After a year spent backpacking in Asia, Gerry Reynolds found himself in Australia with no job, no cash and no plan.
“I came on a whim, I didn’t come looking for a job,” Reynolds says sitting in Medium Rare’s head office on Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney’s Pyrmont. “I was in my 20s and loved my life in Dublin. I loved my job, my car, and my apartment. But my friends were all about to marry each other and I was becoming scared that would be my life, so I just went travelling.”
Arriving in Sydney in 1986, Reynolds’ first gig in Australian media was freelancing, writing a piece for Dolly magazine on young Australian politicians, “which was instructive, because I had arrived off the plane that week and knew nothing about Australia, never mind its politics,” he says. “My first impression was wow, there are so many jobs and so many outlets, particularly in magazines.”
He then zigzagged through the local media landscape, working at some of Australia’s biggest publishing houses along the way.
His resume traverses what appears to be a more diverse media industry, with companies such as ACP Magazines, Century Magazines and Magazine Promotions, later renamed Fairfax Magazines, that have since shut, merged or been swallowed up by other businesses – which then went on to be picked up by the remaining big players.
However, Reynolds pushes back against the idea the media landscape is less diverse now, saying that while old companies have disappeared, new breeds of media businesses, such as Junkee Media, Concrete Playground and his own Medium Rare, have popped up.
“When disruption happens, it’s easy to think a larger company is a safe harbour because of its size, but history would suggest that they’re the ones who find it more difficult to actually turn the boat around.
“On the other hand, the smaller players can be more nimble and react to disruption, and find the opportunity to get on with it. I think that’s what’s happened.” This shift has led to a “crisis in confidence” over the past decade that the industry is only just shaking off.
“The one constant is change. We’ve seen brands come and go. People get scared when titles fall or distribution methods change,” he says. “People’s desire for information and entertainment hasn’t changed; it’s just how they receive content that has changed. For every negative, there’s an opportunity.”
After Reynolds’ first “proper job” at Magazine Promotions as a sub-editor — a role he thought he was always better suited to than a journalist — he then set up a small publishing company with his wife, Helen, creating “one shots” for the larger publishing houses.
After that he teamed up with Michael Mohi, who had launched the music magazine Countdown, to set up Trielle Corporation, which specialised in licensed publications for a young audience. The business worked with titles such as Teenage Ninja Turtles, FIFA World Cup and The Simpsons, which was still a short on the Tracey Ullman Show when Reynolds recognised its potential.
“I thought it was fantastic and heard they were planning to spilt it off and that it was going to be big,” Reynolds says.
Reynolds headed over to LA where he was introduced to Matt Groening’s lawyer, Susan A Grode. He and Mohi were awarded the licence to launch a quarterly magazine, The Simpsons Illustrated. “We were a company of four people and The Simpsons gave us the licence instead of the big publishers. I think Matt Groening liked the fact that we were the underdogs,” he says. “We were the first people outside of The Simpsons employees to be allowed to write in the voices of the characters which we were chuffed about. That was fun.”
But along with some big wins, Reynolds took his share of failures. In partnership with Babe Scott, he launched the first “lad’s mag” (a UK invention) in Australia, called Men’s STUFF. “We wanted to create the ultimate men’s magazine that we’d actually like to read, without the prerequisite glossy paper and scantily clad women — and of course, it failed,” he says.
Rather than being knocked back, Reynolds says he’s “proud” to have failed and still manage to pay his bills. He then joined Scott’s custom publishing company, Propaganda Print, as managing partner, and the business went on to create magazines for clients such as Weight Watchers and Video Ezy.
They later sold Propaganda to Eric Beecher’s Text Media, with Reynolds staying on as editorial director for a couple of years.
“After that I took a break and tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up which I still don’t know,” he says.
Following a phone call from ACP’s managing director Phil Scott in 2004, Reynolds joined the business to build its custom publishing division. Working closely with Medium Rare co-founder Sally Wright, he grew the division with clients such as Myer, Telstra, Westfield, Coles and Qantas.
Reynolds and Wright also helped set up ACP Hong Kong off the back of securing the business of Cathay Pacific and Dragon Air. In 2011, Reynolds was appointed publishing director across all of ACP’s consumer, custom and book titles.
“I enjoyed my time there, it was fun, but towards the end it was difficult,” he says. “Being at a large publisher when the market was changing so quickly and so radically was definitely interesting.
“Ultimately, you end up spending more of your time looking at how to make cost cuts without affecting the product and trying to protect the editorial teams when really, the focus should be on how to create better editorial.”
After a nine year stint at ACP, which was later sold by Nine Entertainment to Bauer Media, Reynolds again found himself a free man. That’s when he and Sally Wright set up Medium Rare in 2014 with the backing of News Corp Australia. The deal with the news media business was secured with Nicole Sheffield, who was head of NewsLifeMedia at the time.
Reynolds and Wright saw it as the perfect partnership. News Corp wanted to enter the content marketing space more deeply, and Medium Rare needed the research and insights the media organisation could provide.
Timing was once again in his favour when Coles decided to tender its magazine, which Reynolds had launched at ACP, as he and Wright were setting up Medium Rare. And despite not being officially launched, the duo went for the account and won it.
Now, Medium Rare has more than 200 staff across offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore and New Zealand. It also produces content across print, digital and social platforms for big brands such as Qantas, Jetstar, David Jones and Bunnings among others, and added a new branded content division, Rare Creative.
With more than 30 years’ in the industry, Reynolds rejects the idea that magazines are dead, saying there’s still a big appetite for them and brands have become the new publishers instead.
“On the whole, readers are as satisfied with this shift with a couple of provisos,” he says. “One, brands can only create content in areas they have authority in, and two, the content has to be really, really good.”
Gerry Reynolds joins Morry Schwartz, founder of Schwartz Media, in the Australian Magazine Awards Hall of Fame and Eric Beecher, founder of Crikey-owner Private Media.
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