Michael Mason is the editor-in-chief of This Land Press, a media company based out of Tulsa, Okla. that produces a twice-monthly newspaper, radio show, website and television show covering the entire state. Mason recently talked with the Vista about his company’s recent push into the Oklahoma City market, Woody Guthrie and the state of the news as he sees it.
Vista: What has the response from the Oklahoma City market been so far to THIS LAND?
Michael Mason: By all accounts, it’s been extremely positive; you might even say it’s been more enthusiastic than it was at its inception. I think part of this has to do with the fact that the launch was a little bit different in Oklahoma City for the print edition, because we had the television show airing there for about three or four months prior to the launch of the magazine.
There was already a lot of brand familiarity with it. The impression that I got was that there were a lot of people in Oklahoma City hearing buzz about THIS LAND, so it created a sort of mystique, I guess you could say, that they were eager to get in on the new magazine.
Vista: How are you distributing THIS LAND down here? Are you talking to businesses to see if they would like to distribute you, or are they coming to you, asking, “could we distribute your newspaper?”
MM: It’s a little bit of both, and the distribution model is pretty unique, because what we do, is we tell businesses that if they’re a locally-capitalized business, meaning they’re founded in Oklahoma and based here, then they get to keep 100 percent of the profits on the condition that they sell the paper and don’t give it away.
It’s kind of based on the whole Chris Anderson freed markets idea that you have to give something away, so we did that to essentially build up our readership and try to convert those newsstand customers into subscribers. But then you have bigger chains, like Whole Foods, for example, that carry us, and since they’re non-capitalized here in Oklahoma, we charge them 15 percent. They send us a check every so often, paying us for the issues that we’ve stocked at their stores.
Vista: Woody Guthrie seems to have a very big influence on THIS LAND, can you talk about that?
MM: What Woody Guthrie, I think, epitomizes is the individual—the sense of individuality that I think is entrenched in Oklahoma. It’s often thought of as a very red state, but its early roots are more socialistic and also very libertarian at the same time. Those ideas can coexist harmoniously; I mean, look at Noam Chomsky, for example. He’s a libertarian socialist. Basically there is this great support for the individual that came through in Woody Guthrie’s songs, and I think that, um, that’s what we sort of wanted to reclaim—a kind of gritty love for Oklahoma and its people.
Vista: The design of THIS LAND is just visually stunning. What spurred you to go towards lots of bold type, thick lines and bright colors in your approach to designing a newspaper?
MM: When I was first working with our designer, the image that kept coming to my mind was that of the old railroad posters of the 19th century. You may recall what those look like, in the sense that they look a lot like the font that we use, basically—big black on white typeface.
As far as actually designing a broadsheet to look like a magazine goes, that idea came directly to me from McSweeney’s. A few years ago, they published a broadsheet of their literary journal. It was kind of like a message to the newspaper industry that they could reinvent themselves in a way that’s very appealing if they tried. We were probably the only ones in the country that took them up on that challenge.
And so I actually went out to McSweeney’s, talked with the publisher, and talked about paper size and paper weight and costs of production and things like that, and learned that they were a bit off on their cost projections, and some of their style decisions ultimately we found that our readers didn’t really agree with. We tweaked the design format to something more of what it looks like today—a very high-quality paper, bright white paper that we print on sheet-fed web-press, so the colors are more vibrant than your typical newspaper—and that’s where we kind of started from.
Vista: THIS LAND’s design really stands out where a lot of papers blend in more.
MM: We really care a lot about the design. It’s very important to us, and one of the liberties that we have is that we don’t feel like we have to jam-pack every square inch of the paper to make money. We’re okay with—basically, what we’re doing is we’re using paper to do what it does best, and letting the Internet do what it does best. So for example, one thing that the Internet cannot do is it cannot deliver the visual impact of a 15-by-24-inch photo, you know? But when you turn to the back of our broadsheet, you see this huge portrait of a person, it creates a connection to you in a way that you can’t get on a monitor.
The other thing that you can do with a broadsheet is you can read—in one sitting, on one page—an enormous article that would take you 10 clickthroughs to read. And so, I think that it’s a far more comfortable reading experience for longform journalism, whereas the Internet really excels at shortform and lists. You’ll notice that we don’t have very many lists going out in the paper.
Vista: I want to ask about your motto change from “Relevant Readings Regarding Oklahoma” to “Oklahoma’s First New Media Company.” What spurred that decision to change?
MM: Well, what is currently on the deck of the flag is “New Media From the Middle of America,” so it’s actually gone through yet another iteration. but the particular change that you’re talking about is that, at first when we began, I began with a different partner, and what we felt was the distinction between what we were doing and everybody else. It’s a little message saying, “We’re not going to publish anything that’s irrelevant.” We felt that newspapers and free press around Oklahoma were packed with the irrelevant. And so this was kind of our little shot at that quality of journalism.
After a certain point we felt that the relevancy kind of spoke for itself, and that we didn’t need to promote the fact that it was relevant. But, what we wanted to convey was that there was a “new media” aspect of it. The reason that we no longer use the term “new media” is because we found it to be basically too academic, and that it took too much explaining to people what new media is and what it does. And so now, what we do is we simply say, “We’re a magazine, a TV show and a radio program and a website, and you can access us a bunch of different ways. You can access us however you want.”
Vista: THIS LAND has covered fracking, the recent water fights and Bradley Manning. You all took very unique angles with those stories. Is the goal of THIS LAND to put stories into a larger context and then into the public view?
MM: That’s exactly right. We are not in the game of breaking news. We are sort of freed from this constraint of “fast” journalism, and so we get to spend months and months and months developing stories. Those stories have complexity and depth and roundness that you wouldn’t typically see in newspapers. Our stories are so well-crafted and we have the luxury of having a lot of time to spend on them. That’s why they’re different in scope in the community sense.
From an editorial perspective, I kind of feel like we’re not just doing journalism. We are trying to create the literature of our community. We have published fiction and poetry and things like that because we believe that those contain types of truth and portraits of where we are that are just as important as the nonfiction that we are known for.
Vista: A lot of the media and media critics seem to be stuck on questions of paywalls versus free content, arguments for and against blogging and fact-checking, and it doesn’t really seem like these arguments are effecting THIS LAND. What is the media philosophy of THIS LAND and where do you see journalism heading in the future if it is to survive?
MM: We think that if we do our best job at crafting a story, whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, that it will be so good that people outside of Oklahoma will want to read it. We believe that’s been the case. We’ve had international interest in our journalism. Because of the quality of the work that we’re creating, we believe that the community—the business community, basically—will rise up and support it through advertising, and that individuals will file in and support it through subscription. We are wholly dependent on Oklahomans to determine our fate. That’s the business side of it, and kind of the ethos of our editorial position.