Lecture: Max Schorr

Good publisher Max Schorr. Photo: HHill.org.


When he took the podium wearing a green hooded sweatshirt, faded jeans, and cowboy boots, Max Schorr looked more like a member of the student A.V. club than a guest lecturer. But the 26-year-old publisher and editor-in-chief of Good Magazine, who spoke at NYU’s Department of Journalism on October 25, 2006, had a leg up on the students and faculty in the audience: he knew what it took to start a brand-new magazine with nation-wide distribution.

After introducing Danny Goldfield, a photographer whose project New York Children, which features portraits of kids from all over the world who now reside in New York City, was featured in the first issue, Schorr got right to the point. “‘What is Good Magazine?’ has been the question since I started on the project,” he said. By way of an answer, he plucked a copy of Inc. Magazine from the magazine racks that lined the wall and proceeded to recount the bittersweet origins of Good.

Inc.’s founder, Bernie Goldhirsh, died of brain cancer in 2003, leaving his two college-aged children with trust funds that would pay out in installments over the next ten years, explained Schorr. A self-made entrepreneur, Goldhirsh stipulated that his son and daughter only take out money earlier than the prescribed period of time if they used it for investments or to start companies. His son Ben had recently moved to Los Angeles to go to film school, but dropped out to start his own film company, Reason Pictures, after his father’s death.

Ben wanted to “create social change,” Schorr explained, and he thought the best way to do that was through media. Reason funds films that aim to entertain and inform viewers about issues that don’t typically appear on the Hollywood agenda, such as Americas, a thriller that chronicles the efforts of a 17-year-old Los Angeles girl to extricate herself and her family from gang life.

Schorr, who had been friends with Ben since high school, tracked the younger Goldhirsh’s efforts to “usher in a culture of good,” with interest. Like Ben, he believed strongly in “social entrepreneurship”—the idea that business-minded individuals can come up with creative, economically viable ways to promote change. Ben thought starting a magazine would help him further his agenda. At Ben’s urging, Schorr resigned from his teaching job in Massachusetts and moved to LA to help launch Ben’s brainchild: Good.

From the beginning, Schorr said, he puzzled over how to convey a sense of “good,” one that would fit the lifestyles and concerns of today’s 20-somethings. This could be done, he and Goldhirsh decided, through socially conscious media: articles about projects designed to positively influence the world; advertisements from businesses that use their economic power to help underserved communities; profiles of people who refuse to get swept away by the waves of apathy rolling across the nation. The challenge was figuring out how to maintain the magazine’s integrity in a ruthless media marketplace, Schorr said.

In previous generations, people tended to believe that financial success and altruism were mutually exclusive ideas. “I think the way our parents or grandparents thought of that was… ‘you do good because that’s a nice thing to do [but] you don’t have fun while you’re doing good, and you don’t make money while you’re doing good,’” said Schorr. Today, more and more people are bent on being successful in their chosen fields and making an impact on the world. Goldhirsh and Schorr felt that people who fit this description were underserved in the magazine market. “We don’t just want to be another gossip-y magazine,” Schorr declared, “We want content that nourishes people’s minds and stimulates their thoughts.”

As an example of such content, Schorr asked photographer Danny Goldfield to speak about New York Children, which is featured in the opening “Look” section of the first issue. Two years ago, Goldfield set out to take pictures of one child from each country in the world now living in New York City. The goal of the project is to explore the commonalities between cultures and nurture a sense of community. Reason Pictures filmed a mini-documentary about Goldfield’s endeavor that is featured on Good’s web site and Yahoo! Videos. Two hours after appearing on Yahoo! the documentary had received 250,000 hits. This cyber popularity helped Goldfield advance his project and brought attention to the magazine.

While New York Children generated a great deal of interest in Good, Schorr was aware that interesting content alone wouldn’t guarantee the magazine’s survival. Working with several consultants and friends of the late Bernie Goldhirsh, Schorr’s team decided to use a time-tested business model for commercial magazine development. This three-pronged approach focuses on refining “Concept”, boosting “Circulation,” and increasing “Advertising” revenue. Despite its proven success, Schorr didn’t feel comfortable adopting the model wholesale and insisted on tailoring it to suit Good’s vision and audience.

The consultants contended that the only way to solicit readers was through direct-mail advertising campaigns. But Schorr and his team questioned the effectiveness of direct mail, which most people “direct” right into the garbage bin. And at $50 a piece to produce, the team was determined to grow their audience more economically. The “Choose Good” campaign is their innovative solution. As part of the campaign, Good has chosen 12 charities to benefit financially from subscriptions to the magazine. Every person who subscribes to Good chooses one of these organizations, focused on issues as diverse as wildlife conservation, assistance to needy schools, and microfinance, to receive the $20 subscription fee.

Sounds great, one audience member pointed out, but how do you make money? Through advertising, Schorr explained. Good wants to create “projects and initiatives with companies that will do tangible good in the world, or do amazing projects, or support artists.” Still, Schorr acknowledged that working with large companies, such as Timberland, can be a tricky business, since no company is ideologically perfect.

For example, Nike is a brand that no socially-conscious college student would have been caught dead in ten years ago, due to sweatshop conditions in their Asian factories, according to Schorr. At a Nike protest in Harvard Square in the 1990s, Schorr remembered thinking, “Nike’s kind of evil.” But he has since grown to respect the corporation’s turnaround.

After years of pressure from students and others boycotting Nike products, the company is now “doing amazingly progressive, forward-looking things in these countries where their factories are,” Schorr said. While he did not mention any immediate plans to partner with Nike, this example illustrates one of Good’s core messages: instead of complaining that big business is intractably evil, young adults should use their collective purchasing power to effect change in the corporate-dominated world.

At the end of the lecture, Schorr asked the audience for their impressions of the first issue of Good. The journalism students in the audience had a lot to say, and Schorr leaned on the podium, listening attentively. Most of the questions involved submitting or pitching to the magazine, but one or two cynics chimed in. One student suggested that having Albert Gore, Jr. on staff must be a financial advantage. Another said that it must be nice to have Goldhirsh’s millions invested in the magazine, which elicited a sly smile from Schorr. “I like hearing the skeptical point of view…” he said. “Some people won’t be into this and that’s fine.”

But Schorr is intent on proving the cynics wrong. Good’s goal is to reach 50,000 subscribers by the sixth issue, which would generate $1 million in donations—an ambitious goal, but Schorr is confident. “The experts say it can’t be done,” he told the audience. “I can’t imagine us not doing it.”

Suzanne Pekow is a first semester graduate student in NYU’s Department of Journalism.

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