I met up with Adam Welch in a pub tucked down an alleyway in central London, where we shared tea by candlelight. It was a weirdly romantic setting for an interview, but since Adam and I have a common love of print publishing and offbeat interview ideas, I guess it was apt. Welch is currently the Editor of British independent pop-style title Wonderland. Previously, he was the Editor at NOWNESS, and before that, he wrote for titles like Vogue.co.uk and The Independent. What better person to grill on the topic of print publishing vs online journalism?
Zac: So, the new Wonderland covers look great!
Adam: Yeah, they’re my favourites so far. It was really good to do something with colour, since it’s such a gloomy season. I like how they’re positive, loud, a little bit nineties…
Totally. So, you were working at NOWNESS in the Dazed offices before Wonderland, right?
Yes.
What was it like working with Jefferson Hack?
He’s inspiring. There’s just this phenomenal sort of outpouring of ideas all the time. I mean, that’s the thing that I admire him for — that constant need to ask, “How can we make this better? How can we make this more interesting for people? How can we be more unique?” I was very lucky to work with him and be in that position.
What did you do before NOWNESS?
I was working at an arts publishing company, and I was doing bits and pieces of fashion writing. I ended up sending in some samples to Vogue UK and started writing for Vogue.co.uk for a couple of seasons, and then I decided to do a journalism course. I started writing for The Independent, and had interned at Dazed before, and was recommended to work on NOWNESS. And then NOWNESS became a much bigger thing than we ever thought it was going to be. It was crazy. It was a real baptism of fire! Then Huw, the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher at Wonderland, which I’d been writing for, approached me.
I remember some of your earlier pieces for them. You interviewed DSquared2, right? Didn’t you get into bed with them for the piece?
I called it ‘In Bed With Dean and Dan’, but… [laughs]. Well, they were sitting with this big shaggy fur rug over them, and that’s just what it felt like. They were smoking fags and eating cookies, and then they were like, “Call it ‘In Bed with Dean and Dan’!”
So Huw approached you, and…
Yeah, he approached me, and I’d always wanted to work in print, because I felt like I’d skipped a step by jumping into online.
The pace is so fast, isn’t it?
Yeah.
It’s funny, because everyone wants to be a print editor, but they don’t realise that being a web editor can be just as stimulating because it’s so full-on!
Right, right. Trying to secure exclusives all the time, and having things up every day… We weren’t allowed to post anything on NOWNESS unless it was exclusive, and we posted every single day of the week, so it was…
A trial by fire.
Exactly — but a good one. We could do what we wanted to an extent, and there was no advertising pressure-
Which is something I learned recently about NOWNESS, and I find that so super weird since it’s owned by LVMH! I thought you’d have to do a certain amount of content to appease them.
No, no — not at all. Certainly not while I was there. It’s curious, isn’t it?
Yeah. So, you’re glad you made the jump to print?
Yeah, of course. The stresses are the same though — deadlines, big workload and all of those things, and you always have to be on it. You lie awake at night wondering what you’re going to do next, but that just comes with the territory.
How do you work out ‘who’s next’ while keeping in mind the long lead with print?
It’s tricky, especially with musicians, because nowadays people burn so brightly and fizzle out over night! It’s like two months later they’re everywhere and then two months after that they’re nowhere. I think the benefit of working with a small team is that you can get things in closer to absolute deadline if you suddenly discover someone, like Lana Del Rey who’s on our current cover, or Tyler the Creator in April. I’m really proud of those two covers actually.
So where do you see Wonderland fitting into the magazine world?
I think we’re fairly unique within the roster of the British independent magazines in that we have a bit more of a sense of humour with the things that we do, and that we can, you know, put an interview with Marilyn Minter — who’s an amazing contemporary artist — next to someone from The Only Way is Essex dressed up as Queen Elizabeth! You know, I like that about us. You don’t get that so much at bigger magazines, but working at a bigger magazine you’re trying to appeal to a much broader audience, which would be an interesting challenge in itself.
Do you find bigger magazines interesting though? I know it’s nothing new to say, but there’s such a lack of the critical in so many magazines, and I’m not going to spend ten bucks on 300P of fluff.
Yeah. It’s the case across the board, unfortunately. In terms of fashion criticism, there are so few people who are willing to be brutally honest. You’re right — on the one hand that’s a shame, but on the other hand, you can go too far the other way. You know, designers are just people and sometimes you read a review that makes it look like they’ve murdered a village of children when all they’ve done is not produced something particularly inspiring or unique that season.
Right.
I mean I never feel like, “I wish I could say what I really think about this.”
Is it kind of a case of ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’ for you?
Yeah… But at the same time if you have to write something then you have to be honest and maintain integrity. It’s a tricky one.
Totally. And I mean, even with the amount of fluff out there, you know when someone’s done a good job. I mean every magazine wasn’t interviewing Riccardo Tisci this year because Givenchy advertises.
Exactly. If you do a good collection, you get a good reception from the fashion industry, but at the same time I don’t think that necessarily translates to the people buying the clothes. It’s a funny thing, because the audience for fashion criticism is so tiny, but if you like something you buy it! It doesn’t matter what the rest of the collection was like or what people wrote about it. Like, do you need someone to tell you whether that’s OK or not?
It’s true. And I kind of think that if all journalists and editors were allowed to bitch all they wanted, they’d get over it and end up just writing about the stuff they love, which is kind of the way a lot of people operate anyway, because you don’t get into this kind of work if you don’t love it.
Well, hopefully not anyway. You have to have fun. I just think it’s the most fun thing in the world. I supposed I’m quite frivolous, so I don’t like reading things by people who take it so seriously. There’s this thing where people in the industry really feel like it’s such hard work. Like, “Oh… I’ve got to go to a lunch put on by Moet, and it’s so hard.” But I must admit that all of that can get quite tiring.
Oh, I’m one of the whingers. I hate press-related stuff. I find it exhausting.
When I started at Wonderland, I had more invites to things than I’d ever had before and I was like, “Wooooooo!” Then it was all back to work, but I’m not complaining. Actually, I really liked that issue of Oyster that you edited with Meghan Collison on the cover, because there were fun approaches to content. It was your cover girl’s favourite songs and things like that. That’s what I want. When you read a magazine, it used to be about telling you what’s out there and what’s new, but now who cares about news in a print magazine? It’s old. A magazine is now a place to do something fun and special, something that you can’t achieve online, and that’s what we’re aiming for with Wonderland.
Yeah. I think that the only way print magazines can survive is by doing something special and exciting that there’s not always time to arrange for online.
Yeah — you’ve got to do something ‘genius’ and have a sense of humour. You’ve got to have fun with it, because that sense of enjoyment translates to the reader. Who wants to read something that’s no fun?
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