Show notes
Condé Nast was once synonymous with the excesses of the magazine industry's golden age: chauffeured cars, lavish photo shoots, enormous expense accounts, and glossy titles that commanded both cultural influence and premium advertising dollars. That world is long gone, but Condé Nast itself has endured. With CEO Roger Lynch now leaving the company, it's a good moment to ask what remains of that old empire. Has Condé Nast successfully reinvented itself around subscriptions, events, and premium advertising, or has it simply become a smaller, less culturally relevant version of what it once was?
To talk through that question, I brought back Jason Krebs, a media veteran who has held senior roles at The New York Times, Google, and Disney. Jason also spent time at Condé Nast, giving him a firsthand view of how the company operated during an earlier era. We discussed how the publisher survived the collapse of the print advertising model, why its decision to avoid the programmatic advertising race mattered, and whether the next generation of leaders can keep brands like Vogue, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair relevant.
We also dug into another question facing legacy media companies: Should the traditional wall between editorial and business still be quite so high? As creators build lucrative businesses around sponsorships, merchandise, and other direct monetization, many traditional publishers and TV networks still leave their biggest digital audiences largely in the hands of platform revenue shares. Jason and I discussed why editorial and commercial teams should be talking to each other more often, how those collaborations can happen without compromising journalistic independence, and what the media industry can learn from creators who have become much better at monetizing the trust and attention they've built.
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