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Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said Thursday that the company does not expect to close down any additional magazine brands this year after it announced earlier in the day that the company was shutting Self magazine.
“For us, it’s really more about focus,” Lynch said at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC. “I just want our teams really focused on the brands that really have a clear path to continued growth and profitability.”
Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith asked Lynch why Condé Nast operated in China when so many Western media companies have avoided the market.
Lynch noted that the company does not offer its news-oriented sites like The New Yorker but concentrates on its lifestyle and luxury publications.
“It’s not for the faint hearted, because it’s a complex place to operate,” Lynch said of China. “if you get it right it’s a huge economy, huge growing middle class … it is a very profitable business for us.”
He was also very bullish about its Middle East market despite the ongoing conflict in the Gulf. “It is a region that is very digital, very young, a lot of growth, and a huge luxury market,” Lynch said. He added that the US market is very strong for the company’s magazine brands.
Lynch said that while he initially viewed AI technology as a threat to media companies, his view has shifted. “As we’ve engaged with these companies, and as we use AI in our business increasingly, I see it more as a tailwind now than a headwind.”
Smith also asked Lynch about the success of Wired, which has been rapidly growing its digital subscriptions by aggressively covering politics, the Trump administration, and the tech sector, to the dismay of some titans of Silicon Valley.
Lynch said he was comfortable with the confrontational nature because the privately held company’s owners, the Newhouse family, has taken an hands-off approach.
“They do not interfere, which gives me as a CEO the ability to just appoint the best editors, let them do their jobs, and encourage them,” he said.
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The publishing house also said Thursday that it’s closing the international editions of Glamour in Germany, Spain, and Mexico and will concentrate in the US and UK, “where we see the strongest opportunities,” Lynch wrote in a memo to employees. It will also shutter Wired’s print magazine in Italy.
In November, the company announced that it was folding Teen Vogue into Vogue.com. The company drew criticism from its union after it fired four employees who protested the layoffs.
Lynch’s latest missive to employees suggested that the ship had been righted.
“Our overall business is healthy and doing well. We ended 2025 with revenue growth and a fourth year of profitability growth since 2020,” Lynch wrote Thursday, adding that the first quarter had “exceeded both our revenue and profitability budgets.”