Journal Inc. launches new lifestyle magazine

TUPELO — Journal Inc. has launched Mud & Magnolias, a Northeast Mississippi lifestyle magazine focusing on food, home and garden, travel, people, outdoors, fashion and pop culture.

The bimonthly magazine will guide readers through the aspects of everyday life in the region and state, as well as showcase to the rest of the world the best parts of the South.

Mud & Magnolias debuted Aug. 25, as a gift to subscribers of its sister product, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. It will be on sale at Barnes & Noble stores in Tupelo, Oxford and Starkville and at other Tupelo retailers.

Journal Inc. is best known for its flagship newspaper, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. The company also publishes seven weekly newspapers in Northeast Mississippi and seven in the Memphis suburban area. It recently purchased the Mississippi Business Journal in Jackson.

Journal Inc. CEO and Publisher Clay Foster said the company’s publishing business will be successful in the future by combining its loyal readers of existing products with new niche products to reach targeted audiences. “To reach other markets, we need new products and maybe even new brands — products and brands they can call their own,” Foster said. “We believe in the future of the newspaper industry —but one in which the canvas we use is different from the one we’ve used in the past.”

“As readers open the inaugural issue, they will find a conversation about what makes Mississippi a state we are proud to call home,” said Editor-in-Chief Ellie Turner. “From our own Olympian Brittany Reese to the football cupcakes that

only SEC tailgaters would understand, Mud & Magnolias will be the best story-teller around.”

Turner said that even though she has no children, she believes some of the emotions in starting a magazine are similar to parenting. “At times it seems too hard, and then, right when you want to give up, it makes you so proud you could just scream. And I have.