Michael Strahan Squares Up May Issue of Success Magazine
A fantastic profile by Jeff Vrabel.
Michael Strahan is about to tee up a fourth television show to go along with Live! With Kelly and Michael, Good Morning America and Fox NFL Sunday. Later this month in New York, he will shoot a recently announced 10-episode revival of The $100,000 Pyramid, which is set to air in prime time this summer on ABC.
Strahan is also on the cover of the May issue of Success magazine, which will be pushed out on social media starting tomorrow and hit newsstands April 12. Inside the issue, under the headline “You Can’t Stop Him,” regular contributor Jeff Vrabel does a great job of capturing Strahan’s natural effervescence, touching on everything from his subject’s childhood in Germany, to that Hall of Fame run with the New York Giants, to key excerpts from last fall’s tome Wake Up Happy, and more:
Strahan has a number of natural advantages for achieving all these things, and the first is probably his memory. He ascribes that to being the youngest of six kids, where observation was key to attention and survival. He also credits the Giants, who made him study a six-inch-thick playbook in training camp and plucked out particular pages in practices and on game days. “In football, you have to adjust without a second thought,” he says, “You have to remember that blitz, that call.” He claims a photographic memory for sacks, which is considerable when you count up how many he has to remember…
The second natural advantage is his work ethic, born into him and reinforced during his days in Germany. “It’s the little things,” he says. “When I’m done with GMA and get to Live, I make sure I change my entire outfit. Shoes, socks, tie, shirt, everything. You don’t want someone to look and go, ‘Man, I saw him wearing the same thing!’ That’s lazy to me. It’s very important in whatever job I do to be 100 percent present.”
Strahan is also about to add to his J.C. Penney menswear line with MSX by Michael Strahan, a companion “athleisure” collection arriving in stores just in time for Father’s Day. Vrabel, who has a second piece in the May issue about trying out meditation, spent time for the Strahan piece on the Live! set and also got some nice quotes from, among others, Howie Long.
Success magazine is in the midst of its own impressive growth. The magazine launched a full redesign with the October 2015 issue, has just added a podcast titled Success Insider and has seen between January 2015 and February of this year increases in digital subscriptions (147.4%), newsstand sales (18.1%) and print subscriber rolls (17.5%).
Headquartered in Dallas, Success magazine was launched way back in 1897 as a manifesto by Orison Swett Marden. In December, Josh Ellis (pictured) joined as the new editor in chief and in February of this year, Success welcomed Michael Mooney as editor at large.
On the Web side, monthly unique visitors totals at success.com are up 50.8% and social media followings have increased across the various platforms by an average of 30.8%. From a forthcoming announcement:
“As people become more engrossed with fulfilling their own personal definition of success – whether in the workplace or in life – the need for rich and inspiring content is more necessary than ever,” said Jim McCabe, vice president and general manager of Sucess. “We’re proud to continuously be a go-to source for those who aspire to develop themselves personally and professionally.”
Total magazine readership currently stands at around 1.3 million.
