Strip-Skeeze at Architect Magazine

As Jeff Meyers, CEO at Zonda, the publisher of Architect Magazine, tells it, there are big things in store for the company’s premier design journal. In an interview with NYRA in early January, Meyers played up a new tech hire brought over from digital-native news site Axios and said the editorial capacity of Architect will be augmented by a twelve-person “cross-functional editorial team,” as well as external “outsourcing.” “We’re really just leveraging the assets of the entire company,” he asserted, into a “merged content strategy.” Of course, the company is retreating from print media; given that Zonda is a “tech-first” company, print is “not something we’re going to support long term,” Meyers said. “It’s not by any means shutting down that particular brand. We’re really just moving the focus to a digital-first strategy.” Web traffic is up, he told me, and ad revenue is ahead of schedule. Meyers expects that Architect will be robust and “growing” in the next two years, a rare boast in the midst of a prolonged media recession.

Recent editorial layoffs at the company …