AARP The Magazine: America’s Largest Consumer Magazine – Fighting The Good Fight To Disrupt The Idea Of Aging In America

The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Bob Love, Editor-In-Chief of AARP The Magazine

“In my business, I’ve been around a long time, 20 years at Rolling Stone, and then the next 15 at a variety of publications. All I know is that the alarmists are almost never correct. Print is far from dead and it’s a great time still to be a journalist.” Bob Love“I believe it’s (print) far from dead. There are people who think that we’re in the buggy-whip business, but when you deliver 1.3 million new readers to your publication in the last year, I would say that’s not quite true.” Bob LoveWhen media people and those in the advertising side of the business think of audience engagement or reaching core customers and entrancing new ones into the fold, their minds are usually on that sector of individuals dubbed millennials. Fair? No, far from it. True nonetheless. And while millennials are a very important part of the industry’s life’s blood, there is another extremely large group of people, in fact, 100 million strong, who are being overlooked and slighted when it comes to cultivating their readership. That group is the 50+ audience.Bob Love is out to change that one-sided practice and perception. Bob is editor-in-chief of the largest circulation magazine in the country: AARP The Magazine. And at AARP The Magazine, the 50+ opinion is the only one that matters. According to the magazine’s research, 50+ Americans will soon control more than 70 percent of the disposable income in this country. They buy two-thirds of all the new cars, half of all the computers and a third of all movie tickets. They spend $7 billion a year shopping online. And travel? More than 80 percent of all the premium-travel dollars flow from their credit cards.So why then do magazines and magazine media and advertisers think this group of readers is not a viable investment? Bob’s answer for that is one simple word: ageism. And he should know since he worked at Rolling Stone magazine for 20 years and saw every assignment and every move the magazine made through, as he called it “the lens of youth.” And now he sees through a much more mature lens that is entirely in focus on the needs of his readers.Having worked with some of the greats like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and P.J. O’Rourke, he also knows good writing when he reads it and brings that skill and others he has gained throughout his life’s work to AARP The Magazine to make it a force to be reckoned with in the world of magazines. Through respect for his reader and stories, design and photography that engages as well as informs, Bob is making the statement that 50+ is now the age to be and to attract if you want a readership that can spend money, share their free time and have a love for print that no other audience has right now in this country.So, I hope that you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with the inimitable Bob Love, Editor-In-Chief, AARP The Magazine.But first the sound-bites:On why he thinks the advertising and media worlds today are only interested in what millennials have to say instead of including baby boomers in the conversation as well: First of all, I think there’s ageism in our society. And at AARP we are in kind of a constant battle to counter the pernicious effects of ageism, that thinking that people can be dismissed or counted out because of how many years they’ve lived on earth. I think that advertising and the media itself has fairly ageist persuasions. And I believe that’s the problem.On the magazine’s readership growth over recent years: Our readership from the fall of 2003, when we were first measured by MRI, has grown by 11.669 million readers, which is more than the total population of Greece. The growth of the magazine is bigger than 88% of all the MRI measured magazines. That’s why I think this is the great story that’s underneath the noses of all of the media reporters, and you were the only one smart enough to come back to me and say let’s do this interview. This is a very rare success story in publishing in the 21st century.On the fact that baby boomers have more money to spend and more free time that millennials and yet they remain almost invisible to marketers: It’s a gigantic wave of baby boomers that are still purchasing and still making decisions about what they want to do. They travel more than anybody else and it’s kind of a mystery. That’s why I said you asked me the hardest question first, because I don’t know why the advertising community; why media in general thinks that it’s OK to slag off people over 50.On how his role of editor has changed since his years at Rolling Stone: The short answer is we saw everything through the lens of youth and now I see everything through the lens of the fifty-plus American who has dreams and deserves to live a dignified life and to be treated with respect in society.On how he has utilized his skills to change AARP The Magazine:I’ve been at AARP The Magazine for 2½ years now and I’ve taken my skills of a lifetime in publishing, a combination of Rolling Stone, which was a mass market dual audience magazine, and my time at Rodale magazines, where service is preeminent; Playboy and Reader’s Digest, which each had their own sort of secret sauce, and I sort of combined them together, but the truth is AARP The Magazine is a dual audience, general interest magazine with a mass audience and a mass reach. We had a chance to do Bob Dylan on the cover in February 2015, and that proved to be kind of a shot-heard-round-the-world, in terms of the impact. People kind of had an “aha” moment: oh my gosh, AARP The Magazine has Bob Dylan on the cover. And Bob Dylan chose us to be on the cover and take his message to Americans who are 50 and over.On whether he used his Rolling Stone connections more than AARP’s connections to get the Dylan cover: I have to say in all humility that Bob Dylan chose AARP to take his message out. He could have had the entire arts and leisure section of The New York Times if he’d wanted. But he chose our team and I did know his PR guys and his manager from phone calls at Rolling Stone, but the truth is he made that decision. We just took the ball and ran with it as much as we could.On when he thinks he’ll feel like he’s accomplished that “it” moment with the magazine: I don‘t ever feel like this is it; with a magazine you’re constantly tweaking the design, the editorial approach and it pretty much is what I love to do. I hadn’t really been in charge of a magazine since Rolling Stone and it’s great fun. I don’t think there’s any stopping it. We poll our readers online every issue because we’re not sold on the newsstand. We do a great deal of internal research and so we find out the things that they want in their magazine and the things that they consider must-reads.On whether he can ever envision AARP The Magazine without a print component: Can I see a day when we don’t have a print component? I can see a day maybe into the future, but older readers tend to be the people who are reading magazines. If you look anywhere around you, young people are reading their phones. It’s older people who are actually reading magazines still. So, we’ll be one of the last ones probably to go over because print is still so necessary to reach our readers. And I believe it’s far from dead. There are people who think that we’re in the buggy-whip business, but when you deliver 1.3 million new readers to your publication in the last year, I would say that’s not quite true.On working with people such as P.J. O’Rourke, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson: (Laughs) The thing is, I survived; there are editors who did not quite survive their contact with Hunter. First of all, I loved Hunter and I loved working with him. And I was grateful for the privilege of working with him. I wrote a piece about him in the Columbia Journalism Review and if you read it you’ll see that it was quite a journey to work with Hunter.On whether he believes journalism today is more lower-case or upper-case: I don’t think I would venture an opinion on that because there’s so much more journalism now. When I grew up there were three television stations; there were a few very good national newspapers, and now with the Internet, there are so many more people making journalism and there are so many more outlets, that it would be wrong of me to make a judgement whether or not it’s lower-case journalism.On the secret sauce of AARP The Magazine: That’s a good question. I think it’s treating its readers with respect, not talking down to them, giving them as much variety and depth in the pages of an every two month magazine as we can fit. And keeping it modern and up-to-date, not pandering, and using the best talent in photography and design and journalism that you can afford.On audience engagement with the magazine: I think it’s not taking their interest for granted. We’re an association magazine with all of the joys and exigencies that come with that. People get so much mail that they could throw it away. And AARP generates a lot of mail, but we happen to know from our own surveys, in addition to the independent surveys like MRI, that somewhere between six or seven out of ten readers really read all four issues.On whether his colleagues and friends thought he was crazy to consider the job as editor-in-chief of AARP The Magazine:(Laughs) I’m the only one out of all of my contemporaries and colleagues who has a full time job. Everybody else is putting together the freelance life and trying to keep body and soul together job to job. People on the inside who have to make a living practicing the art of journalism know that a general interest magazine that serves 36 million readers is nothing to laugh at.On the biggest challenge he’s had to face since taking the job with AARP The Magazine: That’s another great question and I know the answer and I’ll be very succinct. The greatest challenge in making an interesting AARP The Magazine is the lack of pages. And because our printing and postage costs are so phenomenally high there is a great deal of energy in getting the number of pages that we do down. Like any magazine, it’s the calculus of how many pages of advertising you have versus how many pages of editorial you can afford to put out to 22 million homes. It is the biggest problem because there is so much more that we could do, that I personally would love to do with the magazine.On anything else he’d like to add: We’re fighting the good fight at AARP The Magazine to disrupt the idea of aging in America. And that’s an important notion and that’s what we see as the role of the publication. And by the way, I’m also the editor of the AARP Bulletin, which similarly goes out to 22 million homes, 10 times per year.On what someone would find him doing at home in the evenings if they showed up unexpectedly on his doorstep:Typically, I watch the cable news shows in the early evening around dinnertime, one liberal and one conservative, so I can understand the mood of the country. (Laughs) And then if I read at home, I probably tend to read newspapers and magazines on my tablet. I have the paper magazines at work so this just keeps the clutter down in my home.On what keeps him up at night: I think I’m concerned about the political discourse in this country. Every time I think I’m shocked by it, by how the backbenchers have grown into a chorus of haters, with their own biosphere of radio, television and print, something else happens. I fear for the nation and I fear for an emerging generation of millennials who will, I also fear, not have as rich a life as we’ve had, because it’ll be harder for them to have higher wages to buy homes and other things that have always been associated with the American Dream.And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Bob Love, Editor-In-Chief, AARP The Magazine.Samir Husni: When you were working at Rolling Stone and at almost any other job that you’ve had, people were constantly clamoring to get your views and ideas on everything, and the magazines’ views and ideas that you were working on at the time. And now that you’re working at the largest circulation magazine that we have in the country and serving almost one-third of the Baby Boomers out of the 72 million, everyone only wants to talk about the millennials. Why do you think that’s the case?Bob Love: Did you have to ask me the hardest question first? (Laughs)Samir Husni: (Laughs too).Bob Love: First of all, I think there’s ageism in our society. And at AARP we are in kind of a constant battle to counter the pernicious effects of ageism, that thinking that people can be dismissed or counted out because of how many years they’ve lived on earth. I think that advertising and the media itself has fairly ageist persuasions. And I believe that’s the problem.If you want to get it on record here about who we are at AARP Publications, we are the largest consumer magazine in the nation. We have 22 million subscribers and 35.95 million readers according to the fall MRI.Samir Husni: You’ve shown a very healthy growth from years past, where you had something like .75 percent readership per copy and now you’ve increased that readership quite a bit.Bob Love: Our readership from the fall of 2003, when we were first measured by MRI, has grown by 11.669 million readers, which is more than the total population of Greece. The growth of the magazine is bigger than 88% of all the MRI measured magazines. That’s why I think this is the great story that’s underneath the noses of all of the media reporters, and you were the only one smart enough to come back to me and say let’s do this interview. This is a very rare success story in publishing in the 21st century.Samir Husni: As an editor who has quite a few years under your belt, whether it be at Rolling Stone or editor-at-large at Playboy or as an adjunct professor at Columbia University; what can you do to change the stereotype? I tell my students all of the time; we have as many baby boomers as we have millennials in this country.Bob Love: That’s right.Samir Husni: Who has more money to spend; who has more free time: the millennials or the baby boomers?Bob Love: (Laughs) This is certainly true. We know, because we pay attention to these things. People over the age of 50 are 100 million strong. We will soon control more than 70 percent of the disposable income in this country. We buy two-thirds of all the new cars, half of all the computers and a third of all movie tickets. We spend $7 billion a year shopping online. More than 80 percent of all the premium-travel dollars flow from our credit cards. Add it all up, as my AARP colleague Jody Holtzman did last year, and U.S. adults who are over 50 ka-ching as the third largest economy in the world, trailing only the gross national product of the United States and China!And still, older Americans are virtually ignored by marketers mired in last century’s obsession with youth. In fact, only 5 percent of advertising is directed at older consumers, according to Nielsen, which has been tracking Americans’ habits for decades. It’s insulting.As veteran ad man Bob Hoffman put it recently, “Almost everyone you see in a car commercial is between the ages of 18 and 24. And yet, people 75 to dead buy five times as many new cars as people 18 to 24.” Nielsen calls people 50 and up “the most valuable generation in the history of marketing.”It’s a gigantic wave of baby boomers that are still purchasing and still making decisions about what they want to do. They travel more than anybody else and it’s kind of a mystery. That’s why I said you asked me the hardest question first, because I don’t know why the advertising community; why media in general thinks that it’s OK to slag off people over 50.I think it’s a reflection of ageism in our society and now that I’m in the middle of this revolution about what it means to be middle-aged and older in our society, I find it very, very interesting.Samir Husni: You have over 35 years of experience under your belt as a journalist; if you were to compare your role as managing editor at Rolling Stone and your role now as editor of AARP Magazine; how has your role as editor changed since your years with Rolling Stone?Bob Love: That’s an excellent question and I’ve thought about it. At Rolling Stone we saw everything through the lens of youth; the crime stories were about youth; the political stories were often ones that interested youth, college loans, etc. Jann (Wenner) wanted himself and his readers to have a seat at the table of public discourse, and Rolling Stone was kind of the first on the scene to do that.So, the short answer is we saw everything through the lens of youth and now I see everything through the lens of the fifty-plus American who has dreams and deserves to live a dignified life and to be treated with respect in society.Samir Husni: How have you utilized those skills that you have to, maybe not change people’s perceptions of the fifty-plus American, but in reality to change the magazine?Bob Love: I’ve been at AARP The Magazine for 2½ years now and I’ve taken my skills of a lifetime in publishing, a combination of Rolling Stone, which was a mass market dual audience magazine, and my time at Rodale magazines, where service is preeminent; Playboy and Reader’s Digest, which each had their own sort of secret sauce, and I sort of combined them together, but the truth is AARP The Magazine is a dual audience, general interest magazine with a mass audience and a mass reach.And so it basically comes natural to me to think that what I’m interested in and what I know my friends are interested in, and the people whose opinions count, will be of interest to many of the millions of readers who get the magazine.We had a chance to do Bob Dylan on the cover in February 2015, and that proved to be kind of a shot-heard-round-the-world, in terms of the impact. People kind of had an “aha” moment: oh my gosh, AARP The Magazine has Bob Dylan on the cover. And Bob Dylan chose us to be on the cover and take his message to Americans who are 50 and over.Samir Husni: It’s my understanding that you used your connections more than the AARP connections to get that Dylan cover and also to get the CD that went to very specific, lucky subscribers.Bob Love: I have to say in all humility that Bob Dylan chose AARP to take his message out. He could have had the entire arts and leisure section of The New York Times if he’d wanted. But he chose our team and I did know his PR guys and his manager from phone calls at Rolling Stone, but the truth is he made that decision. We just took the ball and ran with it as much as we could.And we got to deliver the new CD to thousands of our readers and also a discount to millions of our readers if they wanted to buy it.That’s one of the things that I love about my job here, the access I am granted. I got to interview Bob Dylan, President Obama, Robin Roberts, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Douglas, all in the space of about 14 months. And I get to work with one of the grand dames of women’s publishing, Myrna Blyth, who dispenses great magazine ideas as easily as breathing.Samir Husni: When will you feel like this is that “it” moment with the magazine?Bob Love: I don‘t ever feel like this is it; with a magazine you’re constantly tweaking the design, the editorial approach and it pretty much is what I love to do. I hadn’t really been in charge of a magazine since Rolling Stone and it’s great fun.I don’t think there’s any stopping it. We poll our readers online every issue because we’re not sold on the newsstand. We do a great deal of internal research and so we find out the things that they want in their magazine and the things that they consider must-reads.So it’s my job to reinvent service for the fifty-plus readership; it’s my job to bring them something surprising in each issue if we have the pages to do it. And I don’t think that’s a job that’s ever done. I feel like you just keep doing it every day. And surround yourself with people who love to do the same job.Samir Husni: If I heard you correctly, you said you poll the people online; I thought us older folks didn’t use online. We’re ink on paper people, right?Bob Love: (Laughs) That’s far from true.Samir Husni: (Laughs too).Bob Love: We know that our readers do a lot of online reading. And we get to them for the most important thing, which are our reader engagement surveys, and we do that online.By the way, one of the things that MRI turned up for us in the fall is that we continue to have the highest reader engagement metrics in the business bar none. Actually, 66% read four out of four of the last issues, compared to the other top ten total reach magazines, which are at least 20 or 30 points behind that.So, this is a magazine that people really take quite seriously and they love it. They spend 45 minutes with it every time they get it and it’s quite successful when it comes to engaging its readers.Samir Husni: I know we live in a digital age, but can you ever envision AARP The Magazine without the ink on paper component and everything will be digital-only?Bob Love: That is the great issue of our time. How do we cross over that divide between paper and digital? We have an active online site for the organization; we put our magazines out on tablet and I’m negotiating with Texture right now to get us onto that platform.Can I see a day when we don’t have a print component? I can see a day maybe into the future, but older readers tend to be the people who are reading magazines. If you look anywhere around you, young people are reading their phones. It’s older people who are actually reading magazines still. So, we’ll be one of the last ones probably to go over because print is still so necessary to reach our readers.And I believe it’s far from dead. There are people who think that we’re in the buggy-whip business, but when you deliver 1.3 million new readers to your publication in the last year, I would say that’s not quite true.Samir Husni: Not too many journalists can say they’ve worked with and edited people like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and P. J. O’Rourke. One of my colleagues here at the University of Mississippi is Curtis Wilkie, who was a very good friend of Hunter S. Thompson’s. So, just the mere fact that you worked with Hunter S. Thompson should have left some kind of an impact on you.Bob Love: (Laughs) The thing is, I survived; there are editors who did not quite survive their contact with Hunter. First of all, I loved Hunter and I loved working with him. And I was grateful for the privilege of working with him. I wrote a piece about him in the Columbia Journalism Review and if you read it you’ll see that it was quite a journey to work with Hunter.But the guy had such a distinct voice and was so very generous as a writer and as a seer in our society that it left me thinking that there are possibilities with voices in journalism that are out there. But you have to be careful, for every Hunter there are a thousand Hunter imitators. For every Tom Wolfe…it’s the same story, you know?But to seek out the voices, the truly unique voices working in journalism, that was something that Jann Wenner did very well and I’ll always take my lessons from him and be grateful to him for all of the things that he taught me. And one of them was, believing in people who have an idiosyncratic view and supporting them. It was a long haul with Hunter; it was a long haul with Tom Wolfe’s book, which was serialized in the magazine. I enjoyed working with Tom too, very much; he’s such a great talent and a gentleman to work with. And P.J. O’Rourke; I even brought him into AARP The Magazine to do something on the baby boomers last year.Does it change you to work with great writers? Yes it does. It shows you possibilities; it shows you the unique power of voices in journalism, which is a subset of what we do.Samir Husni: Do you think today’s journalism compared to the journalism of the pre-digital age is more of a lower-case journalism or more of an upper-case journalism?Bob Love: I don’t think I would venture an opinion on that because there’s so much more journalism now. When I grew up there were three television stations; there were a few very good national newspapers, and now with the Internet, there are so many more people making journalism and there are so many more outlets, that it would be wrong of me to make a judgement whether or not it’s lower-case journalism. I would think that some of the stuff we’re seeing now is of the highest quality. It’s much harder to break through to readers in this environment where we are saturated with information.Samir Husni: When you referred to Reader’s Digest and Playboy as having their own secret sauce; what is the secret sauce for AARP The Magazine?Bob Love: That’s a good question. I think it’s treating its readers with respect, not talking down to them, giving them as much variety and depth in the pages of an every two month magazine as we can fit. And keeping it modern and up-to-date, not pandering, and using the best talent in photography and design and journalism that you can afford.Basically, it’s all of the ingredients that I learned at the other publications. Reader’s Digest is a mass market magazine that is much smarter than young people might give it credit for. It’s a very smart magazine. At Rodale, they reinvented service and brought young men into the tent that hadn’t been in, and they basically have done so much work in making service relevant and to have its voice speak to young men and young women.Samir Husni: Not to put down any former editors of the magazine, but somehow you’ve used your magic journalism skills to actually give me, and I am that audience, something to engage with when I sit down to read.Bob Love: Do you read it?Samir Husni: Yes, I do. I am an active member. (Laughs)Bob Love: I think it’s not taking their interest for granted. We’re an association magazine with all of the joys and exigencies that come with that. People get so much mail that they could throw it away. And AARP generates a lot of mail, but we happen to know from our own surveys, in addition to the independent surveys like MRI, that somewhere between six or seven out of ten readers really read all four issues.So, we pay attention. I think maybe that’s the best way to shorthand what an editor can do to serve his or her readers and that’s to just pay attention and to give them what they want, and also to lead and to give them something surprising in each issue. In the last issue we had a piece on aging gangsters, who of course do not get social security, do not have 401K plans and most of the time do not live to get very aged. But today’s gangsters are living quite long, so it was sort of a surprise curve ball piece to appear in the magazine.Samir Husni: When you told people you were offered the job as editor-in-chief of AARP The Magazine; did they think you’d lost your mind to even consider it or did they say wow and congratulate you?Bob Love: (Laughs) I’m the only one out of all of my contemporaries and colleagues who has a full time job.Samir Husni: (Laughs)Bob Love: Everybody else is putting together the freelance life and trying to keep body and soul together job to job. People on the inside who have to make a living practicing the art of journalism know that a general interest magazine that serves 36 million readers is nothing to laugh at.Again, it comes back to the inherent ageism in our society. It seems to be OK to make fun of older people, and to make fun of AARP because it represents those older people. We used to be called the American Association of Retired Persons, but we’ve dropped that because maybe 40% of our members work part time or full time now. It’s a different population of people 50 and up, as you well know.Samir Husni: What has been the biggest challenge that you’ve had to face since taking the job and how did you overcome it?Bob Love: That’s another great question and I know the answer and I’ll be very succinct. The greatest challenge in making an interesting AARP The Magazine is the lack of pages. And because our printing and postage costs are so phenomenally high there is a great deal of energy in getting the number of pages that we do down. Like any magazine, it’s the calculus of how many pages of advertising you have versus how many pages of editorial you can afford to put out to 22 million homes. It is the biggest problem because there is so much more that we could do, that I personally would love to do with the magazine.We should have a column for men because women are more natural magazine readers than men and I’d like to appeal to men more. I’d like to use my experience at Best Life and Men’s Health to figure out how to speak more directly to men and bring men into the fold. We know that we’re slightly more women than men in terms of readers, but we also know, and you know too, that women are the great readers of service. They are always looking for ways to improve their lives, their families’ lives, their homes, and men are not that. Men gravitate toward other things.I would do that and I would expand the feature well. We have this really great little section in the back of the book called “Personal Best.” And these are all photo-driven stories about people 50 and older who are doing really cool and interesting things. That’s a section that I would expand too. Or I would move some of it up front. I’m literally held back by the number of pages in which we have, which is somewhere around 52-53, six times per year.Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?Bob Love: We’re fighting the good fight at AARP The Magazine to disrupt the idea of aging in America. And that’s an important notion and that’s what we see as the role of the publication. And by the way, I’m also the editor of the AARP Bulletin, which similarly goes out to 22 million homes, 10 times per year. The magazine is the glossy paper with the color photos, which is a bit more accessible. People remember they’re getting it in the mail. It’s kind of our flagship method of communication with our readers.Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly one evening at your home, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; watching TV or simply relaxing with a glass of wine?Bob Love: Typically, I watch the cable news shows in the early evening around dinnertime, one liberal and one conservative, so I can understand the mood of the country. (Laughs) And then if I read at home, I probably tend to read newspapers and magazines on my tablet. I have the paper magazines at work so this just keeps the clutter down in my home.And then later on in the evening I go to a book or Netflix or something like that. So, if you arrive unannounced, it depends on what part of the evening you arrive.Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?Bob Love: I think I’m concerned about the political discourse in this country. Every time I think I’m shocked by it, by how the backbenchers have grown into a chorus of haters, with their own biosphere of radio, television and print, something else happens. I fear for the nation and I fear for an emerging generation of millennials who will, I also fear, not have as rich a life as we’ve had, because it’ll be harder for them to have higher wages to buy homes and other things that have always been associated with the American Dream.And I’m not just being facetious; those are the things that keep me up. In my business, I’ve been around a long time, 20 years at Rolling Stone, and then the next 15 at a variety of publications. All I know is that the alarmists are almost never correct. Print is far from dead and it’s a great time still to be a journalist.Samir Husni: Thank you.