Out of Print
An Editor and a Gentleman
by Jonty CruzPhoto courtesy of Chris Gayomali.
GQ articles editor Chris Gayomali on masculinity in men’s magazines, the state of publishing, and jamming to Lea Salonga.
After its former editor Jim Nelson left GQ, having served 15 years as its editor, the magazine had a sort of reawakening. The world was completely different from when Nelson started as editor in 2003, and the magazine wanted to better reflect that.
The GQ that Chris is now a part of is a magazine coming to terms with the state of the world but also the state of publishing itself. In some ways, the two are addressing the same questions: how did we get here and what can we do about it? These are the issues that Chris and everyone at GQ, most especially its new editor, Will Welch, are trying to answer.
Chris talks more about the recent changes at GQ, the things they are adding, the things they took out, and how exactly he traded a “paperclip” to get into GQ in the first place.
The following interview was conducted over Zoom and email and has been edited for publication.
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Out of Print: Hi Chris! So you said in an interview earlier this year that “it's an interesting time to be at a men’s publication” and that “dudes need more help than ever.” Could you talk more about that?
Chris Gayomali: I’ve been thinking a lot about that. On one hand guys are sort of more conscious of their decision-making in like, they know their skincare routines and everything feels like it’s so advanced, but simultaneously there’s a phylum of guys who are just coming to terms with their masculinity. That’s sort of who I was speaking to.
Obviously the internet has sort of collapsed all of that and it’s made it easy to access any information you want, but I do think it’s an ongoing or forever process of reckoning with the toxic side of being a guy. So we just try to make GQ lighty aspirational. We don’t want to tell anyone what to do, but we want to make it like, “Oh, I want to be that kind of man because that sounds cool.” I think that’s a key difference now. You want to be more carrot than stick. Whereas maybe in the past some of these men’s magazines were a little bit like, “Here are the rules about how to be a man” and “Your tie bar has to be 1.25 inches” or whatever. It’s not like that anymore. Now we’re just trying to think about how do you make being a man—which has been the cause of so much damage and suffering and inequality in the world—how do you reckon with that and try to be the best version of yourself so that other people would want to be like you. I think that’s the mission right now.
When you want to open up the conversation on masculinity, is that something you also try to discuss internally? What is it you’re trying to say that speaks to the past of GQ but also speaks to everything that’s happening now?
I think that’s the challenge with making the brand feel modern. You’re just trying to make a version of masculinity that’s more inclusive, that includes trans people and black and brown people, and to be frank the old versions of GQ were very cis and white and had that sort of image baked in. That’s such an old and dated idea at this point, and it also goes hand-in-hand with the idea that this prescriptive thing just doesn’t work anymore because everyone’s lived experience is so different. We want to challenge ourselves and think, how do we do this in the most responsible, aspirational, and cool way possible but also [be] really thoughtful about all our decision-making and trying to be the best examples we could be?
So back when you were in college taking up English, was being a writer or journalist something you were thinking about? Were you already into magazines or publishing then?
I came into magazines a little bit late, admittedly. It was probably in my freshman year, I had no inclinations of being a journalist or a writer at that point. I had no concept of what I wanted to do with my future. I was a Psychology major at UC Irvine and ended up switching to English. There was this college promo where you could subscribe to like five magazines for some measly price. I was vastly underpaying and devaluing what a magazine should be worth. [Laughs] It had like Rolling Stone, GQ, and some others, and I found—hidden in these pages about fashion tips or whatever are these beautiful longform stories. I remember there was one Rolling Stone article I read about the Gossip Girl cast. I don’t know how long ago this was but it was just written so elegantly and funnily and I thought, this was such a rewarding form to dive into.
There’s sort of this immersion and depth and also a level of difficulty to reading a magazine. When you’re reading you’re not passively watching something in the background. It’s taking all your faculties to be in this article. So when it does have that thing that makes the article crackle or that magic twist, it just feels so much better. For all the talk that magazines are dying or whatever, I think storytelling isn’t going anywhere. I think there’s always going to be an appetite for that in some way, shape, or form. That’s what heartens me about the industry and keeps me optimistic.
There are some sites now that are trying to feel like—or capture the nuance of a—magazine these days, which is great.
People are becoming wiser consumers of what they want to read right now. That’s one reason why you see the newsletter explosion and why people want substantial writing. Clickbait feels like a million years ago already. People don’t want to be underestimated anymore.
So speaking of substantial writing: You wrote about Lea Salonga for your first column at GQ. What about her music struck you?
Yeah, my family didn’t teach us Tagalog growing up in Long Beach. I think they wanted us to learn English undiluted, and as an adult I disagree with that idea now. It would’ve been to our benefit to know multiple languages and that kind of stuff. We had touch points though to Filipino culture and [at the top] were always food and family. Number two would be church. We would go to a Tagalog mass at our local Catholic church and people would be jamming to the music. I couldn’t understand any of it but I was like, this music is so good! And then in high school my parents got a Magic Mic and so they were firing up Lea Salonga songs like “Nandito Ako” and—what was that other song? Bakit?
“Bakit Labis Kitang Mahal.”
Yeah, that one! That was the jam. I still don’t understand it and my pronunciation is terrible, but she was such a beautiful entry point to a lot of stuff.
It’s good to know that you wish you learned Tagalog. I wanted to ask since you were an English major and you’re a writer now, what is your relationship with language?
It’s interesting. As an editor one of the valuable things that I picked up at GQ was learning how to care about every sentence on a syntax level, and learning what beautiful writing looks like, what effective writing looks like, and what voice looks like. Those are things I’m always thinking about. I think in some ways, in my career, I always felt a little bit behind, I guess? Just because my grammar isn’t great and I’m just trying to figure it out. There’s a little bit of pretending that you know what you’re doing until you actually know what you’re doing. I think that’s sort of benefitted me in my career, in that I can be comfortable being an idiot for a while until I actually know what I’m doing.
I was reading some of your interviews like I said and it seems you had greater formation in grad school. Could you talk about your time at NYU?
I moved to New York in 2008, which was the height of the last recession. I didn’t have a job lined up. I worked at UNICEF for a bit as an assistant and then decided I should try and go to this publishing program at NYU. I mostly did it in retrospect because I didn’t have a network in the industry. I’m not a natural schmoozer, know what I mean? I’m a little bit introverted and shy at parties, so I knew I wouldn’t be the kind of person to just approach a journalist to ask them how they got their job. So in the program you sort of develop these deep working relationships with people. It was my entry point into an industry that I feel like I wouldn’t have had otherwise. It was basically spending a lot of money to open the door for yourself, and I’m going to be paying back the loans until I die. [Laughs]
Was there any project that really helped you push forward?
I had this bad blog that I would write—and it’s deleted off the internet now, thank god. But it did help me secure some internships and a byline at The Atlantic early on. It’s like that parable where you trade a paperclip up to a [house] and I’ve been trading that all the way up. I was trading that paperclip everywhere and trying to make myself look like a real writer. [Laughs]
“Clickbait feels like a million years ago already. People don’t want to be underestimated anymore.”
So when you traded that paperclip up and got to GQ, what did you expect you were going to do?
I was a tech journalist before I came to GQ. I was at another publication, Fast Company, reporting about business. So I came to GQ pretty open-minded. The way I saw it was like, “Oh, I’m around some of the smartest people in the industry, some of the most legendary writers and editors, and I said I’m just going to be a sponge and learn as much as I can and as quickly as I can to get on their level.” I didn’t really have huge expectations about the stories I wanted to do.
I guess for a lack of a better term, this is my Hypebeast question: Growing up reading magazines, I felt like everyone was trying to catch up to GQ. And then in the last 10 years we’ve gotten new publications that people have gravitated towards. Is there a feeling now of GQ catching up to all those publications? Or how are you reacting to a lot more competition?
It’s interesting. I think we take a different approach. Like with those brands like Hypebeast and Highsnobiety, they do such an amazing job of curating the stuff they’re into. I think for GQ we sort of bring a rigour to our standards. We still have the best fashion writers on our staff, who think about what’s next and where fashion is going. They’re not just trying to react to what’s cool. That’s where we’re at and how we think as a brand. We’re looking at all these different areas, these tribes of fashion, and hopefully we synthesize it in an interesting way.
I get it. It’s less about distancing yourselves but trying to put them all together and how you discuss it as a whole.
Exactly. You know, obviously, even everyone in our staff has different tastes but I think there’s an internal standard there.
I’m excited to talk to you about the rebrand of GQ. It’s nice to feel excited to open the magazine again and not know what to expect. And it seems to be a holistic rebrand. You can see the change visually, of course, but as the articles editor, was there a subtle or not-so-subtle rebrand with the articles, too?
Deep storytelling is sort of embedded in our DNA, you know what I mean? It’s just such an institution. I think if the rebrand has manifested in any way, we’re doing more profiles of fashion designers and visual artists. I do think our visuals are the best in the game right now, and I’m completely biased about that, but I do think there’s an element of surprise every issue. You sort of know what a GQ shoot looks like, but we’re also always really trying to push right to the end of what we can do that will hit people with something exciting, that feels new.
There is more vibrancy to it now.
That’s what’s so cool about this era. We have a little bit more freedom to be experimental. It’s really freeing and really cool to think, okay, what are those stories we couldn’t do at GQ before that we can do now? We can put out an issue that raises the question of what masculinity looks like now. We’re playing with a lot of big ideas right now and it’s a cool challenge. It keeps publishing feeling fresh.
We’re also trying to do representation in a way that doesn’t feel corny. I think that’s what a lot of brands are having problems with right now. [Laughs] But yeah, that’s something we’ve been thinking about and taking very seriously.
And in a lot of ways, representation in not just who you feature but also who gets to tell that story.
That’s sort of been GQ’s project, and I guess mine as well, and we think about—how do we do stuff that feels natural and organic, but also do it responsibly and feature writers and photographers who in the previous eras probably wouldn’t have had the same opportunities? That’s sort of what we’re focused on right now. You just have to bake it in until it feels normal. I think that’s how you do representation responsibly.
Is it harder than it sounds, though? Yeah, it’s the most obvious thing to do and you should do it but what are those challenges you face because of it?
You know, that’s a great question, because a lot of it is stepping out of your usual networks. And when faced with sort of an easy choice of like, “Okay, this writer totally makes sense with this subject,” you have to challenge yourself to think: how can we make this pairing more exciting and also give someone a shot, who might not have had a shot before? It does require reaching out to people and asking around, but it’s that kind of work that makes this job worth it.
I was a tech journalist before I came to GQ. I was at another publication, Fast Company, reporting about business. So I came to GQ pretty open-minded. The way I saw it was like, “Oh, I’m around some of the smartest people in the industry, some of the most legendary writers and editors, and I said I’m just going to be a sponge and learn as much as I can and as quickly as I can to get on their level.” I didn’t really have huge expectations about the stories I wanted to do.
I guess for a lack of a better term, this is my Hypebeast question: Growing up reading magazines, I felt like everyone was trying to catch up to GQ. And then in the last 10 years we’ve gotten new publications that people have gravitated towards. Is there a feeling now of GQ catching up to all those publications? Or how are you reacting to a lot more competition?
It’s interesting. I think we take a different approach. Like with those brands like Hypebeast and Highsnobiety, they do such an amazing job of curating the stuff they’re into. I think for GQ we sort of bring a rigour to our standards. We still have the best fashion writers on our staff, who think about what’s next and where fashion is going. They’re not just trying to react to what’s cool. That’s where we’re at and how we think as a brand. We’re looking at all these different areas, these tribes of fashion, and hopefully we synthesize it in an interesting way.
I get it. It’s less about distancing yourselves but trying to put them all together and how you discuss it as a whole.
Exactly. You know, obviously, even everyone in our staff has different tastes but I think there’s an internal standard there.
I’m excited to talk to you about the rebrand of GQ. It’s nice to feel excited to open the magazine again and not know what to expect. And it seems to be a holistic rebrand. You can see the change visually, of course, but as the articles editor, was there a subtle or not-so-subtle rebrand with the articles, too?
Deep storytelling is sort of embedded in our DNA, you know what I mean? It’s just such an institution. I think if the rebrand has manifested in any way, we’re doing more profiles of fashion designers and visual artists. I do think our visuals are the best in the game right now, and I’m completely biased about that, but I do think there’s an element of surprise every issue. You sort of know what a GQ shoot looks like, but we’re also always really trying to push right to the end of what we can do that will hit people with something exciting, that feels new.
There is more vibrancy to it now.
That’s what’s so cool about this era. We have a little bit more freedom to be experimental. It’s really freeing and really cool to think, okay, what are those stories we couldn’t do at GQ before that we can do now? We can put out an issue that raises the question of what masculinity looks like now. We’re playing with a lot of big ideas right now and it’s a cool challenge. It keeps publishing feeling fresh.
We’re also trying to do representation in a way that doesn’t feel corny. I think that’s what a lot of brands are having problems with right now. [Laughs] But yeah, that’s something we’ve been thinking about and taking very seriously.
And in a lot of ways, representation in not just who you feature but also who gets to tell that story.
That’s sort of been GQ’s project, and I guess mine as well, and we think about—how do we do stuff that feels natural and organic, but also do it responsibly and feature writers and photographers who in the previous eras probably wouldn’t have had the same opportunities? That’s sort of what we’re focused on right now. You just have to bake it in until it feels normal. I think that’s how you do representation responsibly.
Is it harder than it sounds, though? Yeah, it’s the most obvious thing to do and you should do it but what are those challenges you face because of it?
You know, that’s a great question, because a lot of it is stepping out of your usual networks. And when faced with sort of an easy choice of like, “Okay, this writer totally makes sense with this subject,” you have to challenge yourself to think: how can we make this pairing more exciting and also give someone a shot, who might not have had a shot before? It does require reaching out to people and asking around, but it’s that kind of work that makes this job worth it.
GQ’s November 2019 issue explores the state of masculunity today and serves as a statement of the kind of magazine it wants to be.As you keep getting new people or trying new things, are there more hits than misses?
I work closely on the magazine side now, and there’s a lot of calculation that goes into making sure that when something goes to print it has to be a hit. There’s a lot of work behind it and I think our batting average is pretty high. Obviously there are always lessons to take from it, and we take criticism of our work very seriously, but we try to not miss. We try very hard. It’s very expensive to miss. [Laughs]
It’s so exciting to talk about the things you added with the rebrand, but I guess one of the most glaring subtractions, especially on the site, is that you took out the Women section/category tab that’s been a thing at lad mags and men’s publications since forever.
That was something we really felt icky about for a long time. When I joined in 2015 there was this Women tab right on top of the homepage and it got a lot of traffic. And it was weird to see how or why it was spiking at 11 p.m. It just felt so out of step with the moment and everything that was happening.
My timeline might be wrong by a little bit but I think we took [the tab] out on my first year of joining GQ. We were all feeling weighed down by it and it was bugging us. We knew we would give up a considerable portion of our traffic by getting rid of it but we just had to do it.
Now I think we’re a bit more equal opportunity with our thirst. We don’t shy away from it in a lot of ways. [Laughs] Like, I did this story with Drew Magary about Christian McCaffrey and he looks great. So there is still room for sexiness, but a little bit more equal opportunity and smart about it.
You started at GQ in 2015. How would you describe the last five years, and publishing as a whole?
The industry keeps shrinking and it’s condensing. Our staff is pretty small right now, which is why there’s this onus of being more simple, more creative, more flexible with all the stuff we’re doing. But it’s interesting, too. It’s forcing us to be more creative about coming up with revenue streams. Our GQ merch shop is doing really well. I think we’re trying to just come up with more ways to make money that historically we might have shied away from.
I think the brands that are going to come out of this tough era are going to be the ones that approach it with creativity and openness.
It does feel strange, in a way, how the public is demanding more from magazines and these media institutions—as they should be—but internally magazines are also facing so many cutbacks and you’re left with having to do even more with much less.
Yeah, at the core of so much of what we do is built around storytelling again. Whether that’s some 15-second video clip that goes on Instagram or a blog post or one of the features of the magazine, there’s such a focus on creating something entertaining, informative, and something that feels a little special, hopefully.
There’s this thing we would talk about internally in GQ, and this came down from Jim Nelson and it’s baked into our DNA now—and our editor now, Will Welch, is a magazine genius—but it’s this idea that 15% of what you do should be surprising. You should leave space for it to keep people excited. You want them coming back for the familiar stuff and for what you do well, but you want to keep them constantly delighted somehow.
I work closely on the magazine side now, and there’s a lot of calculation that goes into making sure that when something goes to print it has to be a hit. There’s a lot of work behind it and I think our batting average is pretty high. Obviously there are always lessons to take from it, and we take criticism of our work very seriously, but we try to not miss. We try very hard. It’s very expensive to miss. [Laughs]
It’s so exciting to talk about the things you added with the rebrand, but I guess one of the most glaring subtractions, especially on the site, is that you took out the Women section/category tab that’s been a thing at lad mags and men’s publications since forever.
That was something we really felt icky about for a long time. When I joined in 2015 there was this Women tab right on top of the homepage and it got a lot of traffic. And it was weird to see how or why it was spiking at 11 p.m. It just felt so out of step with the moment and everything that was happening.
My timeline might be wrong by a little bit but I think we took [the tab] out on my first year of joining GQ. We were all feeling weighed down by it and it was bugging us. We knew we would give up a considerable portion of our traffic by getting rid of it but we just had to do it.
Now I think we’re a bit more equal opportunity with our thirst. We don’t shy away from it in a lot of ways. [Laughs] Like, I did this story with Drew Magary about Christian McCaffrey and he looks great. So there is still room for sexiness, but a little bit more equal opportunity and smart about it.
You started at GQ in 2015. How would you describe the last five years, and publishing as a whole?
The industry keeps shrinking and it’s condensing. Our staff is pretty small right now, which is why there’s this onus of being more simple, more creative, more flexible with all the stuff we’re doing. But it’s interesting, too. It’s forcing us to be more creative about coming up with revenue streams. Our GQ merch shop is doing really well. I think we’re trying to just come up with more ways to make money that historically we might have shied away from.
I think the brands that are going to come out of this tough era are going to be the ones that approach it with creativity and openness.
It does feel strange, in a way, how the public is demanding more from magazines and these media institutions—as they should be—but internally magazines are also facing so many cutbacks and you’re left with having to do even more with much less.
Yeah, at the core of so much of what we do is built around storytelling again. Whether that’s some 15-second video clip that goes on Instagram or a blog post or one of the features of the magazine, there’s such a focus on creating something entertaining, informative, and something that feels a little special, hopefully.
There’s this thing we would talk about internally in GQ, and this came down from Jim Nelson and it’s baked into our DNA now—and our editor now, Will Welch, is a magazine genius—but it’s this idea that 15% of what you do should be surprising. You should leave space for it to keep people excited. You want them coming back for the familiar stuff and for what you do well, but you want to keep them constantly delighted somehow.
“I think the brands that are going to come out of this tough era are going to be the ones that approach it with creativity and openness.”
I’m so curious about Will Welch. As a reader, you sort of get to know a magazine editor almost in hindsight. Like, you really see who they are five or even 10 years into their run. So in case I don’t live long enough to see that happen, could you talk about what makes Will’s GQ Will?
Will is a magazine genius. I overlapped with Jim Nelson too, and Jim is an incredible storytelling mind. We would have these meetings with me as the editor of the story, and Jim would just have this Terminator-like story vision where he would know exactly what to do—like, “Move this paragraph here” or “Rework this sentence.” He was literally the LeBron James of figuring out how a story could be the best it could be.
Will is such a holistic and imaginative thinker. His skillset is he can see the whole universe of GQ and he has this vision of it that he’s trying to build. And I think that comes across visually in such a spectacular way. He has this ability to view what a modern brand needs to be to survive and flourish. He’s an endless wellspring of ideas. [Laughs] I’m very blessed to be in all their presences and osmosing a little bit of wisdom from them, hopefully.
Since you mentioned LeBron, and I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this and the Lakers—congratulations, by the way! I’m not a Lakers fan but I love LeBron, and I was wondering: how have Lakers fans come to terms with him? Because for the longest time Lakers fans and Kobe Bryant fans wanted nothing to do with LeBron. And now he just made you guys champions again. I hope you don’t mind that I ask you that since you’re a big Lakers fan.
No, no. I love talking about basketball! It’s one of my favorite things. But yeah, it’s so weird. I also grew up worshiping Kobe almost one-dimensionally and hating LeBron. But as I grew older my relationship with that sort of changed. I think I just became more of an enlightened fan and came to really appreciate what LeBron has done as a player. But when he came to the Lakers, yeah, it was just the weirdest, most surreal thing. I think a lot of Lakers fans were trying to compartmentalize that same thing. How you spent so many years putting Kobe over LeBron and now he’s on your team and now you have to slowly let the air out of that balloon and let that hate for him go out. [Laughs]
It was just such a complicated year for Lakers fans. I was skeptical of this team at first but I kind of started rallying around them and loving how idiosyncratic they were. I mean, they got me fucking rooting for [Rajon] Rondo and Dwight Howard! [Laughs] They were so weird and awkward in a lot of ways but they all really seemed to like each other that I grew to love this team in a way that I didn’t anticipate.
You wrote a tribute to Kobe after he died. His death, for so many, signalled what kind of year we were going to get. I know it doesn’t equate but with the Lakers winning in the same year, did it make you hopeful in any way for how the year will end?
One way I’ve been surviving this year is to not get too high or too low. I was obviously thrilled when the Lakers won, but who knows what’s going to happen after the elections. [Laughs] You’re preparing for the worst, mentally, but it’s been such a weird stretch of history to live through. I’m just taking all the highs and lows and not getting too absorbed into any of it.
Will is a magazine genius. I overlapped with Jim Nelson too, and Jim is an incredible storytelling mind. We would have these meetings with me as the editor of the story, and Jim would just have this Terminator-like story vision where he would know exactly what to do—like, “Move this paragraph here” or “Rework this sentence.” He was literally the LeBron James of figuring out how a story could be the best it could be.
Will is such a holistic and imaginative thinker. His skillset is he can see the whole universe of GQ and he has this vision of it that he’s trying to build. And I think that comes across visually in such a spectacular way. He has this ability to view what a modern brand needs to be to survive and flourish. He’s an endless wellspring of ideas. [Laughs] I’m very blessed to be in all their presences and osmosing a little bit of wisdom from them, hopefully.
Since you mentioned LeBron, and I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this and the Lakers—congratulations, by the way! I’m not a Lakers fan but I love LeBron, and I was wondering: how have Lakers fans come to terms with him? Because for the longest time Lakers fans and Kobe Bryant fans wanted nothing to do with LeBron. And now he just made you guys champions again. I hope you don’t mind that I ask you that since you’re a big Lakers fan.
No, no. I love talking about basketball! It’s one of my favorite things. But yeah, it’s so weird. I also grew up worshiping Kobe almost one-dimensionally and hating LeBron. But as I grew older my relationship with that sort of changed. I think I just became more of an enlightened fan and came to really appreciate what LeBron has done as a player. But when he came to the Lakers, yeah, it was just the weirdest, most surreal thing. I think a lot of Lakers fans were trying to compartmentalize that same thing. How you spent so many years putting Kobe over LeBron and now he’s on your team and now you have to slowly let the air out of that balloon and let that hate for him go out. [Laughs]
It was just such a complicated year for Lakers fans. I was skeptical of this team at first but I kind of started rallying around them and loving how idiosyncratic they were. I mean, they got me fucking rooting for [Rajon] Rondo and Dwight Howard! [Laughs] They were so weird and awkward in a lot of ways but they all really seemed to like each other that I grew to love this team in a way that I didn’t anticipate.
You wrote a tribute to Kobe after he died. His death, for so many, signalled what kind of year we were going to get. I know it doesn’t equate but with the Lakers winning in the same year, did it make you hopeful in any way for how the year will end?
One way I’ve been surviving this year is to not get too high or too low. I was obviously thrilled when the Lakers won, but who knows what’s going to happen after the elections. [Laughs] You’re preparing for the worst, mentally, but it’s been such a weird stretch of history to live through. I’m just taking all the highs and lows and not getting too absorbed into any of it.
Hank with his person, Chris.“Politically, we’re in this era where we’re not just taking body blows, but we’re on the ground and getting kicked repeatedly. The losseses keep piling up, you know what I mean?”
So with everything that’s happening, is the work for you now sort of a release? I do find this new era of GQ to have—and again, for a lack of a better term—this edgy optimism. It sounds corny to say but there is this feeling of optimism underneath. There’s this level of joy to it.
I mean, on some level it is easier to be sort of defeatist and just keep your head down. It is harder to keep your head up and find silver linings where you can. And politically, we’re in this era where we’re not just taking body blows, but we’re on the ground and getting kicked repeatedly. The losses keep piling up, you know what I mean? But you also see people rising to the occasion. People doing things they’ve never done before. So there is this current of optimism that’s seeping through. And we’re always trying to find it [at GQ]. It’s weird that we live in a climate that has to be the counterintuitive thing, but we’re trying.
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve experienced both as a digital and magazine editor?
As a digital editor you’re just working with so many people that you develop these deep working relationships. When you orient a relationship around the work and the product and try to make it the best thing it can be, that’s really special and enriching, and doing that in digital was cool.
On the magazine side… you know, it’s weird because in some ways people were like, why would you make that jump from digital to magazines now? But it goes back to the idea of me wanting to be a better storyteller. Having that opportunity to work with editors and top editors who have all this wisdom to share. Like at GQ right now, our executive editor—his name is Geoff Gagnon, and I’ll give him a shoutout—he’s a generational magazine mind in feature editing, in the vein of Jim Nelson. I feel like I just learn so much from him every single time. It’s an insane depth of knowledge that I’m just able to tap into. I feel very blessed as an idiot to learn from him. [Laughs] That’s the most exciting part of magazines—learning to tell the richest story possible. That’s a skill that can carry over to so many different areas, hopefully later on in my career. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I’ll try to work in magazines for as long as I can. ︎
I mean, on some level it is easier to be sort of defeatist and just keep your head down. It is harder to keep your head up and find silver linings where you can. And politically, we’re in this era where we’re not just taking body blows, but we’re on the ground and getting kicked repeatedly. The losses keep piling up, you know what I mean? But you also see people rising to the occasion. People doing things they’ve never done before. So there is this current of optimism that’s seeping through. And we’re always trying to find it [at GQ]. It’s weird that we live in a climate that has to be the counterintuitive thing, but we’re trying.
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve experienced both as a digital and magazine editor?
As a digital editor you’re just working with so many people that you develop these deep working relationships. When you orient a relationship around the work and the product and try to make it the best thing it can be, that’s really special and enriching, and doing that in digital was cool.
On the magazine side… you know, it’s weird because in some ways people were like, why would you make that jump from digital to magazines now? But it goes back to the idea of me wanting to be a better storyteller. Having that opportunity to work with editors and top editors who have all this wisdom to share. Like at GQ right now, our executive editor—his name is Geoff Gagnon, and I’ll give him a shoutout—he’s a generational magazine mind in feature editing, in the vein of Jim Nelson. I feel like I just learn so much from him every single time. It’s an insane depth of knowledge that I’m just able to tap into. I feel very blessed as an idiot to learn from him. [Laughs] That’s the most exciting part of magazines—learning to tell the richest story possible. That’s a skill that can carry over to so many different areas, hopefully later on in my career. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I’ll try to work in magazines for as long as I can. ︎
Jonty Cruz is a writer and former magazine editor.