Happy New Year from all of us at JCK magazine and JCKonline! This year promises to be a very exciting one for our team, and I’m thrilled to tell you why.
As some of you may know, Reed Exhibitions purchased JCK magazine in 2010, hiring a third party (custom publishing house TMG) to produce the magazine. After six successful years of awards and praise, it was time for us to rethink that arrangement. Following a request-for-proposal process, we are delighted to announce our new publishing partner: Headline Studio.
Headline Studio is a new custom publishing and content marketing division in the Advance Local network, which in turn is part of Advance Publications—one of the nation’s largest publishing companies, and parent company of Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, The New Yorker, Wired, and more.
The principals at Headline Studio, Liz Buffa and Matt Chervin, are former colleagues of ours, so we are at once in the hands of old friends while simultaneously within the walls of an exciting new level of publishing house. Headquartered in the Condé Nast offices at One World Trade Center, Headline Studio will bring to JCK—and to our industry—a whole new level of expertise and best practices in magazine publishing, website design, and more. Perhaps most exciting for me, Headline Studio will work with us to further develop my baby, the JCK Content Studio. Like The New York Times’ T Brand Studio or Forbes’ BrandVoice, JCK Content Studio is our sponsored content and native advertising division, one of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas of advertising right now.
Our first task with our new partner is a complete redesign of JCK magazine, JCKonline, and our JCK News Daily newsletter, for which Headline Studio has tapped Peter Yates, former creative director at Hearst International and design director at Condé Nast before that. I’ve seen the mock-ups, and they are stunning—clean, elegant, and spare, yet dynamic and engaging. They accommodate both the beauty of jewelry and the importance of JCK’s trade content. Peter’s debut is the March–April issue, so be on the lookout!
For JCKonline (both desktop and mobile), the look is a crisp refinement of our current style, with plenty of white space, simplicity of use, elegant design, and large, impactful ads. For the first time, we will have a true mobile version (not simply a responsive design). As someone who reads about 90 percent of my personal web content on my iPhone, I’m perhaps most thrilled about this.
Of course, as publisher, I’d be remiss not to mention how all of this affects our advertising community. New, improved design shows our commitment to this trade and our investment in this brand. Our new design will increase reader excitement, engagement, and interaction with our advertisers’ messages. Our new mobile site will allow advertisers’ messages to travel from one platform to another, with each providing maximum impact. And finally, our enhanced JCK Content Studio will allow us to work with advertisers to take advantage of all the latest best practices in marketing through storytelling. I told you it was going to be an exciting year!
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me personally if you’d like to be a part of the “new” JCK—especially our exciting March–April launch issue. We’re confident it will be a must-read!
Top: One World Trade (far left), which now houses the JCK editorial offices
(Inset: Smelzer photograph by Michael Falco)