understood that and luxury brands, fashion brands for sure have understood it more than anyone else, which is why they never really abandoned print.

And I think as the internet erodes, which I think is accepted that it’s eroding that it never lived up to its initial promise, which was boundless and then, now, in enshittification is a word and we’re all using it. What more can print do that the internet or a screen can’t?

Josh Jones: So you get to keep it, it’s yours. I can’t really imagine people pulling pages out and put them on their wall like they used to covering their school books.

No one has school books. I guess you have a school iPad, don’t you? I think they’ll just coexist in the same way, that slightly tired analogy, but vinyl came back. People appreciate the sort of imperfections in that. And the sort of the experience of vinyl’s always going to be better than Spotify or streamers.

I feel like they’re just going to coexist in this world and people want to switch off from, like you say, the internet has definitely not lived up to what we thought it would be. Why would you want to go on? What’s just bad news whenever you open it?

Arjun Basu: To use a terribly overused marketing word, there’s authentic, and the fact that it’s an object, the fact that it lives once but also forever and that it won’t go away. Once it’s there, it’s not going to disappear like it does on the internet and it’s real.

Then we have to talk about what AI is threatening to do to everyone and everything. And it’s almost a guarantee or a hedge against that part of it too.

Josh Jones: It’s like a bastion, isn’t it? I it found really sad when Vice imploded in every way possible. But all those journalists who had left their bylines and stories on the internet hadn’t saved it or PDF’d it in any way, and then they just shut down the servers and it just gone forever. They’re gone. There’s no way of recovering that. People just, oh, it’s on the internet will be there forever.

Not necessarily.

Arjun Basu: No, it won’t. The agency I used to work for was sold and I can’t find any of my work.

Josh Jones: It’s awful, isn’t it? And you spend ages and you’re like, those are my things. So I always PDF’d everything that was online. I’ve got them in for hard drives and stuff. Even with hard drives, you’ll go and find the stuff I do quite like going back through, you can’t quite see it here, but I’ve got a whole bookshelf of magazines and stuff, books I’ve made. But it’s nice to go flick through them and find all of those things.

Arjun Basu: I have a theory and I want to bounce it off you, I think the last 20 years were an anomaly for print. I think it was like a dip or a panic and I’m calling it The Print Panic. Which happened because the business models and the money went online because it was more efficiently spent. But I think it’s like the media version of the Satanic Panic that happened many years ago, that we had a Print Panic and we’re going to find a new equilibrium.

We’re finding it. And we’re at the beginning of that.

Josh Jones: Absolutely. Amanda Mull, I think, who writes for Bloomberg and she’s written a bunch of it, but here it is. She’s like, fundamentally the issue is that people didn’t stop buying print magazines and they didn’t stop printing print magazines because consumers hated them, which is normally what happens at the death of an industry, isn’t it? People move on. They stopped happening because the money just was whipped out and went online. So it just became untenable to print magazines and sell them. People still want them, and that’s why if you look at Vanity Fair, which Amanda Mull goes on to write about Vanity Fair and Vogue and GQ, they’re luxury.

People didn’t care for the internet. Rich people don’t care about the internet at all. They don’t have phones, but they love tangibility and they’ll keep buying Vogue and they’ll keep buying Vanity Fair. There’s quite a lot of magazines now, like doing a US edition. And with Ralph, we’re now looking at doing a Japanese language edition which I’m very excited for.

Yeah there’s green shoots of recovery. Definitely. But I’m hoping you’re right, that it’s been just this brutal panic dip, and then it’s writing itself and it’s never going to be like the late nineties when you’re selling 350,000 copies of a monthly magazine.

Arjun Basu: I think we need to make t-shirts: “I survived the print panic of 2010” or something like that.

Josh Jones: I like it. Yeah, I made it, man.

Arjun Basu: I survived, but barely. I just have to ask you about the hip hop magazine from Mongolia. Because I think you’re the only person I can ask that question to.

Josh Jones: That isn’t a magazine, that’s a book. It’s a book, right?

Arjun Basu: Yeah. It’s a book. But it’s an object that was created that you did and it’s words that are put together that I don’t think I’ve ever uttered and might not ever again.

Josh Jones: That came about I was with, this sounds slightly media. My good friend Steph is a photographer and she had done a book, a photo shoot in Greece, a Greek island somewhere with some models, and turned it into a book. And James Lee Duffy, who I’ve mentioned a few times, designed it and it was printed, beautifully printed at a place called Calverts, which is like a cooperative here in London.

And I really love what they do. We had to have a launch party for it. So after drinking some warm wine we were chatting to another photographer friend called Alex de Mora, who shoots big campaigns for Adidas and Nike. And I’ve known him, I actually was the first person to ever commission him.

So I’ve known him for a long time. He had found out about the Mongolian hip hop scene, and there’s a rapper out there called Big Gee, who’s like the most famous rapper. So he went out to Ulaanbaatar, which is the capital of Mongolia, and shot some beautiful shots of the hip hop scene. And it’s obviously tiny as you can imagine, but he went and met the kids and the dancers in this city in Mongolia. Which is like 60% tents. People still live in tents like their ancestors did. And Genghis Khan did, out on the hills. As we were talking about it, he was like, I want to do something with the pictures. And we realized collaboration had just been born. So we were like, why don’t we make a book or something?

It looks a bit like a magazine because it’s soft covered, but yeah, it’s beautiful.

Arjun Basu: So your final thoughts in the book are basically... I used to tell people who want to be editors, what do I need? And I said, you need to be curious, but mostly your antenna always need to be up. And that’s the tiring part of it. Something may spark a different angle. And so it really is in the end about just being open to the world. It’s a very literary thought.

Josh Jones: I’ve not thought of that, keeping an antenna up. That’s all right. I’m going to steal that off.

Arjun Basu: You go ahead.

Josh Jones: I dunno, I just feel like you can file stuff away and we have so much information being vomited at us and thrown at us and everywhere you go.

There’s stories and everything. Even when you’re browsing Twitter and it’s just horrendous, there’s usually something that you’re like, that could make a good story. And I’ve got a weird memory where I can remember a lot. I remember everyone I went to school with names and things that happened, like people I’m still friends with, like, how do you remember these sorts of things?

What I do is curating. What I see as my job is I have an idea: Who’s the best person to write that? Who’s the best person to shoot that? Which is basic editing, but I like getting that person who’s exactly right. In Ralph, we do a music deep dive. We have this idea to do emo music of the early two thousands in South Wales. Really niche. But Emma Garland, who’s a brilliant writer and a famous world writer, her culture, she’s culture editor of Vice, one of the best freelance writers I know, most music writers in the UK, she’s Welsh. I know Emma, so I was like, this could be perfect.

So she did a brilliant job. And then the new Ralph, actually, we’ve got a piece on the Music of Stampede Festival. Which I’m sure you are aware of in Calgary the sort of rock and roll element to it. Tracy Kawalik is a writer over here, but she’s from Calgary and her dad used to run two of the stages. She wrote this whole piece on it and had insider knowledge. So there’s going from a good idea and then being like who could do this justice, and who’s going to get this sort of scoop in this and the insider knowledge. So that’s how I like to edit my mags.

Steering the bus, but inviting the right people on that bus. I sometimes wonder what it would be like when you’re working in a big team. I occasionally get irate when you look at a culture magazine and they post their cover and the credits are about 50 people long.

And I’m like, I don’t have a nail technician. We don’t have a talent wrangler and we don’t have this person doing that. I wonder what it’d be like if someone out of the blue listening to this offered me a job as an editor of a magazine which has all that sort of infrastructure.

Arjun Basu: You may find that the grass is not greener.

Josh Jones: No, I do think that. Yeah.

Arjun Basu: Okay. Three magazines or media that are exciting you right now?

Josh Jones: Polyester immediately is just brilliant. Subscriber-led mainly. They haven’t got many pennies to rub together, but what they do is they reinvest it and they’re very upfront about that. I hope they’re listening to this. I’ve had ideas for covers four times in the last 12 months, made approaches. And then within two months they’ve had them, that same person on the cover. And I’m not talking big names, I’m talking about the up and coming names, and I’m like, fuck no.

Arjun Basu: Check your tech. They’re listening in.

Josh Jones: They’re listening. They’re so on the button with culture.

They just know what’s going on. Look at their photography. It’s fantastic. You look at their production values and you’re like, that is almost Vogue quality. There’s also another magazine over here run out of Brixton in South London by an editor called Tori West, which is called Bricks, which is fashion mainly, but just working someone working hard. Like literally come from nothing. Just had a vision and made her own magazine and she’s had some brilliant covers. I subscribe to both Bricks and Polyester. I just think they just do a great job.

And then Enthusiasmos magazine.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I’ve been trying to get ’em on. It’s a great magazine.

Josh Jones: It’s a great magazine. Roman Coppola and Johan Chairamonte. I don’t know how you say that name. It’s printed in France, which for some reason makes it cool. Smells beautiful.

Nutts magazine, which is by Richard Turley, who produces magazines every day it seems. But if you see it, it’s massive. It’s a black and white fashion bible, but go and pick it up and be absolutely surprised at how light it is. He’s used this crazy paper stock, a black and white thing, it is like a tome. It looks like it’ll break your toe if you dropped it and then you pick it up and you all gasp. Trying new things I think is just quite incredible. And all of those mags I mentioned are all totally different sizes, which shows you can just print whatever you want.

Arjun Basu: You can just print whatever you want, which is exactly what you say in the book. So that’s a nice, that’s a nice bow on the whole thing.