Popular culture, fashion and art are only a few of the subjects covered by Paper Magazine.
Almost 40 years ago, Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits, both journalists, co-founded what started as just a piece of paper but soon evolved into a trendy magazine and website.
Hastreiter and Hershkovits first met while working for the Soho Weekly News, a weekly alternative newspaper published in New York City. Hastreiter was the Style Editor of the newspaper while Hershkovits held the position of News Editor, there they both became familiar with the underground punk scene.
Sharing an interest in nightlife and meeting creative people, the colleagues became friends. So in 1982, when Soho Weekly News stopped being published, the two friends did not have the heart to stop.
However, the industry was crumbling down and it was not the right time to invest money in something new. On the other hand, there was a real boom in the art, fashion and music industry with people such as Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean Michael Basquiat at their peak.
So in 1984, Paper was first published as a single piece of paper, a poster. This was sold for 50 cents in the streets of New York City.
“But in the beginning, it was all freelance and friends and as it evolved, we added more and more people to do a lot of the jobs that I had been doing. And I did every job, including taking out the garbage.”, recalls Hershkovits.
As the magazine took off, it evolved into a black and white 16 pages monthly printed magazine.Then the word of technologies started to grow as well, with the arrival of the internet, it seemed natural for the magazine to get their online version too. Paper was one of the first print magazines to make a website in 1994.
With the rise of social media, Paper grew more and more popular. In 2014, their “break the internet” issue became famous worldwide. Indeed, reality star Kim Kardashian was their cover model along with her No Filter: An Afternoon With Kim Kardashian story. The style of the cover was really unique, quite controversial and featured partial nudity.
“We’ll make an issue called ‘Break the Internet.’” It was totally Drew’s idea. “And everything in the issue will be about breaking the internet.” I was like, “That’s a genius idea, I love it, yes. A thousand percent.” It was a genius solution.”, Kim Hastreiter recalls.
Jean-Paule Goude, a french photographer and graphic designer, who has worked with Dior, Saint Laurent and Lacoste was the one who took the pictures which helped the magazine’s boom. The shoot was a re-creation of Goude’s work featuring a series of photographs called “Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976” , also known as “Champagne Incident” from his 1982 book Jungle Fever.
In less than 24 hours after the launch of this cover, the magazine racked up over five and a half million search results. Since the story was published, it has gotten over 34 million unique page-views, which is more than double the number of page-views Paper normally receives annually.
This marked Paper’s passage from its arty, downtown style with a small but loyal following to the digital-media version focused on the mainstream pop-culture scene. The magazine reached a huge level of popularity especially around younger audiences. Nowadays, they are extremely popular on Instagram where they are followed by 1.6 millions people.
“Of course it’s [was like] the famous Jean Paul Goude photo and it went all over the world and became a global, viral madness and has been, well, like an albatross ever since, because it’s very hard to repeat. But, we’re doing other things.”, says David Hershkovits in an interview to TabletMag.
If you take a look at Paper’s most successful stories, “Tim and Eric Do High-Fashion Drag” or “How Nicki Minaj and Female Artists are Turning the Color Pink into a Weapon”, you realise that they mainly target women and members of the LGBTQ+ community but most broadly creative people.
As for the type of article, they have a lot of different categories such as Fashion, LGBTQ+, Internet Culture or Break The Internet. They recently added Care which address current events and foster activism on Paper’s website
When asked what do you want your readers to get out of Paper, Kim Hastreiter says “Inspiration. One word. Just be inspired. I love to inspire people and I love to find inspirational people and turn other people on to inspiring people.”
In 2017, Hastreiter and Hershkovits decided to sell their company to Tom Florio, the former senior vice president publishing director of American Vogue and former chief executive of Advanstar Fashion Group along with Drew Elliot who was Paper’s chief creative officer.
The struggles of the media world and how to make money out of a magazine became too much for Hastreiter. “I was just hustling, and I was just exhausted from it. It’s exhausting because, you know, a magazine is not a business model anymore. So I had clients and I was doing everything to try and bring in the money.”, she explains.
That’s when she started talking to Drew Elliot about leaving him the magazine. He had a completely different vision from her but he had been working with Paper for a really long time and she trusted his creative ideas.
Florio says that their new plan is to grow the digital content into the primary revenue source. To do so, they will be expanding the team, investing in video and viral strategies and building “social architecture and distribution” technology.
Today, three years after the magazine was handed over to Florio and Elliot, Paper publishes 4 printed issues per year, one for each season.
On the other hand, they update their online magazine all the time, create new audio and video content along with their social media accounts which are followed massively. Their cover usually features celebrities with past issues featuring singer Katy Perry, athlete Colin Kaepernik, model Naomi Campbell and actress Zendaya.
Their new vision has definitely paid off. Indeed, since 2014, Paper has quadrupled the number of visitors to its website and its social media presence quintupled, according to internal figures.
Paper still has a humble print circulation of 155,000 magazines per issue mainly based in Los Angeles and New York.
However, Paper does not use any advertisement on their online version and all of their articles are free to read. This leaves us wondering, how do they survive ?
First, Paper Magazine is published by Paper Communications, a multi-platform company that also offers marketing services to companies wishing to connect their brands to its communities. Their services include cultural and communications strategy, experiential marketing, event production and influencer marketing.
Second, their print magazine is quite expensive costing 14$ per issue without a subscription in the USA. If you want to order it from outside of the United States, it will cost you almost 50$ for one issue. They also have a shop where they sell clothes ranging from 25$ to 50$.
When it comes to Paper’s future, that position is clear “We want to create something so exciting, so coveted, you want to go to that destination,” Drew Elliot explains. Paper is no longer only a magazine. It’s a brand, a concept, a multiplatform experience.
