Will Dean

0:43 magazine uh and not the independent itself if that's on record um I've got my little clicker here I'll just start by showing you um this is this Saturday's edition of the magazine uh and the Saturday that's just gone out um I thought it'd be quite interesting to show you this just as a kind of a little lesson about kind of the weekly process of putting the magazine together um we obviously everyone has been watching skeleton at Sochi for the last few weeks and we were kind of lucky enough to be offered in I think it's about September quite a long time for us really good access with one of Team gb's skeleton Riders so we thought that'd be great at

1:22 the time she was number one in the world and was nailed on for the gold medal we were kind of assured by her Representatives um if anyone is a particularly Keen skeleton fan I'll say that isn't actually Lizzie Arnold who won the gold medal it was Shelly Rudman who since we agreed to interview her has kind of plummeted slightly down the rankings and came 16th uh in Sochi so we rather cunningly didn't make that too clear on the cover um I just said I started on the um magazine about eight months ago I'd been on the daily features desk at the independent before that and I'd worked on a magazine I'd worked in the guide at the guardian for a couple of years before that so I kind of done weekly I'd done daily which

2:03 is absolutely mental and breaks your brain and kind of was quite glad to go back to a weekly which feels slightly luxurious but I could kind of do with a lot more time I think because doing a Weekly Magazine I mean 60 pages every week so it kind of comes around and we have quite a small team so it can kind of blow your mind and you get to the end of Friday and kind of never want to look at it again and then you have to go by the paper the next day and it's there I'll show you these are the first two we did um when I started we've had a redesign which was part of the independence hole redesign under Matt Willey

2:36 um just to kind of show you how it's how it's changed I actually quite like these two um although the second one I had a sort of long running battle with a fashion editor Who convinced me and assured me that to celebrate the Royal christening because the independent famously doesn't really cover the Royals the best thing to do would be to hire the country's number one Kate Middleton look alike and borrow some babies and put them in very very expensive sort of hot Couture dresses and see if anyone noticed but um I think we we kind of got away with it um when the guys asked me to talk tonight I kind of said you know what what do you

3:15 want me to talk about and they seemed quite interested in you know how you kind of go about putting a magazine together on a weekly basis and what the process for that is and I kind of had to stop for a second and think well I've not actually really considered because it comes around so quickly I I've not really thought too much about what that actual process is so I um one of my favorite magazines is a Bloomberg businessweek which is you know something that a lot of people who work in magazines say you know we love business week it's um are directed by um a guy called Rich Turley who used to

3:47 be the guardian and it said it said Josh tranjul is a genius but basically they make business which you know can be quite dull and it's lots of dry subjects they make it seem very interesting I mean mainly through design but also you know they they cover the right things but I'll just show you a few more these are on cover junkie which is a great website which um kind of has covers throughout the the week updated um this uh coming up is sort of my favorite one of theirs probably my favorite sort of magazine magazine cover of the last year I think I mean it's silly it's that it's about something quite dry and serious which is messed you know the biggest mess shipping

4:25 container bow in the world but having sort of Holy Ship in 112 Point font I think is quite a fun way to do it um and I mentioned this because um basically the the process of kind of going through and thinking about doing a cover on a weekly basis because it's so quick you don't really get a chance to think about it but they have this great feature called um the cover Trail which they have every week um and it's the first thing I'm sure lots of other people who work working mags kind of go to to kind of see what they came up with I mean if it's something I'll just go back to this quite mad J crew cover they had where

4:58 they had Prince William and Prince Kate again um dressed in J crew and just to sort of see how they they got to that end product I mean this one's quite funny because I mean it's a conversation between Josh and Richard um and you know just focusing on Holy Ship as a massive headline um so I that's similar if kind of a better articulated look at how we do it on the independent magazine um that's the end of the cover trailer and their details um says turnover so it's kind of a little bit like peering over the shoulders of someone as they make it and um so I'll try and do similar with um I've just picked a couple of our issues just to um because and they're not necessarily the best ones we've done

5:44 um and let's keep sort of repeating it but the you know they're very fast turnaround of it means you you kind of never are going to be happy with what you end up with um so the first one I want to talk about um I mean lots of magazines especially kind of newspaper supplements they do end of year specials and I always found that they could be quite dry and quite repetitive and quite similar and you end up you know with kind of pictures of the year or just kind of a straight review of the year or A to Z of the year and I wanted to do something slightly different from that um so this is just to demonstrate um the influence if that's a generous way of putting it at a big ship cover so Holy

6:22 Ship had on a couple of our issues um so I I kind of wanted to do an end of year thing that could become a kind of fun franchise that we we could do each year and um I remembered when I was in the guide we did this until the end of 2009 very fun thing called and the people who ruined the decade and um it was kind of the most noise we made I mean I think the guide can sort of sometimes slip away a little bit mainly because it's so Diddy and kind of hidden you know inside the guardian package but it was kind of it was very Daft and silly and that's kind of what we we thought we did well so we kind of had people you know kind of uh Usual Suspects like Simon Cowell who

7:04 we could kind of legitimately accuse everyone in the decade but kind of Daft things as well like zombies and Michael Sarah who got in there above Osama Bin Laden I'm not quite sure how so I kind of I like the idea of doing this kind of concept that I mean obviously they can't do that every year because it's a decade but you could maybe make it a year there's another one as well um which has sort of since been discontinued I love us Esquire um and they had kind of from very early on in their creation they had a uh an annual in January I believe uh called dubious achievements and it it's kind of a way of having a cake and eating it and

7:36 and covering you know stuff that's happening in the air but kind of moving it on a semitone or something um another one that's great is New York Times every December do the lives they lived which is a kind of series of essays and some pictures and thoughts on people who've died that year um the one on the left is actually James gandolfini's Cadillac and the the essay with it was really kind of moving and Brilliant so I mean it doesn't have to be Arch and silly um and I think that proves it um I mean obviously it's about dead people so it's not going to be wildly Jolly um so we we counted this concept I'll talk a little bit about the cover in a second but we thought well how do we cover the year because we we kind of

8:16 have to do it but what's a funny way to do it so in about September or so we we started thinking well what if we kind of got the unluckiest people of the year and you know instead of kind of doing something on the pope we do something on um the Cardinal of Milan I think it was who was basically the guy that everybody in in the Vatican said this guy is going to be the next Pope he's kind of the anointed one and then obviously wasn't so he kind of did that and had the serious things we also had slightly different things like badgers who'd been called or not being called as the case was um and uh the beaker that was included in quite a famous mum's net thread so it wasn't just people we didn't get a few I

8:54 don't know if you can see it on there there is a little caveat we struggled a bit with the cover um I mean I think if we'd had if we kind of thought about it a bit more we could have kind of designed some kind of branding for the unluckiest people the year that we could come back to next year which I think we'll do um we also tried some various I've not got the roughs sadly so I can't show you but um we kind of did things like we had the copy upside down on the headline we had some letters the wrong way around but it kind of just looked a little bit more like you know this is the stupid issue rather than the Unlucky issue it's very diff we thought it was quite tricky

9:27 to kind of capture bad luck um just using words my original idea actually was just to have Sideshow Bob from that episode of The Simpsons standing on a rake but we can get the rights to that and there aren't many kind of wire images of someone standing on a rake hitting themselves in their in their face so we tried to do it typographically and I mean when I went back and looked at this week I kind of wonder why the G and the E aren't falling off if the U and the ml so it still doesn't quite work but I think the idea itself was quite a fun thing and quite a good way of approaching it um I'll just show you the spreads inside um which again because we've got Howard here from

10:06 uh the Great British Bake Off who I don't know if everybody watches it but he had his custard stolen from a fridge it was a big Ferrari um sadly he looked a little bit like a slightly chubbier Michael Gove um which isn't sort of great pictorially so I think when we do this next year and we kind of got the whole year to kind of get good unlucky people we'll we'll try and kind of improve the presentation but I didn't want to sort of just show you stuff that I was really happy with which isn't much really um we got um John Terry who got in his kit for the second time having missed his second final year uh Chris Froome

10:45 who nobody cared when the Tour of France um and this chat I don't know if you remember he was accused of sending rice into Barack Obama he was an Elvis impersonator but was framed by another Elvis impersonator so it was kind of it was a good way of getting quirky stories that that might have been forgotten you know things obviously like the Pope that that wouldn't be forgotten but just kind of and showing our kind of mentality of how we look at things um so it kind of worked but I think there's a bit more on that um I think we probably will do it better next year and there's Dennis Farina who died on the uh that's okay Middleton again I didn't realize was three in there he died on the day that role baby was born so

11:25 unlucky him um I'll speak to you about a second issue before I finish um we we kind of have a set roster of um issues we have to do each year kind of we do a few travel issues a few fashion issues a few food issues um and they're quite good fun and they they kind of allow you to focus in a way and I kind of I wanted to do a travel issue we basically the independent um is among its faults it's very good for travel and has a weekly travel um magazine called The Traveler which has won lots of awards and we have Simon Calder who's kind of the biggest name in in travel and they cover kind of wonderful holidays every week so I didn't really want to do that and I didn't want to basically just send a load of journalists from DND on kind of

12:11 paid holidays that people might not necessarily be able to afford so we um we kind of narrowed it down and we decided that just doing it on trains might be a good idea even though trains can be a bit nerdy they're also kind of have been the focus of some of the best travel writing that's ever been done um so we I'll just talk you through the cover about what we ended up with my initial thought as you may have guessed here if you know Noma Barr was to maybe try and get him to do something that combined trains and kind of holidays which aren't too completely disparate ideas there's a couple that know myself in the last few years one when I was at the guide um I was actually inspired by my Deputy who was reading

12:53 um the what it's called the one the second uh on the top um I thought I should include that because I hadn't realized until I was researching this that it was commissioned by it's nice that so there they are um so my our director Kevin Bayless he had an idea of kind of trying to create a train from a load of old maps and uh he mentioned a chap called Martin and Neil um who'd done a few things for us before one of them was this a to z of 2013 um which we won't be doing next year because I don't like that kind of thing um and basically we said to him can you make a trainer of all maps thinking well that's

13:32 could be a bit of a full Zone but let's see what he comes up with and so we we gave him a week or two which again isn't a tremendous amount of time and the next day he kind of tweeted this which filled us with confidence where he'd basically been to a uh a second-hand Bookshop and got all these beautiful old um maps and we kind of thought well that's interesting they're going to come to a a bloody end and uh you'll see sort of not long after he'd kind of torn them to shreds um so we were quite excited to kind of check in with him and he said no it's fine I'll do it um and you know it'll work and we work so I'm drifting over here um so we after a couple of days he came back and he gave us this which

14:15 I was really happy with it I think it's really sort of quite unusual and beautiful and striking for a Saturday supplement cover um I would say that perhaps but I think often illustration isn't used enough in them and you kind of they can be a bit too kind of glossy and aspirational um and we should perhaps do that as well but um I thought it was the image ended up looking really nice and it was kind of the best thing I think I've done since I've been on the Mac um so then we kind of thought okay well this didn't actually happen in this chronological order but um we started thinking about well if we're doing trains what do we put in there and um

14:55 I've sort of been reading the great Railway Bizarre by Paul Thoreau and um which is sort of kind of known as the the greatest bit of travel writing about trains ever done possibly even though you know the kind of greatest book about travel period um so I thought well I'll aim high with our low budgets and see where we get so our email Paul's agent and said you know we're doing this thing about trains be great if he could do something and his agent emailed back and said well you know he's on a beach in Hawaii so probably not going to do it so we thought okay well that's um Troublesome but we'll we'll see what we can do and then we had an idea which I

15:33 I kind of part of the reason I wanted to talk about this issues because it was quite unusual and um I'm still not sure if it was the right decision or not so maybe you know someone could tell me later um we kind of wondered if it would be worth speaking going back to Wiley his agents and saying well what if we kind of extracted some of the great Railway Bazaar which came out in 1972 I think and obviously book extracts are very common but to go back and get something from a very old book which a lot of our readers could well have read is possibly Madness possibly a good idea um but they were they were quite up for it and I I kind of Justified it on the basis of well if you've read it there's

16:14 no real reason you'll be reading it recently and if you are there's probably only about two independent readers who are uh if you've read it before it's a great chapter it's basically Paul traveling from London Victoria to Paris gedernaud um back in the day when there's no Eurostar so it's a great chapter where you know he kind of gets annoyed by various of the tourists um and so we we thought well let's go for it and no one stopped us so we kind of thought it'd be good so um let's get that one um so we kind of ended up with this this package that opened with a big piece by Paul through and he also did a little interview for us as well kind of putting it uh into context and

16:56 kind of you know talking about trains in general and that led to us so we kind of had that and this pitch is beautiful isn't it it's I thought it was from about 1962 but it's from 1996 I think um we kind of use that as a jumping off point to get people to talk about Journeys that weren't necessarily completely joyful um because polls definitely wasn't he kind of has a crap meal in the buffet car and ends up in Paris freezing cold and sort of ready to go on this Epic Journey um so we asked kind of some of our writers in-house like John Walsh um and others to to talk about their training experiences and some of them were some of them were Jolly a lot of them were kind of tales of being you

17:35 know on the second bunk of a train going across India and getting puked on by you know a Backpacker um and I kind of thought that really is what I wanted to I mean it's not great for selling advertising to Holiday companies because I can tell you but um it's having stories in there that aren't so here's Paul I love this picture of him um having pictures of um sorry stories about traveling where it's not very glamorous and there is that kind of hint of Romance of traveling on the train I thought was quite a fun way to do it um we also had a really nice story by Manisha Rajesh who traveled India in every train across India and kind of wrote about the food which you know was a bit more of a kind of a foodie piece

18:23 more than a travel piece um and Evan Gordon got the kind of crap Trans-Siberian um there's two there's a nicer one that goes down the South and another one um and we actually even got our fashion Editor to um go back and look at our sort of famous Louis Vuitton show in Paris where I think it was John Galliano kind of took over an entire train station and in fact drove a training and kind of had you know everyone there dressed head to toe in Louis Vuitton with their famous baggage um so that's kind of that's two I mean they're quite unusual for us issues in that one was kind of uh end of yeary which obviously doesn't come around very often and one is on a

19:09 fairly strict theme but I think we were able to kind of work within those constraints reasonably creatively um and I mean I still feel like I've got a tremendous amount to learn about sort of not been doing it for that long um and kind of every issue I do I pick up and hate basically when it comes on Tuesday but then I've made peace with it by Friday and then three months later I kind of think well that was all right which is kind of what I've done with these um I mean independent is is quite interesting I mean we're we're not very well resourced compared to all the other National newspapers um but that's not really a moment because we compared to a lot of other places um you know reports for example we we have lots of writers and reporters kind

19:58 of on hand the the second we need them so we're kind of working within limits in one way and and not in another and I think there's lots of scope for doing creative things and making more uh good issues like these um hopefully um I will finish that but if anyone wants to tweet me or email me or get in touch with any questions uh do let me know but um that's it thanks