Interview: Steven J. Rivera

I had the pleasure of chatting with Steven J. Rivera, Founder and President of Diablo Publications about the longevity and success of Diablo Magazine. Here’s what he had to say about creating and maintaining a successful magazine in the East Bay.

How many years have you been involved in the magazine industry and how did you get interested in it?

I’ve been involved with Diablo Publications for 29 years. After working for a large corporation in the publishing industry, I quickly realized that I was an entrepreneur at heart. The success of the business [Diablo Publications] is a product of timing–the timing and place were essential. The other part would be commitment and passion.

What contributed to Diablo’s success? How did you approach the East Bay?

Back when we started, the area we serve had much less sophisticated and involved magazines. It was very suburban. I think we were always slightly ahead of it in that regard. We tried to be aspirational. We talked about things that could be–I always had the idea that we could always be a little better, a little aspirational in our approach.

Our mission was to create a place that people could be proud of. We found the best of the place and focused on those things. Whatever segment of the content we were looking at, whether it was food, or architecture, we always found the best out there to write about.

From a marketing point of view, we knew we had to be a very beautiful product. We also knew we needed to create a magazine that had trust with the reader. We focused on them more than anything, because if we engaged them, the advertisers would follow.

About 3 years ago, the East Bay Business Times ran a story about the explosion of lifestyle magazines in the area, which said “Indeed, what has long been the sole turf of Walnut Creek's Diablo magazine is no longer. Elsewhere, in territory traditionally bereft of the glossies, new pubs are sprouting up too.” Since then, some of the magazines they mentioned such as Black Diamond Living have shut down. What is it about Diablo that has made it such an enduring magazine as other regionals have come and gone?

I don’t claim we are the dominant everything, because that cuts against the entrepreneurial code that I believe in: Somebody can always build a better mousetrap. But we never stopped to feel good about ourselves when we started to win awards. We celebrated for a few minutes, then sat down and thought to ourselves, how can we do better? I think part of the secret of success is reinventing yourself all the time, thinking about how readers and advertisers all change all the time.

The other thing is, you don’t need two Diablo Magazines. In our market, we have a much more finite area and its much more homogeneous as compared to someplace like San Francisco. You have to be reinventing yourself and rethinking yourself all the time.

There could be a million reasons a magazine could fail. It’s often just businesses not paying attention. We pretend we’re our competition and play against ourselves. One of my strategies for building the business was to not be the most important guy there. I’ve tried to make myself less and less important. I wanted to create something like a living organism.

In that same article, Barney Fonzi is quoted as saying "Community involvement is key in the way we market ourselves.” How important is community involvement to the success of a regional magazine? What kinds of things does Diablo do to stay engaged with the community around it, and in turn, how does that translate to a form of marketing for the magazine?

Essential to a magazine’s success is being in involved with the community around it. There are a number of areas by which marketing and community relations are big parts. To market to a community you have to be a good citizen. There’s a philanthropic side. It doesn’t mean you’re out there cutting checks. But you’ll notice all these logos where we are a sponsor of events.

For instance, we want to raise money for the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, Alameda County Food Bank, and Project Open Hand. So we put them together with the food community, to create an event like Gourmet East Bay. We put everyone together to have an event that raises money for the food bank, raises an awareness of certain restaurants, and is sponsored by other companies. So we become an important part of their business mission because we invented the event. The one I’m most proud of is Threads of Hope.