Daily Front Row

2012 February 13

The Long Granger

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David Granger
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(NEW YORK) After 15 years editing Esquire, David Granger remains one of the heroic, happy few with overflowing reservoirs of passion for every little detail of publishing. How do you like your paper additives? Aspiring EICs, meet your maestro!
BY ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV

Is this your dream job?
When I came to New York, I specifically wanted to work at Esquire. It was the first magazine that I really started to read as a man. I went to the University of Tennessee for undergrad, and these two guys who had finished about 10 years or so ahead of me bought Esquire—Chris Whittle and Phil Moffitt—and that piqued my interest in the magazine. It became my guide book! Esquire taught me the things I needed to know to move to New York. At GQ, Art Cooper taught me so much, but after four or so years, I wanted to sit in the big chair.

Any anxieties?
Only after I got it! You come in thinking you’re going to change everything, and then you see all the roadblocks. You realize you’re so screwed, and that you really don’t know anything!

What kind of roadblocks?
I turned over the staff relatively quickly, but it takes so long to communicate what you want to do with the magazine to the people you either inherit or bring in. Then, you do those things in such halting steps. Some ideas turn out to be great, and others are just terrible. The first issue that I was the least bit proud of was probably six or seven months after I got the job. I don’t know why Cathie [Black] didn’t fire me during my first three years! I thank her in my mind every day. I remember Tina Brown once saying she still hadn’t gotten The New Yorker right as she was leaving after almost five years. I thought that was bullshit, and that Tina was just being modest, but I now I realize it’s true—so rarely do you get everything right.

How often do you feel like you’ve nailed it from cover to cover?
We do many good issues, but we do maybe one or two great issues every three years.

What are the milestones of your 15-year run?
The most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened to me was when The New York Times ran an article at the end of May 1997 announcing that David Granger was the next editor of Esquire. That’s hard to top.

And a memorable moment off the printed page?
On our 75th anniversary in 2008, we had a big celebration for a couple thousand people. President Clinton spoke because the theme of the anniversary was ‘The 21st Century Begins Now.’ Even though he was a few years early, President Clinton was the guy who promised to build us a bridge to the 21st century. He owed me a favor, so we got him to show. The party was filled with Esquire people, from all 17 or 18 of our international editions at the time. It was magical to see the number of lives that the magazine touches internally.

Have your competitors changed?
For quite a while, I’ve thought that our competition isn’t just magazines—it’s every form of entertainment or information media. I really doubt that there are a lot of people making a choice between reading Esquire, GQ, or Men’s Health anymore—they’re deciding between Esquire, Xbox, or cable TV. Esquire’s biggest challenge is to be consistently entertaining. The more options, the more special we seem by comparison. Our magazine only comes out once a month, and it’s a really edited view of the world.

Who is inducing your envy?
The magazines with great visuals—with photography budgets that are, I assume, so lush. What Stefano has done at W is really ambitious. I can’t help but envy some of the things I see going on at Condé Nast magazines, especially visually, like at Vanity Fair. Also, one of the smartest magazines around is Elle. Their front-of-book is really smart and substantial.

Who is your current editor crush?
Adam Moss. Because New York is the magazine that makes me angriest that I didn’t think of an idea, mostly in regards to their service. Probably everyone at a magazine in this city would agree with me on that one. Great service stories in other magazines just make me smack myself on the forehead!

What’s the women’s mag counterpart to Esquire?
Some of what Marie Claire does is similar in ambition to Esquire, and Elle has a level of intelligence that I really admire. But there isn’t any one title in particular that lines up with what we do. Our first goal is to be entertaining and funny—and there are very few magazines that people will walk away from going, ‘Wow, that was fun.’

What do you really think of GQ?
It’s not polite to talk about publications that are seen as direct competition! That’s a hard question. I admire a lot of what they do. I think their art direction and design is fantastic, and they still have amazing writers. GQ has become an even more urban magazine and a little more edgy, which is a good thing. They’ve defined themselves in a different way than we have.

What’s the trick to feigning fearless leadership?
Bluster. And a show of confidence, even when you’re doubting yourself.

Has the shifting media landscape enriched you?
Our brains have had to expand as opportunities have widened beyond print. These new platforms that were supposed to kill traditional media have ended up helping Esquire thrive. If you take advantage of it, disintermediation allows you to be anything you want—it’s amazing! We’re not just people who create paper things anymore. We’re also game makers if we want to be, as we did with our first Esquire iPad game recently. We can be almost anything.

But you’re really into paper stock and ink quality!
Five or so years ago, everybody was saying that print was dead. I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn’t. I talked to Hearst’s manufacturing department about experimenting with paper and ink. They got excited about that, convened a meeting with their six most important vendors, and I gave them a speech about the magazine’s potential. Over the next few months, the vendors came back with fantastic presentations about what paper could do—stuff you’ve seen in greeting cards, but never in magazines. As it happened, it was at the end of 2008—when the whole world was collapsing—but we still used that paper research to do two origami covers in 2009. Before that, we’d done an electronic mix cover for the first time, where the cover ‘moved’—it’s incredibly crude, sure, but stuff moves! That’s cool! I get really excited about the potential of new additives to paper. I don’t know if it’s as exciting as an Oscar party, though.

How has your reader changed over the years?
When I took over Esquire, it was a much more insular magazine for people that lived in New York and looked down on the rest of the country. We tried to make it more generous and less exclusive. Our readers today are younger, regardless of what any research might say. They’re also more curious. I describe today’s reader as the ‘high-normal’ American man: they’re not snobbish or precious. They’re men who are interested in politics—but they’re also interested in a funny joke from a beautiful woman.

How big is your female readership?
We make the magazine for men, even though there are women on staff. Yet the best reader responses come from women. Those letters or emails usually start off the same way, ‘I know I’m not supposed to be reading the magazine, but…’ We try to make a smart magazine, and I think that’s why women respond. It’s not a magazine for smart people—it’s just a smart magazine for people. Oh, and I once got a phone call from Bonnie Raitt telling me how much she loved a certain article. Does that count?

What kinds of topics elicit female feedback?
We did this package in the magazine about marriage called ‘Hitched.’ It wasn’t a guide on how to get married, but rather, on how to stay married.

What’s the Esquire Big Black Book’s backstory?
We first started thinking about it when Stefano Tonchi was my fashion creative director. Initially, he wanted to launch an international Esquire fashion magazine—that turned out to be impossible for a variety of reasons. Then we saw this cool, oversized, annual almanac-type publication by Australian Harper’s Bazaar. My previous publisher Kevin O’Malley and I pitched it to Hearst as a special publication about how not to waste your money. If you’re going to spring for luxury goods, assuming you have all the money in the world, you want to purchase intelligently.

What’s your greatest, most intelligent purchase?
I have all of my shirts custom-made, which brings me joy. Around two years ago, Julie, who makes my shirts, asked if I wanted a monogram. I didn’t want a monogram anywhere where it would show, so she put it on the shirttail. Only I know it’s there, and it gives me a bit of pleasure every time.

What would you be doing if you weren’t editing?

It’s almost impossible to say! My second year of graduate school I was offered the assistant manager job at Lord Hardwicke’s Inn in Richmond, Virginia. So my nightmare is that I would be the manager at Lord Hardwicke’s Inn in Richmond, Virginia by now.

What will Esquire look like at its centennial?
It will have a much larger trim size, and the paper stock is going to be gorgeous. People are going to treasure print even more in the next 25 or so years! Esquire will be there, as an even more beautiful physical product than it already is now.