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21 Most Intriguing: Josh Jackson
Josh Jackson & Jeremy Greenfield & Courtney Barnes

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Editor-in-Chief, Paste Magazine

About six years ago, my friend Nick Purdy and I were kicking around ideas on how to grow our Web site, PasteMusic.com, into something bigger. Our little side project had grown big enough to start interfering with our day jobs—but not quite big enough for us to quit them. We took a close look at the magazine landscape, mostly to find places to advertise our Web site, and realized that nothing really excited us. The big rock titles were battling it out for Christina Aguilera covers, while the smaller ones each seemed to narrowly focus on a single style of music. We’d been reading some great magazines covering either indie rock or alt. country, but our tastes were a little more diverse than that. In fact, when I started quizzing my friends, I found out that everyone I knew believed they had the most eclectic taste in music.

We thought, why not launch an entertainment magazine that just covered the good stuff, regardless of genre? We could cover rock, pop, hip-hop and country, but ignore the crappy nü-metal bands on modern rock radio, the vapidity of Top 40, the thuggery of mainstream hip-hop, and the cliché-riddled ridiculousness of guys in 5-gallon hats. We’d find the most innovative indie rock, unheralded singer/songwriters, smart underground hip-hop, and real roots artists—regardless of whether they sold hundreds of records or millions. Everything from Death Cab For Cutie to Steve Earle, Blackalicious to Randy Newman. It was the long-tail approach, relying on the fact that people actually wanted to find new music after they left college, but who felt the closest thing to a resource was randomly hearing something on NPR or The O.C. And, of course, we’d add in film and culture, mostly to keep ourselves from getting bored. Our guiding principle was to create the magazine that we would want to read and hope that there were others out there like us.

In college, I’d helped my friend Tim Porter put out a music ’zine, so Tim was my first phone call, and the three of us started building a magazine. It was possibly the most shoestring, unsophisticated successful national consumer magazine in history. We put out an offer to our online customers, and they sent us about 600 checks for $26.95 each. Tim coughed up a few thousand dollars himself, and we got to work. I moved back to Atlanta in April 2002, and we quickly found a distributor, an ad sales rep and a publicist. Because all of us were the kids in high school who made mix tapes for our friends, we decided to include a CD with every issue. We lined up artists like Wilco, Patty Griffin, Victoria Williams and Speech for the first CD, and a buyer at Border’s recognized that the artists we were covering were the same ones they were selling in their stores. They promised to distribute our first issue in all of their stores. That gave us enough credibility to sell ads and line up interviews. Tim and I wrote half the first issue and relied on our friends for the rest. I took the cover photo and did about half the layout. By some miracle, we got our first issue of Paste out—less than three months after I quit my job.

It wasn’t the prettiest of books; it was poorly organized and had its share of typos. But the beautiful thing about periodicals is that you can always try to make the next one better. And the next one was. We hired José Reyes to redesign the magazine and grew our writer stable. We started getting veteran bylines and identifying young talent. We refined ourselves with every issue and started to get letters from people telling us we re-awakened their love for music.
Being new to this industry has led to mistakes and cost us money. But it’s also allowed us to look for unorthodox ways of growing the magazine. We built our own highly profitable retail program in independent record stores called Paste Recommends. We opted not to move to New York, and we got a two-year weekly stint on CNN Headline News. We had an ad-to-edit ratio of about 20/80, which wasn’t making us rich; but it was getting us readers. Before we took any investment money, we had become one of the most trusted brands among music lovers, and were ranked #21 on The Chicago Tribune’s "50 Best Magazine" list, one spot behind The New Yorker.

Since then, we’ve been able to take our little magazine to a circulation of 180,000. We have our own channel on American Airlines. We routinely help break new artists, and we’re currently working on what would be one of the biggest distribution deals in magazine history. Plus—most exciting to our staff—we’re featured in the just-released video game Guitar Hero III. But the thing that makes my job great is that I still get to cover the music, film and books I love.

mInsight

Paste has really turned a corner this year, gaining national recognition and the circ and ad dollars that come with it. Paste is seeking to capitalize by offering readers a two-week offer to subscribe or renew at whatever rate they wanted to pay—a la Radiohead with its latest album—showing advertisers and readers that it’s got its fingers on the pulse of the music industry.

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