Garden & Gun Magazine Survives in an Ailing Industry

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, September 03, 2012

Garden & Gun Magazine Survives in an Ailing Industry

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Among the many magazines that were battered by the recession, few survived such a precarious financial state as Garden & Gun.

In 2009, the two-year-old Southern lifestyle magazine lost financial support from its first publisher. Its employees, many of whom had relocated from New York City to work here, were left with dwindling buyout packages and the promise of freelance pay. Real estate developers could no longer afford to buy advertisements, and some new prospects said they would not give a cent to the magazine until the owners took “gun” out of its title.

David DiBenedetto, the editor in chief, recalled that when the magazine’s color printer broke, the staff did not have the money to replace it for two months. They had to print out proofs at a nearby Kinko’s.

“You didn’t know if you would be there the next week,” Mr. DiBenedetto said as he picked over a lunch of peach soup, fried green tomatoes and catfish at Charleston’s Husk restaurant. He and his wife moved here from New York so he could work at Garden & Gun. “You just didn’t know if the lights would be on.”

It did not help that Garden & Gun’s spare layouts and meandering prose differed radically from the shorter, flashier articles many magazines were moving toward to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

But now, its provocative name and contrarian approach seem to be paying off in a struggling magazine industry. The bimonthly won a 2011 American Society of Magazine Editors award for general excellence, and its editors have a three-book deal with HarperCollins to publish a Southern guide, a collection of dog columns and a cookbook.

With advertisers like Audi, Le Creuset and Brooks Brothers on board, the magazine’s owners forecast that it could be profitable for the first time this year. While circulation is slipping across the magazine industry, Garden & Gun’s circulation grew to 237,837 subscribers in December 2011 from 210,172 the year before, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The magazine, based out of a 200-year-old former pharmacy on Charleston’s historic King Street, was founded as what Jessica Hundhausen Derrick, its vice president and brand development director, described as “a love song to the South.”

It included articles about backyard gin makers, woodworkers crafting chairs from whiskey barrels, and Southern produce like Georgia rattlesnake watermelon. Among the lighter pieces by authors like Roy Blount Jr., there were richly detailed articles like the one from a lifelong friend of Eudora Welty describing how the author feared that if her dead mother saw her cook, “she’d weep with shame.”

And to feed advertisers’ anxieties, nearly every issue featured unapologetic articles in praise of hunting. There were essays on quail hunts, hunting clubs and hunting dogs, often written with an emphasis on land preservation and basking in sumptuous photo spreads to rival Vogue or National Geographic.

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