Identifying a niche
Among those independent publishers entering the print magazine space is Nick Giallourakis, who ended a seven-year tenure with Informa (formerly Penton) last year, teamed up with his mom, Angie, and launched Elephants & Tea, a new quarterly serving adolescents and young adults who have been diagnosed with cancer, as well as their caregivers.
Inspired by the experience of his younger brother, a two-time cancer survivor, and born out of a recognition that there was no dedicated media brand specifically serving such an audience, the first issue of Elephants & Tea came out in March to an overwhelming response from the community, Giallourakis tells Folio:.
“This age range has their own specific issues that you don’t see in adult or childhood cancers,” he says. “There’s nothing specifically for this group out there like this.”
Still in the process of building out its own database, Giallourakis first spread the word about Elephants & Tea by partnering with cancer hospitals around the country, including the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“It started with just an email chain to get the word out, and then we attended a couple of conferences and talked to the people there,” says Giallourakis. “The people we’re working with—it could be anyone from the lead oncologist or a program manager or patient navigator—they’ve been our main contacts, but then they’ve passed it along to people at other hospitals, and it’s just kind of snowballed from a distribution standpoint, which has been really cool.”
Giallourakis says many of these contacts in turn submitted more writers for future issues, while others have been giving out copies of the debut issue to newly diagnosed patients and their families.
“A lot of the survivors have been telling us that they wish they had this when they were going through treatments,” Giallourakis adds. “It gives people hope—just because they have cancer, it doesn’t mean that their life is over.”
The magazine’s title is derived from a metaphor—explained in its tagline, “Cancer is the elephant in the room. Tea is the relief that conversation provides.” As such, the content mix is heavy on first-person narratives and adolescent/young adult subjects sharing their own experiences with cancer. Patients overwhelmingly indicated that they don’t want to read articles by someone who hasn’t lived through the experience themselves, Giallourakis says.
One topic the magazine explores in every issue is sexuality.
“When we started talking with people, that was a topic they wanted to know more about,” he adds. “I think it’s something people are afraid to just ask their doctor or their social worker about. For a patient or survivor that’s trying to have a normal sex life, that’s extremely important to them.”
Like adolescent and young adult patients and survivors, another underserved community, Giallourakis says, is their caregivers.
“The emotional toll that caregivers go through—don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely not the same as what the patient goes through—but it is significant,” he continues. “I think that it’s important for the caregivers to be able to get this content for their own support, but also to really understand what the patient or survivor is going through.”
To formulate a content strategy, the mother-and-son team behind Elephants & Tea conducted focus groups and one-on-one interviews with patients, survivors and caregivers, but also oncologists, social workers, program managers and nonprofits. They formulated five key areas of focus: “wellness and nutrition,” “emotional support,” “college, career and cash,” “sexuality” and “chemo brain,” any of which could change based on continued feedback (the magazine’s second issue is slated to come out in June).
Apart from distribution at cancer centers, Giallourakis hired a freelancer to handle social media promotion and organic SEO to drive people to the magazine’s website and get them to register for a free subscription. Weekly email newsletters update readers about new posts on the site, which is updated a few times a week and modeled after The Players’ Tribune, another specialist in first-person narratives.
Free to access on all channels and monetized through advertising, Giallourakis has ambitions to expand into sponsored or custom content—something his years of experience at Penton and Informa helped inform—and sees potential from nonprofits to major cosmetics companies. In the end, though, the print edition remains the brand’s bedrock.
“It’s tough to justify print from an ROI standpoint individually in this day and age, however the magazine itself is such a powerful marketing tool,” Giallourakis says. “I just feel that if we’re really going to be a media company for adolescent and young adult survivors, patients and caregivers, we need a print component. It really has validated what we have done, just in terms of authority and trust and to prove that we are for real. I think there’s something to be said for that. It helps separate us from the pack.”
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Greg Dool
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Greg Dool is Folio:'s senior editor.
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