of a magazine is its entirety: its view of the world, its table of contents, its look and feel, its tone and design, its serendipity and even its advertising pages. I honestly don’t see how searching for a number of isolated items on the internet is going to replace this overall experience.
INNOVATION: What are the most important reasons for the sustained success of Abril? Is it its values, perceptions...?
RC: There is no question that believing in and adhering to our basic values of integrity, independence, quality and commitment to the truth are absolutely fundamental, because, over time, they are the basis for our readers’ trust in our publications. But so is our continuing obsession with knowing our readers and their interests. This goes way beyond doing market surveys. First of all, it involves editors and journalists meeting with and talking to their readers on a regular basis in order to learn how they live their lives, what they’re interested in, what they’re worried about, what they eat for dinner, where they go on weekends, what they watch on TV and, of course, what they read and don’t read in any given magazine. But it also involves replying to their letters and emails, asking for their opinion on timely subjects and always trying to guess what they want to know that they don’t know they want to know.
Almost equally important has been the
development of an extraordinarily efficient common infrastructure for our magazines that stretches all the way from a great printing plant to world-class subscription sales and fulfillment, newsstand distribution and home-delivery operations.
INNOVATION: You are known for the passion you show for print media.
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“I used to read under the covers after going to bed.I remember my mother com- ing to tell me to turn off my flashligh.”
When and why did you fall in love with .magazines?
RC: I have had a lifelong passion for
words and have been an omnivorous reader ever since I was very young. I remember my mother coming to tell me to turn off my flashlight I used to read under the covers after going to bed. Inevitably, I became the editor of both my high school newspaper as well as its first yearbook. All of this was compounded when I simultaneously studied both journalism and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote my graduation thesis on magazine publishing and then was hired as a trainee by Time Inc – at the time, the world’s most extraordinary magazine publisher.