Carolyn Turgeon

Though you may recognize Patagonia for the clothes, the catalog, or the overall strength of the brand, Books Director Karla Olson says the company has always had a rich storytelling tradition. Founder Yvon Chouinard climbed six months out of the year and came back with his own stories for the company to publish. Karla thinks his 2006 memoir, Let My People Go Surfing, convinced the company that there are some stories that can’t be told in a 750-word essay in the catalog. Patagonia officially started publishing books in 2007.

When did you join Patagonia Books? How does it fit into the rest of the company? 

I joined the company in 2012. The company had already published 12 books and they knew that it was a good way of communicating with our community and beyond. I often say that the books can go where the clothes can’t go, into bookstores. The books are a good branding tool as well, although we are very careful not to over-communicate our brand. I think we actually end up taking out mentions of Patagonia. We just let the story be the thing that convinces the reader that this is an issue they need to care about, or we let it entertain them in some way.

The goal of the publishing program is to educate people, inspire people, and encourage people to become involved with outdoor places and public lands. We’ve published 50 books, and if you look at them through that lens, they might look really disparate in the beginning, but you start to see that connection.  

What is the goal of this book? What are we trying to get someone to do by reading this book? That is a direct action. They’re going to care about the river system. They’re going to go outside and climb outside on public lands so that they are involved in the fight for public lands. They’re going to learn how to be more effective at environmental activism. They’re going to be encouraged to start a business that has social responsibility involved. Those are all goals that we articulate at the beginning of a project. 

Margarita Noriega joined Glitch a year ago, and has since founded its tech culture publication, Glimmer, which launched in February. Glimmer consists of Podcasts (run by Glitch’s Media team), Original Features (assigned to freelancers), and The Playlist and Starter Kits, which lean more toward content marketing (sourced and written internally). Margarita says you won’t see a ton of content marketing in the podcasts, and you’ll see almost none of it in the original features. Though she reports to Marketing, her role as Principal Editor combines content marketing with editorial.

What made Glitch decide they needed an editor to champion content?

The original Culture Zine came out of a very strong personal love for zine culture at Glitch. I think there was a cultural and technical skill set alignment when Glitch launched and they started producing media formats that really aligned with the skills of the people in the room. Eventually you get to a point where the people in the room cannot tell the stories in the formats you need for other things. At some point, tiny experimental media content doesn’t work as well for general audience brand awareness. 

I was hired to run a zine that wasn’t in print, for a tech company that is really a community, about cultural topics, for an industry that’s been pretty controversially connected to culture. So there were all these threads I had to undo and then try to weave back together. And that led to the Culture Zine becoming Glimmer. 

We were using Ghost for the Culture Zine, and we loved Ghost. We needed something that our brand partners could jump into as a CMS. So we knew we needed to make a choice about ramping up our backend to create a website along with the platform. 

Glitch is already a platform, that’s what we call the Glitch community, and that’s really what you see in the messaging on glitch.com. But there also has to be an engine for creating content that isn’t in an app, that isn’t a zine. We still do a lot of content as apps, but they are very experimental. So from a marketing perspective, editorial perspective, and the media team’s perspective, we needed juicier stuff. 

We chose Prismic, it’s a newer CMS. We’re running Glimmer off of Prismic and that allows us to do all sorts of content strategy we couldn’t do before. And of course, that requires an editor. Before I came to Glitch, I was consulting and contracting for companies, and that included WordPress. So I came in with a certain knowledge of the CMS world.

Framer doesn’t have a traditional marketing team. Four years ago, Asha Indralingam was its first content hire. Even as it grew, nobody at Framer had “marketing” in their job title. Instead it was handled by a mix of the content and design teams. Now that the product is changing, the marketing needs are changing too. Asha is now Head of Content, and her team has grown to cover marketing while maintaining a content and editorial focus.

It must be nice to build the marketing side from the ground up with such a focus on content, rather than coming in later and having to figure out where a content team fits into a company.

Yeah, I’ve also been lucky because the founders are very into quality content. They are into maintaining the quality of our brand, but the content factors into that, very much so. Not a lot of companies give you the free rein to really try doing that with content without immediately telling you to run some ads or do some aggressive growth marketing hack.

There’s a very typical struggle at a lot of companies between the content team and the design team. We’ve definitely had our share of that. We’ve finally gone to a good place with a lot of things on the marketing side, where the content is leading design. Now that the designers have seen firsthand that it’s actually amazing to have messaging in place before we start coming up with ideas for the visual design, that has been super successful. 

As the first Managing Editor of Shopify UX, Gene Shannon’s priorities are the blog’s content, maintaining its social media, and running their newsletter for the UX community. The blog has been around for about 5 years, but before Gene became the editor, it was being managed on the side of the UX team’s roles, and their designers, content strategists, researchers, and developers contributed as they saw fit. He told Wonder Shuttle that creating his position was an investment in putting out a more cohesive message and lowering the barrier for contributors. “We felt we had a lot of people who have good things to say and we wanted to help them say it.” 

Since everyone contributing to the blog has a day job, how do you incentivize them to make time for it?

I think what helps for us is that one of the company’s cultural values is, “Do things, tell people.” We’re a very large team, we’re distributed across a bunch of different offices, in different time zones, in different countries. Even though the audience for the blog is nominally external, I think it’s really helpful internally for people to share interesting projects or techniques. 

I know for some of our other outreach activities, like if you’re speaking at a conference, Shopify will pay you a bonus for that and cover your expenses. So we’re looking at doing something similar to that around blog content, but for content that we think is really high value and that takes a bit of extra time for the person involved. 

We’ve actually given people who want to contribute resources about how to talk about that with their managers and with their leads, saying, “Here’s the time commitment involved. Here’s why it’s valuable. Here’s what Shopify will get out of it.” And a lot of people have it as a personal development goal that they want to get better at communicating, and this can be a way to help them do that.

Since 2011, Magazine B has devoted each monthly print issue to a single “well-balanced” brand, uncovering untold stories from the business and its customers, and providing original insight and analysis. Eunsung Park took over as Content & Editorial Director in 2017, but she’s been on staff since the magazine’s fourth issue in 2012. She corresponded with Wonder Shuttle on how she runs the “brand documentary magazine,” their global network of correspondents, and why their financial independence is so important. Her answers were written in Korean, and translated to English by Magazine B staff, with special thanks to YB Kim. 

Can you describe your responsibilities as Content & Editorial Director? How do you understand the magazine’s audience?

From planning and creating content to marketing and selling it, I guide the overall direction, conduct business strategies, and do my best to share my vision with our team. I believe it’s important for all the editors, marketers, distributors, and designers to look in the same direction, so I try to give thoughtful advice as the person who has worked at the magazine for the longest period of time, guiding them on what Magazine B is about. It’s fair to say, however, that our members now have the ability to make the right decisions themselves. 

In addition, I strive to communicate how important I believe it is for the people making this magazine, myself included, to consider ourselves as the core reader. There is, of course, an ideal target for Magazine B readers, but our original expectations of it can often be different from when we receive feedback and discover new readers. As opposed to trying to predict our changing audience, we have set a high standard to satisfy the people creating the content, believing that there will be many more people that have similar standards.  

Holloway, a new digital publishing startup, makes comprehensive guides on how to navigate modern work. Courtney Nash is the Director of Editorial Development, overseeing the creation of the guides. She’s currently putting together a guide on remote work, navigating complex topics and recruiting experts to share knowledge with startups and high-growth companies. Now that they’ve produced a few guides, Holloway is also opening up its platform to independent authors, which Courtney described as “reverse Netflix”: they demonstrated the value of the in-house guides, and now they’re bringing in outside talent. 

Was Holloway already focused on editorial development, or did that come in with you and other editorial hires?

What drew me to Holloway was that it isn’t just a technology company or just a publishing company. Pretty much everybody there is in some way a writer and an editor. Everybody is a huge fan of books and knowledge. Even on the engineering side, there has always been that focus. So it’s been a combination of a really strong editorial philosophy paired with a product development philosophy. They’re largely intertwined; everyone at that company is thinking about publishing as an entire value chain, instead of pieces of it, which is where places tend to spend more of their time.