What started it all? What was the driving factor for starting LASN?
George: The driving factor for LASN would have been that, when I got hired at "Western Landscaping News" (WLN), we found this new group called Landscape Architects and an association called the CLASS Fund (California Landscape Architectural Student Scholarship Fund). Landscape Architects had just been licensed 25 years earlier and only a couple of states had licensure, but the potential for this sub-category in landscape looked promising. Then, "Western Landscaping News" was sold to my archenemy (Denne Goldstein), who I was never going to work for. The new owner of the company was such a harsh guy that I had a bunch of people come up to me and say: "George, start a magazine. Landscape Architects are important, start the magazine. If you do, we'll be in it." Guys like Bob Seat and Mark Cochran of Seatree Nursery, Brent Holden of Gro-Power, Mickey Strauss of American Wholesale Nursery, and a few others. Out of the 15 advertisers in the first issue, Terracast, Superior Controls, Gro-Power, and Pottery Manufacturing are still active clients today (and I'm currently on the Board of the Green Industry Hall of Fame with Micky Strauss ). And then, Stuart Sperber of the Valley Crest Tree Company called up - and Burton Sperber, too - and said, "Hey, Landscape Architects are great! We want to support this magazine." Those guys actually bought a half-page ad and paid in advance for a whole year. So, all those companies kind of put the magazine on the map, as well as Landscape Architects, who were only licensed in a couple of states and represented an untapped market at the time.

How did you come up with the name for the magazine?
George: I was going to call it just "The Landscape Architect," which you see on the first issue cover logo. The grid logo doesn't say "Specifier News." We changed that on the top of the issue at the last minute because I had called Ed Able - who was the Executive Director of the ASLA at the time and whom I had met a few times in the years before - and said, "Hey, Ed, I'm starting a magazine and we're going to call it 'The Landscape Architect.' What do you think? I know you have 'Landscape Architecture Magazine,' but this is going to happen, and I want to know what you guys think." And he goes, "Well, that's really close to our name. Can you change it or do anything else to it?" So, I said, "How about 'Landscape Architect and Specifier News'? We'll make it more of a news magazine." He said, "You do that, and you have my blessing." So, the very first magazine had the blessing of the ASLA. Then, we started to get successful, and all these advertisers started to come along. When Ed Able retired, ASLA started to fight us because we started taking away ad revenue and were also promoting licensure over membership, and HQ didn't like that.

Who was on the first editorial team?
George: At first, I used a couple of freelance writers, like Miles Crossen and David Shaw, but LASN's first 'real' editor was Martin "Marty" H. Smith Jr. I called him up a month or so into it and said, "Marty, I started a magazine - you need to come down." He was my friend, and he had a lot of building industry and masonry experience. His dad was a major contractor in the Seattle area and Marty grew up working with the company, so he knew all about building, architecture, planting materials, roots, retaining walls, hillsides, slopes, and all the things that go along with that. He was the editor for the first five years and became a partner.

When I first called him up, he had just proposed to his fianc?(C)e. And I go, "Hey, man, you've gotta come down." He actually did come down for about four or five months to help me get everything started. Then, he worked remotely in Seattle (this was in 1986 before there was a lot of remote work), and then they got married and they came down. They were down here for several years, but it was kind of rough back then, with a new wife and a fledgling business a long way from home, and they ended up leaving and going back to Seattle ...

What was some of the technology used back then?
George: The very first month, we had the very first Macintosh, a 400K single-sided disk drive. The system folder was on the same external disk as all the programs. Sometimes, files would be on several disks, so you had to put one disk in, open the file, eject that disk and load the next disk before the file would open. Sometimes it took a while. We called it "MacWait," but it organized everything. It was so awesome.

The very first year, we had the first Mac, a phone machine, a file cabinet, and a car phone that we bought for only for $3,500. It was like $1.50 per minute. There was all this new technology, and that's what drove us. We eventually upgraded to the first Mac that stored everything on a hard drive, allowing us to send digital files to the typesetters. Before that, you would send a printed page to the typesetter, and they had to type it again into their machine. Now ... you could just give them a file and they could "upload" it. That was really cool. We had a phone machine, too. It answered the call, gave a promotional message, and then took a message. We could even screen calls. It's hard to imagine now, but nobody really had those things before.

We started LandscapeOnline.com in like '91 or '92 - something like that. I always like to say that Al Gore and I invented the internet. We had six modem ports going into an Apple II computer. We had to get six phone lines into the building and six separate modems running into the computer. We'd be sitting at our desks, we'd hear the modem ring, and we'd run over to pick up the receiver. Then, we'd connect it and, sure enough, one of the six screens would light up with text. We'd type something like, "Welcome, how can we assist you today?" Then, the caller would type a request, like an article on a certain topic, and we would go find the article by plugging in the aforementioned disc drives and searching through all the files. It sometimes took two or three discs to find the file. Then, we'd have to take it over to the computer, put it in, open the file, copy and paste in on the screen with the internet connection, and send it over. That would take ten minutes, minimum. You'd have to pay attention to respond in time to the person on the other end. In the meantime, the phone would ring again, and you'd start the process all over, going back and forth between our computers with these disc drives. By then, there were larger disks involved, but we'd still have to find it and send it to whoever was asking for it. Then, we'd hang up and wait for the next one. It was really cool and state-of-the-art, but little did we realize that the abbreviation for LandscapeOnline.com was going to be LOL ... LOL.

What did the publishing process look like back then?
George: Okay, so my story is that the only two classes I failed in college were in graphic design. I had no artistic experience whatsoever. I did study communication and the theory of communication, so that's why I landed in publishing and advertising and choosing words correctly, but then, right away, I had to become a graphic artist. And it was much different then ... back then, we had typesetters, art boards, and light tables. We used waxed type, slides, negatives, printed photographs, and four-color film to send to the printer. The package could weigh over a
hundred pounds.

 

I shot a lot of slides ... shot a lot of film ... took a lot of pics. My photo credits were under the pen name I.B. Clichen. To get a pic in the magazine, you had to have it scanned at a color separator, who had this huge laser drum that could reduce a small slide into several thousand dots per inch. Then, you could blow it up to a full page - maybe even to a poster. Then, they would make the film that would go onto these big flats. And everything was pasted up with waxed text and cut lines that showed where every photo went. So, if we wanted to change a photo, or even a word, you had to cut out the little piece of waxed text - I always had dirt on my fingers - send it to the typesetter who would return it in a day or two, and then you could cut out the new words and place them back into the layout. Photos were very expensive to include and really hard to change because you had to send it to the color separator and they would have to squeeze in your scan with other projects, and it might take days ... When everything was done, we would send these big, heavy packages of film to the printer.

And then ... one day ... Adobe PageMaker came out, and we got version 1.0. We put it on our old Mac and, within one week, we had an entire magazine pasted up completely. The pictures still had to go through the same process, but we could type the article on the page and leave places for pictures. Magazines were 60-80 pages back then. Before Adobe PageMaker, it would take between three and six weeks to paste up a magazine. Now, it took just one.

As the magazine moved into the 90s, how did the technology change?
George: For a while, we were pasting up the magazine ourselves, but the photos still had to be sent out. Then, they started coming out with the copier technology and fax machines, which were basically just a scanner and a sender. Then, they started making these scanners so you could digitize your slides. It had a little box that you would put your slide in, and it would go through and shoot the slide at better than 1,200 dots per inch (DPI). It eliminated the need for the color separator, but 1,200 DPI wasn't anywhere near the standard. Then, we realized that if you scan a picture that's 1,200 DPI, you still only print it in the magazine at 133 DPI. So, I went out and bought this big, state-of-the-art scanner about a year or so after we got PageMaker. We started scanning all the pictures and putting them into PageMaker. We didn't have to go to the color separator. We had the new tech - we did it ourselves - and we saved so much money and so much time - and the quality of the pictures was great! You could take a black-and-white or a color pic or an 8x10 that somebody would send you and scan those. Or, I had the slide thing, and I could take any slide and make it a digital image. That was the early '90s or so when that was all starting to happen, including digital design options for Landscape Architects.

In terms of firsts ... We were the first ones to recognize licensed Landscape Architects. We were the first ones to have a Macintosh, the first ones to have a cell phone, the first ones to have a scanner and PageMaker - all that really helped a lot in making the magazine, and then we started getting better and better.

What changed with technology in the 2000s?
George: Well, we partied like it was 1999 and still survived Y2K, and there was a lot of great growth in the early 2000s. However, 9/11 happened and it was the first time in my tenure that the ASLA show wasn't held - it was supposed to be in Montreal - and everything shut down for a year. Still, there was a lot of great growth in housing. The markets were going really strong, lenders were lending, and buyers were leveraging, and for some reason interest jumped sharply right before the elections and millions of variable mortgage rate holders went into default.

Even though that was really bad, it kinda spawned the birth of a lot of technology, too, because that's when cell phones were becoming more like computers. In 2008 or 2009 - only 15-16 years ago - nobody was texting, and cell phone pictures were like looking through cataracts compared to today. We had just started to get iPhones, and Blackberrys were on their way out. When you wanted to text, you had to press the button multiple times to get the letter you wanted. That's probably why they've got emojis. It was a pain, but it was still the coolest thing at the time.

And that's also about when the iPad came out in 2010, and we started to go digital with the magazine. We started receiving thousands of requests for our new LAWeekly E-Newsletter, and then we began posting the magazine online in mid-2012. We were able to make it digitally appealing because of the iPad concept and technology. All of a sudden, you had a little tablet that you could put a whole magazine on and flip the pages, and it was really cool. It was really primitive and wasn't as good as it is now, but it was really cool. The digital magazine looks great now; it's got all kinds of viewership, and it's a big part of what we do. I think we have more than 7,000 people who are subscribed to just the digital issue. We haven't even really tried to develop that beyond Landscape Architects, but that's pretty good for this targeted market.

Then, we started to turn LandscapeOnline.com into a product search engine. We had all these clients and all these products. It took about five years to get it going because we were focusing on the magazine and getting through the recession, but we finally launched LOPSE - the Landscape Online Product Search Engine, now known as LADetails. (Last month we had more than 70,000 page views in LADetails)

Well, now we're getting closer to the 2020s. At the time, we had about 30,000 products in the search engine and every article ever published in the digital library, but we were using LandscapeOnline because we also have "Landscape Contractor Magazine" and The Landscape Expo. Everything was under that one umbrella. So, in 2018, we bought LandscapeArchitect.com and started turning it into a website, transitioning everything into a responsive news, project, and product resource specifically for LASN and Practicing Landscape Architects (PLAs).

You launched LandscapeArchitect.com right before COVID-19?
George: Yep ... After two years of working on it, we soft-launched LandscapeArchitect.com at the end of 2019. We launched a new website and an all-new product search engine. It was a place where you could get CAD files and spec sheets, and there are 30,000 products online. But recheck that date ... We launched LA.com and over the next couple of months, the entire world went into hibernation, followed by riots, the election, and a season of turmoil. At least no one was there to notice the newbie blemishes. That was also the year Aaron Schmok joined the team as Editor-in-Training . Poor guy graduated college the same year there were literally zero
jobs available.

What were some of the major milestones in those first five years?
George: I don't know how we survived, but we did. Maybe it was godsend, so God did it, because we couldn't have done it on our own. I do know that this was a new market, and it was big, and we were going to make an impact. Of course, I married my sweetheart Kim in June of '88 and, while we were on our honeymoon, Marty borrowed $10,000 from Francis Sullivan. I was a little mad at first, but it surely helped at the time. Then, there was a big recession going on in the early 90s, and I still don't know how we did it, but we ended up paying him back. Another milestone in those first years was meeting Donald Milton Roberts, PLA, FASLA. (see page 63 for more).

What were some of the big development milestones with circulation in California?
George: Well, we went to every licensed Landscape Architect in California. Then we went to Arizona, Nevada, and others. By the time we started in '85, there were about 15, maybe even 20 states that were licensed already. We knew the West because we had all these ties, and I knew all these people through WLN. (The very first trade show I went to was the Turfgrass Show by the Southern California Turfgrass Council. We ended up buying that trade show and now we call it The Landscape Expo - Anaheim, November 12-13. I've always liked trade shows!)

So, we expanded and arced across the country, ending up in every state that was fully licensed in about ten years or so. Then, we kept adding states as they got licensed. Now, there are 20,000 plus Landscape Architects receiving LASN every month. There are really like 21,000 licensed Landscape Architects across the nation, and we have more than 19,000 on our circulation list.

What's your favorite part of the production process?
George: My favorite part is probably the editing - especially choosing the words - but I like the entire process. I like looking at the submitted features four or five months in advance - dozens and dozens of projects from all over the world, really - to figure out which six or seven we're going to put in the magazine that best represents the newest, greatest stuff. Then, when it gets close to production, I like putting the finishing touches on them, looking at the pictures, examining the various parts, and asking what is going on and why. I like analyzing and putting the final details on what went into the projects, both philosophically and literally. We analyze the articles to that level, which is what Landscape Architects analyze in their community development. I think that's the fun part.

I also like knowing that we are making a positive impact on the growth of a profession that literally affects every single person in the vast majority of the entire earth by making it possible to develop the land in a much cooler way than any other profession can offer.

"The main thing is we want LASN to be something you pick up and read little snippets of information for a few minutes a day, several times a month."

Do you have a favorite cover?
George: The Kayap?? Indian [from 1989]. There's only been three people forever on the cover of the magazine - Cortland Paul, Jack Nicklaus, and the Kayap?? Indian. The Chief was on the cover because the Kayap?? are so cool. They're in South America (Brazil), and they were one of the first sustainability/regenerative people. They started by planning their community. They would build their houses and their community surrounding fences made out of natural blending elements, and they survived in that circle. They harvested their entire environment in some way or another and used it in a completely natural, sustainable, regenerative way. They also do things like plan their landscape to encourage all the bees to live by the fruits and crops, while getting the bug-eating birds to live on the other side by the people. That is really, really cool, so he was on the cover.

What's your favorite issue theme?
George: The [Specifier's] Guide. I like to do the Guide because I would see 1,300 products and organize them. What great knowledge, seeing all these new things and what they do. I learned so much from doing that. As for an editorial theme, my favorite one would be the [Yearbook] because there are thousands of people in there as well as the forecast. We look at all permits and the construction data, and I like the numbers. I like that kind of stuff, I'm analytical when it comes to that. The Yearbook/Economic Forecast and the Spec Guide are my favorites because those are the ones where I learn the most about what's going on out there, 1) what the chapters and people are doing, 2) what the developers are doing, and 3) what new products are coming out. The next one would be the ASLA Show issue because that one has all the Fellows in it, and you see the local firms, who's doing what great work, and how each region is different. The main thing is we want LASN to be something you pick up and read little snippets of information for a few minutes a day, several times a month.

As seen in LASN magazine, July 2025.