Graydon Carter on why the old men in Hollywood need to pass the baton.
Graydon Carter shares his old-school formula for getting digital content right.
Who could have predicted that it would be Graydon Carter and not fellow Canadian Shane Smith, the co-founder of Vice, that would succeed at giving TPG a toe-hold in a successful digital media venture.
The former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief is running four-year-old lifestyle destination Air Mail backed by the private equity firm TPG, Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, and incomprehensibly, a roofing firm called Standard Industries. (David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO is also an investor.)
Their backing, coupled with around 300,000 subscribers, some paying $80 a year, has enabled Carter and co-editor Alessandra Stanley, to keep growing. They’re launching new sections, hiring new editors, curating a luxury goods eCommerce initiative and even operating Arts Intel, a multi-city search engine for arts events. Meanwhile, more youth focused efforts in digital media are languishing. BuzzFeed stock is worth 62 cents, Vice is still in bankruptcy and lay-offs are the business model of 2023.
In an interview for The Media Mix podcast, Carter tells me the story of how Air Mail, grew out of a habit of tearing up global magazine and newspaper articles to share with friends. The company offices are in an old town house in New York’s Greenwich Village partly chosen because of Carter’s dislike of swipe cards. The office is complete with a chandelier and fireplace.
Carter is not a fan of data-driven, dashboard-fixated journalism, professing in our podcast interview, “I don’t think I’ve checked the dashboard once the whole time.” He continues, “I’ve been an editor for 50 years and you go with your gut.”
Carter and Stanley come up with some compelling headlines. “Brad and Angelina or Meghan and Harry? The Race for Biggest Attention Whore Continues,” and “Why is Prigozhin’s Russian mercenary force named after Hitler’s favorite 19th-century German composer?”
Carter talked to me from New York after a summer stint in London. (He also has a home in Opio, near Cannes, France.) He says he’s working much harder than he had planned in his post-Vanity Fair phase of life.
He shared some of the perks of working at the Conde Nast magazine empire and recalls flights on the Concorde and inventive gate crashers at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. He also engaged on more serious topics such as the race for the White House and why America needs younger, more energetic leaders and how Hollywood seems to be filled with men in their eighties who keep making movies.
“It’s like the land of old men, and until those men get out of the way, you can’t make way for younger men and women,” he said.
If there is a formula for Air Mail stories, then Carter tells me the concept is akin to a weekend section of a non-existent international newspaper. “Foreign people, foreign places, I love a murder and a scandal,” he said.
Anytime a reader opens the site, there’s likely to be a photo or story on a host of glamour icons including: Jane Birkin, Brigitte Bardot, Jackie Kennedy or John F. Kennedy Jnr. This week, there’s a package of stories about Elon Musk; one on his wealth, another about the Twitter melt-down, and one about his mom, the model Maye Musk. There are some familiar bylines - former Allure editor Linda Wells, former Daily Beast columnist Lloyd Grove, and former FT tech writer, Jonathan Margolis. The site appears to have a single advertiser, Parisian jewelry company Van Cleef & Arpels.
Carter also spoke on the podcast about his rocky history with Donald Trump and his plans for a new magazine store concept that he describes as a, “newsstand.” Air Mail newsstands are already in London and Milan and Carter has another planned for New York in November. It’s all a lot for someone who jokes, “I just wanted to put out a pokey little newsletter.”
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