Transcription of Kevin Thomas for the show Old Port Adventuring #155
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show #155, “Old Port Adventuring,” airing for the first time on Sunday, August 31st, 2014. It has been said that publishing is dead, but we at the Maine Media Collective know that publishing is merely transitioning and that we have the opportunity to make a good thing, even better than before. As a wellness editor, it has been my privilege to share the good news about health with Maine Magazine readers since January.
In June, we launched a new magazine called Old Port which focuses on the goings on around the Portland Peninsula. Today we speak with Jen DeRose, editor of Old Port and Kevin Thomas, publisher of Old Port Maine Magazine and Maine Home & Design. To get behind the scenes, look at this exciting edition to Maine publishing. We also speak with Zack Anchors and Erin Quigley of Portland Paddle who were featured in the September issue of Old Port Magazine. Thank you for joining us.
Most doctors do not have the opportunity to work in the publishing field and I do. I’m very fortunate with the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast to work closely with the Maine Media Collective and with the editors and publishers and staff of Maine Magazine, Maine Home & Design and now Old Port Magazine. Today we have with us two individuals who are very familiar with their newest publication which is Old Port Magazine.
This is Kevin Thomas, the publisher at Maine Media Collective which includes Maine Magazine, Maine Home & Design and now Old Port, and Jen De Rose is the Managing Editor of Old Port Magazine as well as the Editor at Large at Maine Home & Design. Old Port Magazine launched in June of this year and it covers everything you need to know about living, working and playing in Portland. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to me today.
Kevin: Happy to be here.
Jen: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: This is really an interesting time to be in publishing. I want to talk about this first a little bit because there are many people who’ve said publishing is dead, print magazines don’t work. Not only have you launched Maine Home & Design, I guess seven years ago now and Maine Magazine five years ago now. Correct me at any point Kevin but Old Port. You brought this on the scene and it’s been really well received.
Kevin: It certainly has been the common misperception that print publishing is dead. We have found quite the opposite. If we continue to focus on quality editorial, quality photography and writing and pay attention to what our readers want, there is a significant demand for print publications.
Lisa: You came into the publishing field in a little bit of a roundabout way. You’ve had a variety of different businesses that you’ve made quite successful. You decided you needed a publication to help you with the last business that you’re in.
Kevin: A lot of people don’t know that story but actually in 2003, I started a residential construction business in Kennebunkport and could not find a vehicle to properly market that business. That led me to Maine Home & Design as a vehicle frankly for me and my friends in the industry to market themselves.
Lisa: Jen, you have a lot of background in publishing yourself. You actually moved to Maine specifically to be part of this new publication. What were you doing before?
Jen: Previously, I was at Hearst Digital where I was the Digital Director for Elle Décor, House Beautiful and [Roriender 00:05:19] Magazines. Back to your earlier question, this was just such an amazing opportunity to help launch a magazine. People aren’t creating new magazines that frequently so to have an opportunity to help be part of a team right here; putting something together for the very first time is such incredible work opportunity.
Lisa: You also moved to an entirely different state in order to make this happen and you chose Maine. Why Maine?
Jen: My husband is from here originally and we would come up and visit him. Just fell in love with this city and we ended up getting married here. There were so many independent restaurants. Portland is just platter of things to do and people to meet. I was just so excited. We felt like it gave us access to the ocean and the mountains, and it’s not just the many places in the world that you get all of these things right in one place.
Kevin: We’ve been blessed having Jen on board with her publishing background but especially with her love of Maine and this freshness of spirit she came here wide-eyed and curious and that’s really helped and form Old Port as we launched it.
Lisa: Kevin, you are from Maine originally. You are from Presque Isle which is a distance from Old Port and from Portland. You left the state and you came back, and you really found again a love for the state that you were born in.
Kevin: It’s true. I think that my experience, my background really helped and form our efforts here, 75 Market Street with Maine Magazine, Maine Home & Design and Old Port. I grew up in West County in Presque Isle. I spent the first 18, 19 years of my life there. I spent a lot of time in Bangor in Maine, then a brief time in Portland before I left for Massachusetts when I was involved with a much different career in Massachusetts for 15 years, and really couldn’t wait to get back to the state.
I was attempting to get back to the State of Maine six months after I took my job in Massachusetts and from a career standpoint, I just couldn’t make that work. When I was finally able to do that in 2003, I was thrilled to be back in the State and now really happy to be able to cover Maine from a new perspective, both growing up here but also through the lens of somebody who’s been away and couldn’t wait to get back.
Lisa: Jen, you’re the Managing Editor of Old Port Magazine, but you are the Editor at Large for Maine Home & Design. From what I understand, this requires some scouting, some getting down to know the lay of the land, and really looking for resources that maybe people don’t necessarily have time to find on their own.
Jen: Yes. As we developed this position, I’ve been working on style room with Maine Home & Design which is a great way for me to interact with the different businesses and also to introduce rears to new products. Then currently, we’re working on the look back, which is the roundup of some of the best projects that Maine Home & Design has ever published. Going forward also and maybe helping to scout new projects and working with designers closely.
Kevin: The scouting aspect of what we do here at 75 Market Street is critical to our vision. A lot of our competitors rely very aggressively on pitches from PR firms or outside sources. We prefer to send people out on the road and have their own experiences, whether be through Jen De Rose’s experiences on the road finding shelter stories for Maine Home & Design or our 48 hours staff for Maine Magazine. I think that’s made a significant difference for our publications.
When Jen came on board, we wanted to very purposely make sure she was out travelling Maine and understanding the various characters and geography of the state.
Jen: My background has been with shelter publications along with Elle Décor and House Beautiful. I started off my career at Interior Design magazine as a market Editor. Interior design is just the passion of mine. I love decorating. I love design and so I’m really excited to help get more involved in that here.
Lisa: When you say shelter magazines, you mean magazines that are about homes and home building?
Jen: Right. Exactly.
Kevin: Shelter is the industry term for many magazine folks and home design, builders, architects.
Lisa: We’re going to talk about Old Port but I wanted to back up and mention that you’ve just released the second edition of “48 Hours Maine” “The 48 Hours Guide.” The one last year was very successful, the one this year is equally beautiful and I’m sure will be successful. What is it about “48 Hours” that you think gives people enough of a test of Maine. I know Jen you worked on this project yourself.
Jen: Yeah. The “48 Hours” I think it’s something that’s really special that this magazine does. I think there’s so much to do in a weekend and it can sometimes be overwhelming when you are new to a place. This gives you that introduction to the people and the places and a little bit of a taste of everything that there is to do in a city. It’s really like, I wouldn’t say it’s the best of the best, we are not pulling everything but it does give you a lot of a sampling of what you can you do.
Lisa: And that’s very similar to Old Port Magazine, you are trying to give people, you are not saying you have to do A, B, C, D. You saying these are the people of Portland, this is what we are doing. You’ve had everything from Yoga, to Kayaking. I know you are going have a blowing story coming up. You’ve talked to the people who are building hotels. Why Portland? Why did you think that Portland needed to have its own magazine?
Henry: We were convinced watching the market place that Portland was very under represented within the publishing business but also within our own publications. Maine Home & Design and Maine Magazine could not spend the amount of time on the Portland area that it deserved. We are making efforts to cover the entirety of the State from the county to the Coast.
Lisa: Old Port magazine is a little different from Maine Magazine, it feels a little faster pace somehow, it’s a very stylish, you have models who have gone to various parts of Portland and they are wearing very stylish clothes. Sometimes people don’t think of Maine as being as up to date as what Old Port shows but we really are. We’ve become a very metropolitan State in some aspects.
Jen: Yeah, Just every morning when I’m walking to work I can’t believe all the fashionable women that I can see in the City. It’s, I’m like, “Oh, I like her sunglasses or her shoes” and there’s so much going on here just on the street level. Old Port definitely tries to capture a little bit of that movement that’s going on here. That Portland is growing and we are excited to be there a long with it.
Henry: I think our experience in Maine obviously drives the content in the three publications and what we have found is that our experience has been different than the stereotype that Maine has. That we love and we have Lighthouses and lobsters but does not completely represent our experience. The stylish aspect that you referred to were the fine restaurant choices where the new craft cocktail bars are all part of the experience that we have in between the times when we are traveling to [Cataden 00:13:05] and Arcadia and doing all the fun things we are, the State is primarily known for.
Jen: I think two we have this a couple of new columns, one is Fines and one is the style column that you were talking about. It’s a roundup of the fashion and the products that are available right here at all the stores in Portland. It’s amazing what the resources are at our local.
Lisa: Well tell me about some of the other things that Old Port covers?
Jen: We have several new columns that really focus on the people of the city. There’s Love Letters column where we introduce, it’s generally three people, the last story was three couples that live and work in Portland, who they are and what they doing here. Like I said there’s the finds and style column and that’s really a little bit more of the shopping experience and all of the local independent stores. We have Dish and Drink which are a roundup of some of the signature dishes and signature cocktails that you can find. There’s really just, it’s all about Portland and everything that there is to do in the City.
Henry: We’ve really made an effort to pull in some characters that makeup Portland. People like Andrew Volk from Hunt and Alpine, David Turn from David’s restaurant, John Coleman from VIA, these are the people the characters that we run into weekly within our Portland Peninsula experience and we wanted to share that with our readers.
Lisa: It also seems that you are resenting really quite a broad age train issue. You are dealing with some of the younger entrepreneurs and some of the long term fixtures in the Portland scene.
Henry: That’s absolutely right. This publication out of the three has a larger wide range, wider demographic than any of our publications. We are really speaking to people from 25 to 70 years old.
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Lisa: I want to talk a little bit about food because it’s been very interesting for me as someone who has been all around the State to see that even though Portland is known as a foody town. It’s almost as if we have little other foody townlets that are around up in the Camden mid-Coast area, we have the Kenny Bank area and even I’m thinking in the Mill Hill Restaurant in Bethel. Does it seem to you that there’s an infectiousness almost to this sense that we want to have the best food that the world has to offer.
Henry: I think Sam here where at Ford Street really started a trend with his early adoption of the Farmed Table Movement. I think people that people like Sam and other have really created a food destination here. I think you are right, I think that has no pan intend fed upon itself and has attracted other restaurant, tourists and chefs to the area and to Maine in general.
Jen: I would say to having gone to the Kenny Bank Port Festival in June it was just amazing. The amount of restaurants and the incredibly talented chefs that were involved with that and as well as National prost from VOG and Bon Appetit. Had a really amazing dinner with the Old Port sea grill at someone’s host and just the taunt that’s coming out of both the city and throughout the State as definitely impressive.
Lisa: You are also trying to make the City more accessible. You don’t have to go to a fancy restaurant, you don’t have to buy a fancy dress, you can also go for a run, you can also go for a walk. You are actually putting maps into your issues and you are really just saying, “Here are something’s you can do, choose whatever makes sense to you,” Which is really something that you’ve done with Maine magazine, Home & Design from the very beginning. It’s just an aspirational thing that you have to offer for people. You are not saying this is the right way you are saying here are some ways that we found that we think are fun and interesting and appealing.
Henry: Absolutely I think if Susan Grisanti was here who is our Editor in Chief and partner with the publications, she would say we curate the Maine experience based upon our personalities and our own experience. We certainly aren’t presenting this as the best of the experiences, we are saying this is our experience and you might want to share in that.
Lisa: And you are also employing people on at &5 Market Street and the word employing is really interesting to me because as part of this team it doesn’t even feel as much an employer employee relationship. As it does feel like a team. It feels like a group of individuals who really want to talk about Maine, and why we feel passionate about it, they’re just as likely to find somebody climbing a rock wall or hiking, Cataden or going to Greenville as you’re in your stilettos walking down the Commercial Street or towards Four Street.
The people in Maine are many things and in fact the same person can be interested in hiking, biking, kayaking, canoeing, and also dressing fashionable on a Saturday night.
Kevin: It was really fascinating for us to introduce the 48 hours concept to our staff and we opened up that opportunity to all our staff to participate in that. They could select a weekend and a town and go by themselves or with a spouse or someone like another. What we learned from that experience was more about their personality and to your point how people were hiking, kayaking, dancing, going out to find restaurants and I think that has been the brilliance of the 48 hours piece in general.
That we’re offering a glimpse into what our staffers prefer to do, whether be an art director, an editor or a sales person.
Lisa: We started this conversation by talking about the possibility that publishing was dead. What’s interesting to me and we said of course publishing isn’t dead. We know that’s not true, what‘s interesting to me Kevin, is that prior to this you worked in a building industry and you’re part of Thomason Lord which still exists as a construction company in the Kennebunk area.
Where you also had experience in the food service industry and it seems to me that what you’re saying and coming in here and doing this is just, this is a need that we see, this is something we want to do, we don’t have to do things the way that other theme been done before. If there’s something we want to do, we can find a way to do it and that’s what I’m understanding that Maine Home &Design, Maine magazine, that sort of an interesting approach.
You’re not saying, I’m coming from the publishing role I’m going to do like they do it, to saying I see something I want to create.
Kevin: Unfortunately, a lot of industries get caught in the trap of adhering to old traditional practices where there are legacy systems and I think that’s what has happened to the publishing world prior to five or 10 years ago. I think with new technologies we’re able to buy for example software off a shelf and an iMac from the Apple store. We aren’t using film photography, no longer we using digital photography, we really made the process more efficient and we’re able therefore to talk to a more specific niche.
We didn’t have to be everything to everyone. The old publishing model, you really needed to be everything to everyone, you needed to have a circulation of 200,000, 250,000. In the new publishing model we don’t need that, we can speak very specifically to improve both 30 to 60,000 people and get it right.
Lisa: And at the same time Jen, from the publishing industry we can bring forward the lessons that really make sense to us. We can use some of the things that worked very well as we’re working on magazines like Old Port or as we continuing to improving magazines like Maine magazine.
Jen: Yeah and I think the whole industry is evolving and there’s definitely sense of innovation here which is smart, and having been digital the last few years I think there’s a lot of lessons there to us, as the whole industry re-invents itself.
Kevin: To be clear. We don’t consider ourselves simply a print publisher, we consider ourselves a publisher in that includes print, radio, online whether be website, social media, we have a significance social media presence particularly the Facebook. I think we’ve over 75,000 fans on Maine magazine; we reach a quarter of a million people a week through our posts and we’re communicating with our audience in whatever way they want to receive hat information and that has made us more relevant.
Lisa: You’ve also made significant commitment to the next generation; you brought in quite a number of interns this summer to work with your publications both on the prints side. Also the digital and to really just get a sense that, there is this new and interesting business is something that’s going to be made better by young minds who are coming from a very different stand point educationally and digitally than the minds now in the work place.
Kevin: It’s been a fascinating experiences this year we’ve brought in over eight interns, that’s probably twice as many as we’ve brought in the past. It’s been fun to watch them, they’re high school students and college students’ fun to watch them interact with our regular staff as well as each and they do bring a new energy into the office space.
Lisa: I encourage people to pick up the latest Old Port magazine which is the September issue, also to go back and look at the June issue and of course all these is available online. We’ve been speaking with Kevin Thomas, a Publisher with Maine media collective which includes Maine magazine, Maine Home & Design and now Old Port magazine and Jen DeRose the managing editor of Old Port magazine as well the editor at large at Maine Home & Design and what website should we direct people to.
Jen: It’s oldportmag.com.
Lisa: and also Maine magazine.
Kevin: themainemag.com
Lisa: Very good. Well I appreciate you’re coming in and talking to us today. I know you’re very busy getting all these new publications out into the world, you’re doing a great job and it’s been really fun to be a part of your team as well so, thank you.
Jen: Thanks again.
Kevin: Thank you Lisa.