Magazine Founder Says Doing Good Still Works

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Ben Goldhirsh at the L.A. headquarters of Good Worldwide.

It had been a landmark year for Ben Goldhirsh – and for his media company, Good Worldwide, and for the world.

The Arab Spring, the Occupy protests and the Internet campaigns to defeat Congress’ Stop Online Piracy Act erupted during 2011, global flashpoints of crackling activism, spearheaded by legions of tech-savvy youths. The media portrayed these happenings as an uprising of a generation that was starting to give a damn, and Good Magazine knew it best.

It had been five years since Goldhirsh had started the magazine, using a portion of the money he inherited from his father’s publishing fortune. Back then, the idea of creating an outlet focusing on the young idealistic types who speak casually about “ethical jewelry” and “tipping points” was untenable.

“The term ‘do-gooder’ was a pejorative,” Goldhirsh liked to say.

Here, in 2011, the damn-givers were not only vital, they were powerful, and the magazine that once seemed foolish had emerged with a clarion voice.

But the next year, Good abruptly changed course. It went from being a media outlet to a kind of progressive social network: a hazily defined hub where do-gooders could connect, share insights about activism and promote causes.

The refocusing, clumsily executed, cost the outlet readers and hard-won respect. Yet through it all, management maintained its righteous conviction that that the changes were necessary, productive and for a greater good.

For six months, they rearranged the company, devising and tearing up organizational flow charts, eventually just firing the editorial staff. That last part played out loudly over Twitter, with many promising to never read the quarterly magazine or the site again. Traffic to its website plunged and other elements of the business, such as its reliance on sponsors and a side business of managing the do-gooder images of corporations, became more apparent.

This fall, Good announced that the Air Force had sponsored a science and technology vertical on its website and was soliciting members’ ideas for drone-led domestic search and rescue missions. It appeared as though Good, which had once decried the military industrial complex, had become part and parcel.

The release arrived “with a clang,” said a writer on the news site BuzzFeed; a blogger for the Columbia Journalism Review placed the move “in the annals of Greatest Sellouts of All Time.”

Good executives maintain the criticism wasn’t fair. In either case, if Goldhirsh was attempting to change the way people thought about Good, he had succeeded.

Right decision

Long after the firings, Goldhirsh, speaking from Good’s headquarters on the 15th floor of a Miracle Mile high-rise with broad views of the Hollywood Hills, lamented that the change in course had been rocky. The company is now seven years old, yet its workspace looks like so many other new-era startups, with 45 young employees typing on laptops in the middle of an open space.

Goldhirsh was seated in a Good conference room in his typical outfit: a worn thermal shirt, low-slung jeans and sneakers. Now 33 and a family man, he’s also visibly older than the days when newspaper profiles marveled at the newly rich idealist. He wears the same loose scruffiness, but accessorized with a hairline that has retreated a little.

Still, he speaks with the energy that attracted people to Good in the first place.

Looking back at the saga of his earnest empire of do-gooders over the last year, Goldhirsh regrets the way his editorial staff was fired; it came the day after the magazine celebrated the release of an issue.

“Not only do I wish that day happened differently, I wish the six months leading up to it happened differently,” he said. “But I believe we made the right decision to move in this direction.”

Good still produces its quarterly magazine. Goldhirsh slid the fall 2013 issue across the table to share its cover story that looks at ways simple tweaks to things (toilets, standardized tests, the Middle East) can solve bigger problems. But it is no longer the core of the mission.

On its website, original editorial content is now spread across many verticals, alongside user-generated posts about “Food” and “Global Development.”

It’s a shift that challenges not only the structure of a journalistic endeavor, but an argument for what Goldhirsh points to as the elemental level of how to make a difference. Namely, that journalism isn’t enough.

“I think a really good article about someone doing something interesting is super important,” he said. “But I know in my heart of hearts we need to facilitate people helping each other.”

Ann Friedman, executive editor of Good’s doomed 2012 crew, described the business as having noble goals, “with execution that is uniquely poor.”

“What is Good, is something ownership never found a good answer to,” Friedman explained.

Origin story

Goldhirsh was bred to be a magazine publisher. His father, Bernard, had started a pair of business periodicals, including Inc. Magazine, which he sold for a reported $200 million.

His parents died in close succession while he was in college, leaving Goldhirsh and his sister with a sizable trust that has been bankrolling a number of projects and charitable foundations.

An East Coast transplant, Goldhirsh started Good Magazine in 2006 as an outgrowth of his production company, Reason Films. He and the publication’s other co-founders, Casey Caplowe, Zach Frechette and Max Schorr, were all friends from high school or college. Caplowe would serve as creative director, Frechette as managing editor and Schorr in a series of ever-evolving and unclear managerial roles.

The magazine’s circulation surpassed 20,000, and as it grew, Goldhirsh’s initial endeavors were absorbed into Good Worldwide.

Early employees of the magazine describe it with the ardor of a scrappy startup – an angle the media fixated on. “A Magazine for Earnest Young Things,” read the headline of a glib New York Times profile from 2006.

Good articles were going to focus on people who were trying to make a difference in the world; supported by ad revenue, the magazine allowed subscribers to decide how much to pay, the full amount of which would be donated to charity.

Goldhirsh put up the initial investment of $2.5 million to fund the operation, with some follow-on in the coming years, and staffed it with more friends. Among the early employees was Albert Gore III, scion of the Tennessee Democratic political family.

There were other political ties, particularly with an empowered faction of grassroots activists on the left. Reason Films began producing a documentary in 2006 about the rising profile of recently elected Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. The company’s first official chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, was a co-founder of Ethos Brands, a maker of philanthropically marketed bottled water. Not long after Obama was elected president, Greenblatt left Good to serve in the administration as an adviser on civic engagement.

One of the first things the magazine became known for was design, particularly its infographics, which imbued cold statistics with colorful artistic layouts. Some were cheeky: a bar chart of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history was depicted as a series of capsized ocean liners. Others were trenchant: “Aid or Grenade?” looked at the discrepancy between U.S. spending on foreign aid and the military.

The magazine launched a website, Good.is, which served as an ideal outlet for these graphics. By 2010, the site was bringing in an average of 1.1 million visitors a month, according to ComScore.

“We had a long creative leash and made some awesome things that people otherwise wouldn’t get the chance to do in a more traditional media workplace,” remembered one early employee, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s still a shareholder in the company. “It was awesome.”

Good was met with skepticism and intrigue, in no small part because of its owner’s quixotic mission of affecting good in the world. It seemed like a sappy relic from the early ’90s. The front cover of the first issue introduced the company motto: “(blank), Like You Give a Damn,” with readers able to fill the space with their cause of choice.

Media kits for Good described the company with a series of Venn diagrams: “fun” overlapping with “serious,” “idealism” with “pragmatism,” “entertainment” with “relevance.” Good, it was implied, lived in the middle.

It went on to be nominated three times as a finalist in the National Magazine Awards, pitting the newcomer against the likes of Esquire and Vanity Fair.

“When we started, we were a pretty novel thing and we put up our sails ahead of an emerging wind,” Goldhirsh beamed.

Something the magazine was not, in the early days, was profitable. Goldhirsh revealed it was headed toward bankruptcy in 2008. As the economy began to crater – and the business of journalism suffered acutely – Good began exploring different revenue models.

Among them was leveraging its doe-eyed brand to manage public images. Good had the ear of impressionable, earnest youth, which was a market with cachet after the grassroots effort that pushed Obama into the presidency.

The company partnered with PepsiCo Inc. to help develop its Pepsi Refresh campaign, which saw the soda maker doling out millions of dollars to charitable causes. That division, later dubbed Good/Corps, devised or executed grassroots campaigns for Starbucks, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Girl Scouts of America and others.

Corporate partnerships also began bleeding into the editorial side of the company. A Good collaboration with IBM produced a series of lists and infographics about progressive do-gooder corporations. The magazine signed a deal in 2009 with for-profit University of Phoenix Inc. to create a vertical on the site entirely dedicated to education coverage.

Some editorial staffers who worked for Good have groused about the partnerships. Not that they impeded on editorial independence. Rather, it was the amount of time editorial’s upper management was being asked to work on these projects.

“Ben was really interested in experimental and less traditional business models,” said one former staffer who asked to remain anonymous. “I thought it was a great business idea. I just didn’t like working on it.”

In many ways, Good again managed to be ahead of its time. The idea of sponsored content appearing next to staff-generated editorial copy has become commonplace at online publications. BuzzFeed in particular has marketed its creative advertising in this manner, working with brands to create copy that matches the site’s aesthetic.

Good’s brand and innovative designs pushed the magazine into profitability, and did so at an unlikely time. While magazines across the country were folding, Goldhirsh said the company had been profitable since 2008.

“If we’d been hit by a meteor in 2007, it would have been important for someone else to take up our mission,” he said. “By 2011, culture had evolved to a place where good had permeated society.”

Stronger voice

When Friedman was recruited to be executive editor, the publishers were seeking someone to create a distinctive voice. Frechette and his successor, Morgan Clendaniel, had left the company and Good wanted a stronger presence online.

Friedman had been an editor at American Prospect in Washington and was outspoken about politics and feminism.

Goldhirsh and his colleagues approached Friedman with a simple pitch: “Good has its reputation for design and infographics but no reputation for journalism,” Friedman remembered. “We want you to make it a real magazine.”

That was in 2011, when the troika of Arab Spring-Occupy-SOPA grassroots demonstrations led Goldhirsh to believe everything had changed.

The threads of what ownership said it wanted Good to become are visible in the foundations of those events: Much of the energy behind the Arab Spring can be traced to communications over social networks. The Occupy protests were sparked by a push from agitprop Vancouver magazine AdBusters. And the SOPA protests played out largely through online message boards, particularly Reddit.

Good’s idea of mixing activism and journalism wasn’t new. Newspapers acted as arms of political parties in the 19th century, often giving readers specific instructions at the end of an article. A century ago, muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Nellie Bly used journalism as a cudgel to push a progressive agenda. Stories in activist publications such as Mother Jones will still advise courses of action.

“Traditionally, when editors want to create impact, they do it in serial form and build and build and get prosecutors interested,” said Jack Shafer, a media critic with Reuters. “Even then, it’s not a slam-dunk. It’s very difficult to convert journalism into activism.”

Even tougher, Shafer explained, is converting journalists into activists. That’s what Good set out to do.

In August 2011, Good Worldwide purchased Jumo, a social networking site for non-profits started by political activist and Facebook Inc. co-founder Chris Hughes.

As the idea of a new Good crept along, ownership began holding regular meetings with editorial to discuss the changing nature of the company. There were intimations from the publishers that staffers were going to start doing Huffington Post-style aggregation. Good was going to hire a “director of activation” for the coming grassroots effort and the company toyed with a new motto: “Driving Real World Impact.” It wasn’t enough that someone read an article about global warming; the idea from ownership was that readers needed to know how to act on it.

Schorr, who was the liaison between ownership and editorial, demanded regular meetings with Friedman. Former editorial staffers recount endless PowerPoint presentations announcing new organizational charts. One presentation mistakenly left off the name of an editor, who left the meeting in tears.

“The goal was always changing,” said one former staffer who requested to remain anonymous. “We’d be called into brainstorming situations where we’d have the same conversation. They were trying to define the new model and having a hard time doing it and in the process offending everyone who worked there.”

Creative destruction

Everything boiled over in 2012. The morning of the launch party for the magazine’s May issue, staffers got an email from Caplowe asking them to come in early the next day. It was an uncommon request: The workday after a launch usually started about noon as hung-over employees straggled back into work.

At the party, Friedman approached Goldhirsh’s former assistant after a few drinks and jokingly asked if they were all about to be fired the next day. He looked shocked: “How did you know?”

Despite the turmoil at the end of her editorship, Friedman still believes there is merit in Good’s cause. There might have been a complete lack of clarity inside the company, but the real problem was that ownership had fallen victim to another movement sweeping the country – tech startups.

“They wanted a startup, but Good was already more than six years old,” said Friedman, now a freelance journalist in Los Angeles. “It’s a West Coast mentality among all men in their 20s to mid-30s that this is the way of talking about business aspirations.”

More to the point, she said, “those motivations don’t square with a successful media company.”

Being called a startup is something Goldhirsh wears proudly. Much more so than how he got there.

“I failed to align (Friedman’s) vision with where I thought the company needed to go and I failed to successfully handle the delta between those visions in the way that won’t leave a bad taste in (the staff’s) mouths,” he said. “It’s one of my biggest regrets.”

More than a year after that editorial shakeup, Goldhirsh said that the company has finally settled into this new direction. The magazine is now edited by Josh Neumann, previously the editor of Heeb, a magazine catering to young Jews. While Caplowe remains creative director, Good has hired a new executive team; Schorr departed earlier this year.

The website is designed mostly around the social network, where people can post, comment and share. If members want to promote a post, they click on an “It’s Good” button – the site’s version of a Facebook “like.” People can post causes and projects, which others can join by clicking “Do It.”

Monthly traffic to the site is down from last year, according to data collected by ComScore, though Goldhirsh said more than 500,000 people have signed up for accounts. He said other metrics, such as return rate and time spent on page are up among these new core visitors.

There’s also a new tool, Good Maker, where companies can host competitions that solicit ideas from the community.

It’s the kind of partnership that got the company involved with the Air Force, which sponsors a science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) vertical on the site. The one that got it slammed by BuzzFeed and others. Even some of the angrier former employees say the company is being unfairly slammed on that issue. For one thing, it isn’t making killing machines.

And Goldhirsh sees it as a far cry from selling out.

“If anything, I think we’ve become a less valuable place for advertisers,” he said. “That’s what’s frustrating about people saying, ‘Oh, you’re trying to be more profitable.’”

Journalism is no longer Good’s main driver of change; the push instead comes from the community. Goldhirsh pointed to a recently funded Kickstarter project to create a water filter. He said the creator of that filter told him that of all the social networks he used to pitch his campaign, Good was the leading generator of donations to his page.

A place to support causes – is that what Good is?

Goldhirsh tried to explain. He threw out some examples, using phrases like “value add” and “pure analog.” He walked to a whiteboard and drew a Venn diagram with “individual” and “society.” Once again, Good occupied the space where they overlapped.

But then he sat down and seemed to relax for a moment before making a sweeping point.

“Good is a framework about people not just giving a damn but taking action. And not just taking action but being a change maker and getting other people to take action.”

Is that more fulfilling than running a successful magazine?

Goldhirsh paused for a long time, resting his sneakers against the conference table and tilting his chair until his back is flush against the window.

“It’s the only thing that I’m trying to do,” he said.