Australian magazine Smith Journal will cease publication after its latest issue, eight years after it first challenged ideas of what a men’s mag could be.
Volume 33, which hit newsagent stands on Monday, is slated to be the magazine’s last.
Editor Chris Harrigan told PEDESTRIAN.TV he was proud of running “a magazine for people who didn’t feel there was a magazine out there for them.”
“We just tried to write about people doing objectively interesting things with their lives, often people who had avoided the path most frequently travelled,” he added.
“I guess the word ‘authenticity’ was the word that came to mind most when we were trying to decide what to include in an issue.”
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Launched in 2011 as a counterpart to the immensely popular Frankie magazine, Smith Journal promised readers a down-to-earth alternative to glossy imports like GQ or service station smut.
Early editions featured interviews with taxidermists, vintage Porsche mechanics, and artisan chocolatiers, but Harrigan said the magazine successfully transcended a blokey “hipster” designation to become a true general interest publication.
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He pointed to a recent profile of Angie Abdilla, a Trawlwoolway woman and technologist applying Indigenous Australian knowledge to artificial intelligence, as an example of Smith Journal’s most representative work.
“People [have] unique pursuits that become quite singular, and tend to consume them in ways, and I felt our job was to take these very niche fields and explain them to people who wouldn’t otherwise rub up against them,” Harrigan said.
In 2018, magazine group Nextmedia acquired Smith Journal and Frankie’s publisher Frankie Press for $2.4 million, mirroring a spate of other high-profile mergers in the field.
Nextmedia states the magazine has a readership of 140,000 people and a distribution of 32,000 copies.
Despite a dedicated fanbase, Harrigan said the quarterly mag encountered the same problems facing much of the Australian publishing industry.
“It wasn’t a problem with readership, it was a problem with advertising revenue,” Harrigan said.
“How you can model your business to provide people with the stories that they want: I mean, that sounds like it should be easy enough to do, but for whatever reason… It’s no surprise to anyone that publishing is not the healthiest it’s ever been, and it hasn’t been in a decade.”
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While most members of the small Smith Journal team have been rolled into broader Frankie Press operations, Harrigan himself is leaving, and said he’s excited to take on new editorial opportunities after the magazine’s closure.
Smith Journal will be sent off at tomorrow’s Volume 33 launch party in Melbourne, which will feature an IPA made in collaboration with Burnley Brewing – perhaps as fitting a farewell tribute as we can imagine.
But Harrigan said Smith Journal may return, in some form, if readers make enough of a racket about its closure.
“I like to think Smith Journal was providing something that wasn’t accessible in this market,” he added.
“We had a unique point of difference.”
