Josh Jackson (ABJ '94) took a hard look at the 18-35 demographics that rule the entertainment industry and came up with a radical idea: create a contemporary music magazine for adults. Looks like he's hit it big

B Y - S T E V E - L A B A T E

ith the Southern California sun beating down overhead, Paste editor Josh Jackson (above, at left) barrels down a desert highway in a non-descript rented sedan he picked up at the Los Angeles airport. In what must be considered a coup for a new music magazine based not in New York or L.A. but in Atlanta, Jackson (ABJ '94) is on his way to interview the reclusive Mark Olson of Jayhawks fame and his wife, singer-songwriter Victoria Williams.

To bring back the cover story for the premiere issue of Paste in the summer of 2002, Jackson got utterly lost in the California desert before coming upon the humble abode of the reclusive Mark Olson of Jayhawks fame and his wife, singer-songwriter Victoria Williams. The cost of making Paste is considerable. To fund pastemusic.com, which was a forerunner of Paste magazine, Jackson (ABJ '94 at left) and Purdy took out a $30,000 loan and didn't take a penny in salary for four years. To handle the startup costs for the magazine, they took on a lot of credit card debt.

Tumbleweeds toss about in the wind as Jackson gets closer to what appears to be the middle of nowhere. He has a sinking feeling he's lost. Olson's manager said to look for the first legit dirt road on the left. What exactly is that supposed to mean? Jackson thinks to himself. At this point, it's difficult to distinguish between a road and a footpath. Suddenly surrounded by a bizarre visual scene—hundreds of 50-foot windmills spinning in the breeze—he presses on. Half an hour later, sure he's headed for oblivion, Jackson all but runs into Olson, who is carrying two brown paper sacks full of cactus clippings. He and Williams welcome their young visitor to their humble desert abode, and Jackson spends the rest of the day interviewing them.

"How did you guys wind up living way out here?" he asks.

"When Vic and I got married, she brought me out here," says Olson, adjusting his faded bandana. "We went up to a little cabin and, boy, I liked it. She brought me to this place with the most endless amount of chores and I really took to it like a fish to water."

After an evening meal and some cold beers, Jackson heads back to civilization with conversations captured on tape, insights haphazardly scribbled in his notebook, and a small slice of rock 'n roll history ready to impart to Paste readers in the 82-page premier issue of the magazine that came out in the summer of 2002.

n 1998, when Jackson and high school buddy Nick Purdy started the contemporary music Web site pastemusic.com, Jackson could only dream of one day being a rock 'n roll journalist. At the time, the two friends were still working day jobs—Jackson editing a non-profit organization's newspaper and Purdy doing e-business consulting for Deloitte & Touche. Their side gig was devoted to selling music from intelligent and thoughtful artists—people you wouldn't see on MTV.

"We tried to help artists share audiences," says Jackson. "We released some sampler CDs and, in a sense, we started an artist's collective."

When their fledgling Internet company began picking up steam, Jackson and Purdy went looking for a suitable publication to advertise in—and came up empty. There wasn't a magazine out there covering the music they loved: music by lesser-known, but talented artists like Bill Mallonee, Mark Heard, and Over The Rhine. Judging from the album sales on pastemusic.com, Jackson and Purdy concluded that there was a huge, untapped audience that favored real musical substance over sex appeal and fashion—an audience looking for some sign of life beyond modern pop-culture and its trend of quick-fix entertainment. That's when Paste's eventual cover tagline surfaced: signs of life in music and culture. What the boys envisioned was the country's first large-circulation rock magazine targeted directly at adults. Paste's first extensive reader survey, conducted earlier this year, revealed that 78 percent of its 60,000 readers have at least a bachelor's degree and 35 percent have a graduate degree. An educated audience demands an intelligent and informative publication.

Former Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, who has been writing about music for 30 years, is a Paste subscriber and a big fan of the magazine.

"Paste has already turned me onto a couple of stellar voices," wrote Fong-Torres in a letter to Jackson. "In a time when record label consolidation has shut out a lot of the best music being made, we need other media, other avenues, other ways of getting the word—and the sounds—out to each other. We need you, and I hope Paste stays in the mix for a long, long time."

Paste's devotion to featuring up-and-coming talent and more established artists in virtually every spectrum of music—indie rock, Americana, folk, world, blues, jazz and AAA (that's Adult Album Alternative, for the uninitiated)—has earned the magazine a unique niche in the crowded world of music journalism.

"I've started the publication I've always dreamed of," says Jackson, who went to Dunwoody High School. "The letters our readers send us say things like, 'I can't believe you cover both Wilco and Solomon Burke.' We pull from all these different worlds where great music is happening because we want people to discover art that matters. We want to be the standard bearers for music with depth."

Graphic designer Jose Reyes started working with Paste shortly after the release of the first issue. "We told him we'd love to have him, but couldn't afford it at the time," says Jackson. "We tried to explain this to him but he just said, 'No, you don't understand—I'm going to be your art director.'"

Reyes believed in the mission of Paste and wanted the look to match the content. "We got together and discussed ideas," he says. "I was still at my old job at the time and Nick kept calling me every 15 minutes. Finally, he says, 'Okay, two words—FOLK-DECO—this is going to be the new direction!' So we combined folk art and art deco to come up with this new style. When I work with Paste, I approach features differently in every issue. It helps give the magazine a tactile feel. Content and concept drive everything."

Jackson and Purdy's publication has also set itself apart on the business side. Most new magazines take three to five years to turn a profit. After its first year, Paste is already out of the red, and its readership is expected to jump to 100,000 this October when it switches from a quarterly to bi-monthly format. The magazine's national availability helped cement its financial future. Right off the bat, Paste caught the eye of a buyer at Borders Books and Music.

"He loved the idea," says Jackson. "A lot of the music we cover is music that sells well in their stores. With their support, we were able to launch with a legitimacy I didn't expect us to have. And we've been able to do everything without the help of outside investors."

he aggregate effect of all this rapid-fire success is that the Paste Media Group—Paste magazine, pastemusic.com, and the newly launched Paste Records—projects revenues of $600,000 for 2003. But it wasn't an easy road. When Jackson and Purdy started the Web site in 1998, they took out a loan for $30,000 and, for four years, didn't pay themselves a penny.

"It was a labor of love," says Jackson.

By 2002, the company had generated enough money to start the magazine, but Jackson and Purdy still had to put the startup costs on a credit card. When Jackson moved back to Georgia in April, he had only two months to get settled and get the debut issue out. He found a distributor who was excited about the idea—L.A.'s Rider Circulation Services—and dove into the project headfirst.

Though not on staff because of his full-time commitment with Web-developer Enterpulse, writer-editor Tim Porter, a friend of Jackson's from UGA, has played an important role at the magazine. He and Jackson spent long hours in the office, working feverishly to get the first issue ready. Sometimes at night, while putting the finishing touches on articles, Porter would crash on the couch from exhaustion.

"You basically have to be a superman to run a magazine of this size with only two permanent staff members," says Purdy, sweating in an office with an a/c unit on the blink. Jackson and Purdy not only have had to run most of the creative and business aspects of the magazine, they've had to perform time-consuming, mundane tasks like sorting through stacks of incoming press releases and going to the post office to mail out hundreds of packages. Their job description also includes entering new subscribers into a database, conducting market research, reading other publications to size up the competition, talking to publicists to set up interviews with artists, communicating with freelance writers, and staying in touch with ad-sales rep Kristen Dabbs, who started working for Paste after a stint with the Oxford American. Then there are the 500-plus CDs that arrive in the mail between issues. Jackson and Purdy try their best to listen to every artist who sends in an album, but it's just physically impossible; typically, they get to about half the submissions.

While Purdy worked on assembling the magazine's first sampler CD (each issue comes with a free 20-song disc featuring artists covered in the magazine), Jackson returned from his California interview with Olson and Williams to find he had a lot of catching up to do. "I'd leave the office when the sun came up," says Jackson, who wrote most of the first issue himself. "The same bird would be chirping every morning. To be honest, at first, we had no idea what the hell we were doing."

In the early stages, Purdy was wary of the risk. What if it the idea didn't pan out? Would they end up hopelessly in debt? Have to declare bankruptcy? But the two partners were determined to make Paste work. They had planned to keep their day jobs and put out the magazine on the side; thankfully, this proved unnecessary. When ad revenue doubled between issues 3 and 4, Jackson and Purdy knew their plan was working.

ackson's journey from UGA undergrad to successful magazine entrepreneur followed a path that took him across Africa, Europe, South America, and Central America. After a brief internship at The Christian Index, a weekly newspaper where Jackson says he was the "token non-Baptist" on staff, he went to work for the South Dakota-based Luke Society, a non-profit that supports indigenous medical professionals in Third World countries by setting up clinics and community outreach centers. Jackson was editor of the Luke Society's full-color newspaper, which reached 80,000 people.

"I was in Peru, Honduras, Ukraine, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast," says Jackson. "I wrote about a doctor who was working with street kids in Nairobi. I traveled the city's slums with ex-drug-addict teens. I saw things a lot of people don't see. I realized our life in America is very different than the life of most people on this earth. But I also saw people taking action and making differences in people's lives in a big way."

By late 2001, Jackson felt the time had come for a change. He wanted to pursue his dream of starting a music magazine with a conscience, and he and his wife Lori also wanted to be closer to their families, who were living in the Atlanta area. Once he was sure the Luke Society's paper would be able to continue successfully without him, Jackson packed up and left South Dakota, bound for Atlanta and a new future with Paste. Even though he's running his own magazine now, he hasn't gotten so caught up in the managerial side that he's forgotten his journalism roots at UGA.

"Since JRL 101 with Conrad Fink, I knew I wanted to be a writer," says Jackson, who demonstrated his expertise in a recent phone interview with the woman Time called "America's greatest songwriter." He's done his homework and—after the introductions are over—he's ready to get in deep with Lucinda Williams.

"Two years is pretty quick for you to get an album out," Jackson says. "What spurred this latest batch of songwriting?"

"I've been through another heartbreak," Williams replies in her sweet, road-worn drawl. She laughs, but a little of the hurt comes through. "They're not all about that though . . ."

"Do you think to create songs this heartbreaking you have to have your heart broken?"

"No! I don't think you have to have your heart broken to be able to write good songs," Williams says, sounding a little agitated at the assumption.

"Well, not to write good songs," says Jackson, taking a gentler, more cautious approach, "but to write songs this heartbreaking . . . there are some sad songs on this album."

"Yeah . . . you have to experience whatever you're writing about whether it's heartbreak or an abusive situation, religious persecution—whatever—you have to experience life. It's just part of life and that's one piece of it."

he tall and lanky Jackson, in blue jeans and an untucked button-up shirt, is sitting casually in a padded swivel chair, checking his email at Paste's Decatur offices. On his desk are a pair of bobble-head dolls, one representing the Atlanta Braves and the other the Georgia Bulldogs. Purdy is an Auburn grad and various War Eagle trinkets populate his side of the room. When Purdy gets cocky, Jackson likes to push the button on his UGA bobblehead, which chants "Go Georgia!" followed by the Bulldogs' fight song.

On the floor by Jackson's feet is a remote-control car, one of several reminders that he and Purdy each have two kids under 4 who run wild in the office on a semi-regular basis. Even with the full-time duties of publishing a magazine—which can require up to 100 hours per week when deadline approaches—the two young fathers make time for their families. "I'm a little sore today," says Jackson, who is now a year past the big three-oh. "We took the kids up to Ellijay this weekend and did some hiking."

Leaning against one of the office's walls are two dry erase boards, one filled with the kids' scribbles and one with an important business-model reminder: stay true to the original plan and, as we grow, maintain an independent focus.

In a journalistic niche where content is customarily driven by MTV marketing geniuses, Jackson and Purdy's crusader-like attitude towards quality music and culture has helped set Paste apart. During a recent lunch break at a Thai restaurant near the office, Jackson says, "Have you looked at Rolling Stone or Blender lately? It's like they're having a skin war on their covers. We'll never sink to the lowest common denominator like that. We don't rely on misogynistic attitudes. We're trying to do something positive."

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