[LINK] "Tyler Brûlé, Media Maverick"

[rfmcdonald]

This Bloomberg BusinessWeek profile of Tyler Brûlé, an out Canadian expatriate in the United Kingdom who, after journalism, went ont to co-found Wallpaper and now runs Monocle, is interesting not only in its portrayal of the man but in its description of Monocle: a magazine that works. (And that I like.)

In a modest, terraced mews building beside Marylebone station in West London, the offices of Monocle magazine are, on the morning I visit, a little bleary eyed and blinking themselves awake. Several staffers are just back from a bonding and brainstorming weekend in Beirut, treating their jet lag with a variety of herbal teas. The air is thick with rose hip and ginseng. At the reception desk a scrubbed young man in impeccable casual wear is on the phone, putting a distant hotel booking desk through its paces: "All I want to know are the dimensions of your single room," he says. "I mean, is it an absurd space? We really do not want something absurd."

Tyler Brûlé, the founder, chief executive officer, editor, and guiding tastemaker of Monocle, is running late, but even in his absence you sense him in the detail of his compact and carefully styled offices. Brûlé made his name as the editor of Wallpaper, once the house bible of loft dwellers and metrosexuals everywhere, a magazine with the subtitle, "the stuff that surrounds us." Brûlé became famous for letting nothing escape his attention. His vision is built on stern principles, such as an emphasis on natural materials and a disdain for laminates of any kind. You look, in vain, for a veneer.

The latest edition of Monocle is a fat book of a magazine that challenges just about every piece of received wisdom about what works in media these days, starting with the notion that this is no time to start a new print publication. Now three years old, Monocle boasts a global circulation nearing 150,000, a 35 percent annual increase at a time when magazine sales are supposed to be going in the other direction, and a rising subscription base of 16,000. If that sounds small, consider that these individuals pay $150 for 10 issues, a 50 percent premium over the newsstand price.

For their money, readers get a compendious global mix of reports on new thinking and trends from unlikely places. They get the inside track on the "heroes of hospitality in Basel" and the "movie moguls of Mexico." They find out why "German doctors are the most attractive doctors in the world." There's more coverage than is possibly healthy about matters such as the comparative virtues of various overnight bags and calfskin slippers and monogrammed stationery. Monocle has, too, cornered the market on model cities, fantasy aircraft, and camp jokes. The cover I'm looking at advertises a feature on startups with a picture of a square-jawed warehouseman beside a stack of cardboard boxes, with the headline: "Is your package fit for global consumption?"