Bob Guccione, Jr. is an award winning and internationally renowned Editor and Publisher who has created and managed some of America’s most iconic publishing brands.
WONDERLUST
In August 2017, Bob launched the online luxury travel site WONDERLUST, with American Express Platinum Card as its launch sponsor, to compete with Conde Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure. Take a look at wonderlusttravel.com
From the beginning WONDERLUST disrupted the rather sedate, cozy world of travel journalism with a brand of brasher, superbly written, opinionated and often funny reporting, very quickly becoming one of the most recognized travel sites in America.
SPIN
In 1985, Bob launched SPIN, the enormously successful music magazine that usurped Rolling Stone, and every other magazine, as the dominant pop culture publication for the coveted 18 - 24 and 18 - 34 year old demographics. With Bob as Editor and Publisher, SPIN developed a reputation for award-winning investigative journalism and was Advertising Age’s Magazine of the Year in 1994.
Notable SPIN features included exposés of Live Aid’s tragic missteps in Ethiopia, the Atlanta child murders cover-up, embedding a reporter inside the IRA, the first article on crack cocaine, and, from 1987 to 1997, a very controversial but internationally lauded monthly column devoted to AIDS. In 1997 Bob sold SPIN, for a well-publicized $43.5M
GEAR
In 1998, Bob launched GEAR, a critically-acclaimed young men’s pop culture and fashion magazine, which reached a paid circulation of 500,000 before ceasing publication in 2003.
DISCOVER
In October 2005, Bob completed the acquisition of science magazine DISCOVER from Disney and formed Discover Media LLC. Covering the frontiers of science, technology, medicine and the future, the magazine had a paid circulation of over 700,000 copies monthly and under Bob’s two-year control turned around from being steeply unprofitable to highly profitable. By 2007 the magazine was up 35% in single copy sales and outsold Scientific American on newsstands, and was 20% up over the previous year in ad sales, one of the only magazines in America to enjoy growth in the media downturn at the time.
Speaker
Bob has been a keynote speaker and debater at universities and organizations around the country, and at numerous media and business conferences in the US and internationally. He’s also been a regular guest on television talk and news shows.
He has spoken across a spectrum of venues, from delivering the keynote at SXSW to an address at the prestigious Commonwealth Club of California, speaking between Mikhail Gorbachev the week before and Margaret Thatcher the week after.
Cutting-Edge Journalism
His first major, 10,000-word investigative feature was published in Penthouse when he was 26: “A Nun is Raped in Harlem,” about two street cops who caught a pair of horrific rapists. Since then he has covered wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, interviewed The Dalai Lama, Madonna, Mario Cuomo, David Bowie, James Michener, Bill Maher, Sinead O’Connor, Roseanne Barr, Mike Tyson, and NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir, as well as countless other musicians, scientists, entertainers and athletes. Bob has been a frequent Op Ed contributor to the Los Angeles Times, NY Daily News, Billboard, the Daily Beast and other publications.
On-air
Bob has long been sought after by major news outlets as an opinionated culture and media expert, including regular appearances on CNN, Fox News, Oprah, Phil Donahue, Meet the Press, MSNBC, Politically Incorrect, MTV, The Charlie Rose Show, C-Span, The 700 Club (where he was affectionately known as the “House Liberal”...), and innumerable national radio shows from This American Life and All Things Considered to Howard Stern and Mark Maron’s WTF podcast.
In the early 1990s he was a host of CNBC’s Talk Live.
Advocacy
As an editor, Bob has passionately championed a number of important causes.
In 1987 SPIN became the first major magazine in America to have a monthly AIDS column, which singlehandedly changed the course of how AIDS was reported by the mainstream press. SPIN famously exposed AZT as a cynical “treatment” that killed faster than AIDS itself, and became the first (and probably last) magazine to include a condom with every copy of its November 1988 issue as a safe sex statement, which became a national cause celebre at the time.
SPIN partnered with Amnesty International to highlight the plight of political prisoners around the world, and Bob asked them to guest edit an edition of the magazine (November, 1991). SPIN also worked closely with the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Starting in 1985, along with Frank Zappa, Bob led the fight against rock music lyrics censorship, becoming the most recognized and effective opponent of the PMRC and religious conservatives trying to ban records. Throughout his career Bob has been an articulate, impassioned defender of free speech, debating Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, Tipper Gore, Sean Hannity and Ronald Reagan’s Meese Commission Chairman Ed Meese, and many others, on television and in public forums around the country.
In 1997 Bob and Bosnian Ambassador to the UN, Mo Sacribey, produced the famous U2 concert in Sarajevo which peacefully brought together Croats, Serbs and Bosnians for the first time since the end of the war in the Balkans. (How the concert came together is amusingly recounted in this 2017 Daily Beast article The Untold Origin Story of U2’s Legendary Sarajevo Concert.)
Media Consultant
Bob has worked with major media clients, from managing companies to creating new properties and programs to increase revenue, distribution and brand awareness. These include: CNN Headline News and The Daily Share, Epix, Variety, Engaged Media, Prestige Magazine USA, the /Drive YouTube channel, SPIN (for its 30th Anniversary), Pocket.Watch, and Viaggio (B&B Hospitality’s magazine).
Mentor
Over the course of his career, Bob has given a host of executives and creative talent their major breaks, among them National Book Award winning William T. Vollmann, best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert, James Truman (who became Conde Nast’s Editorial Director), Elizabeth Mitchell (who went on to edit John F. Kennedy Jr’s George), photographer, now movie director Anton Corbin, scriptwriters James Greer and Jonathan Bernstein, and Aaron Hicklin (editor of Out).
For the 2010/2011 academic year, Bob taught journalism at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford MS, and joined the Law School’s Board of Advisers.
Honors & Awards
In 1994, SPIN was named Magazine of the Year by Advertising Age. Bob has won several individual awards as Man or Publisher of the Year from various music industry and other organizations, including GLAAD’s first Publisher of the Year, in 1990. In September 2008 he was Guest Editor of Media, a trade magazine for the advertising and communications industry.
In 2012 Bob’s column for Informationweek.com won MIN’s Online Column of the Year.
