Dr. Samir Husni, known as ‘Mr. Magazine™’, sitting among his books and magazines at the University of Mississippi where he founded the Magazine Innovation Center before he retired in August 2021.
“The golden age of magazines hasn’t faded, it just continued under a different business model,” says Samir Husni, also known professionally as ‘Mr. Magazine™’.
More than anyone, Dr. Husni should know. With a 40-year career in academia and consultancy, he’s had a long finger on the pulse of print media.
Forbes called him ‘the country’s leading magazine expert’ and The Chicago Tribune dubbed him ‘the planet’s leading expert on new magazines.’
In the 1990s, he slammed the door on the doomsayers who predicted the end of ink on paper when cable and technology exploded and print ad dollars started retreating.
For sure, some generational titles did lose their relevance, while others disappeared or were streamlined to monthlies and quarterlies.
To the average baby boomer who grew up with magazines as a household reading staple, the memories of flipping through glossy pages can be as dated as dialing on a rotary phone.
But for Mr. Magazine™, print is alive and even thriving under the new ‘bookazine’ format that skirts advertising and subscriptions as main revenue drivers.
Instead, bookazines, which are single-subject, one-off issues, have found a home at the checkout aisles of supermarkets and mass retail outlets.
Taylor Swift, Star Wars, the Kennedy Assassination, and the British Royal Family are just a few examples of these topical releases, which cater to all tastes and age groups.
Cheap to produce, their 90-day shelf life and high price points, typically ranging from $13 to $19, have breathed life into an industry that traditionally relied on news-infused, multi-columned weeklies.
Husni points out that a record 1,200 to 1,300 bookazine titles came out last year. “A friend of mine calls it the poor man’s coffee table book,” he laughs.
While the digital juggernaut is irreversible and keeps chipping away at the margins, Husni refers to digital as a ‘swimmer’ and to print as a ‘diver’.
“Print is real and authentic…you can feel it and touch it…it’s not fake since print is costly to produce.”
Husni’s journey to magazine guruhood is an American tale of immigration mixed with fortune and circumstance.
He grew up in Tripoli, Lebanon to a family of Presbyterians, a ‘minority of a minority’, as he puts it, in a country of mosaic subcultures.
He was 10 years old in 1964 when he bought the first Arabic language issue of Superman at a newsstand across the street from his apartment building.
“It’s a bird, It’s a plane, It’s Superman!”, he recalls of the print and graphics that fired his imagination and forever forged his interest in magazines, especially first editions.
“I fell in love with the idea of storytelling, something with a beginning and an end that I could flip through and read on my own pace.”
Coming from a home where the bible was the most read reference, the impact was profound.
In high school, Samir attended the Tripoli Boys School, founded by American missionaries in the 19th century.
He created newsletters for his church group and for the boy scouts.
Staring at a career in journalism, he was terrified to bring it up with his father and mother who were hoping to see him carve out a future in medicine.
The church’s youth minister urged him to follow his natural talents but at the same time, not disobey his parents.
To Samir’s relief, his father, a foreman at a petroleum company, was surprisingly open to his son’s professional choice.
He enrolled at the University of Lebanon to study journalism and was a junior when the civil war in Lebanon erupted in 1975.
Bullets, bombs, and roadblocks put a temporary hold on his studies, but remarkably life continued with as much normalcy as one could manage amidst the violence.
When the University reopened in 1977, he graduated at the top of his class, married his current wife, Marie, and worked for a daily and a weekly while the war raged.
In 1978, he was offered a scholarship and the young couple packed up and moved to the U.S.
He earned his Master’s at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, and then his PhD in magazine journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
His thesis focused on the determinants of success and failures in magazine start-ups.
Four decades later, Dr. Husni would donate his extensive archive of magazines to his Alma Mata, which today stores them for scholarship research under the Samir Husni Magazine Collection.
Numbering well over 100,000 titles, many were first and last editions, making them rare pop-culture ‘manuscripts’ with windows into the 20th century.
“The collection was so large that the University of Missouri hired two and a half trailer trucks to move them from Oxford, MS to Columbia, MO,” he notes with a chuckle.
Asked which were his favorite publications, he responds, “That’s like asking me to choose among my children.”
He spent his entire academic career at the University of Mississippi where he taught at the School of Journalism and New Media, and also picked up the nickname, Mr. Magazine™, from a student who couldn’t pronounce his name.
In 2009, Husni founded the Magazine Innovation Center, a popular program that unites students and professionals to seek ways to preserve print as a force in today’s media landscape.
Over the years, he has regularly met and interviewed the world’s most influential magazine publishers, continuously gaging the state of the industry and its future.
A champion of the trade, he retired from Ole Miss in 2021 and a heart attack in the summer of 2023 forced him to slow down, but not give up on his magazine work.
Living in Oxford, Mississippi, he spends his leisure time photographing birds and enjoying his 7 grandchildren from 2 daughters and a son.
He’s still involved in the industry, consulting, attending an occasional conference, and offering insights into the folds of the print business.
His take on the future of magazines? “Print has always been with us, and it always will.”
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