Worthwhile is now Motto, and seeks more funding

Two former Wall Street Journal reporters who started Worthwhile magazine in 2004 have changed the publication’s title to Motto with the latest issue and are raising an additional round of capital to fund its growth, according to one of the co-editors.

Kevin Salwen, who was national small business editor at the Journal, said, “Our motto is work with purpose, passion and profit, and we focus on helping people and companies create more meaningful and purposeful worklives. It’s a national mag with a circulation of 75,000.”

Salwen and co-editor Anita Sharpe, who won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, got the idea when they realized that they — and others, especially women and younger people — had stopped reading the traditional business mags.

“We knew people were intensely interested in their careers but didn’t care nearly as much about the strategy and operations information that the traditional publications cover so well,” Salwen said in an e-mail. “We decided to focus Motto on people who wanted their careers to stand for more than a paycheck, bringing an Oprah-type sensibility to careers and work. That’s the passion part.

“In the process, we realized we could actually begin to change capitalism by highlighting people and organizations who were doing well by doing good, providing a roadmap for a more humane way of building a business. We could show how companies with enlightened leadership were actually outperforming those that didn’t have that — Whole Foods, Kenneth Cole, Starbucks, Honest Tea, Stonyfield Farms. That’s the purpose part.

Salwen and Sharpe raised capital from friends and family, launched in 2004 as Worthwhile, then got sued by Worth Magazine, even though they held the trademark registration for Worthwhile.

They fought to protect they trademark but in the end, Salwen said, “It was a ‘deeper pockets’ scenario that would have cost too much in time, money, etc. So, we decided to re-create Worthwhile into Motto (def: what one stands for), redesigned, etc.”

The first Motto issue includes interviews with Bank of America builder Hugh McColl and social entrepreneur Janet Hanson. The magazine, which is based in Atlanta, is available at Barnes & Noble, Staples and Whole Foods.