Quote, unquote: Tyler Brûlé puts more boots on the ground

Monocle publisher Tyler Brûlé in an interview with LAist, which asked for the reasons for the magazine's success when other magazines were failing:

I think we have the single edition. We’re fortunate enough that we can rely on a variety of advertising markets. That we don’t just have to rely on New York as an advertising base. That’s one of the reasons how we’ve been able to very much in positive results right now. Our next issue is 20 percent up, and on average, we’re 10 or 12 percent up. That’s one thing.

I also think we’ve taken a very different view of how we treat the Web. We’re not giving anything away for free. You want the archives, you have to pay for it. That’s very counter to the rest of the world. I think a lot of newspapers were wondering what were we thinking, giving all of our content away for free. At the same time, I don’t think we chip away at the core of our brand by having discussion groups. There’s no blogs on our site. There’s no social networking. For us, this [interview] is social networking tonight. The good, old-fashioned way. And I think that’s helped maintain a very strong, focused brand.

And, I think that your President has been responsible for a bit of a call to arms saying, yes, we have work to do at home, but our country has work to do abroad as well. And it’s amazing that in this day and age, when a new administration is saying we have to up our game internationally and yet, look what’s happened with the various US newsweeklies. Still cutting back overseas. You’d think this is time for America to wake up and actually start paying attention to what’s going on and that US media brands would be putting more boots on the ground around the world.