The editor’s unorthodox career continues with Now it Counts or NIC, the website-with magazine targeted to the 50-plus demo and available gratis (and ad-free) through NowItCounts.com. “Two years ago, I was asked to develop the Complete Senior concept by ePath Digital CEO Bill Baskin,” says Pérez-Feria, a late-stage baby-boomer who had just turned 50 himself. “My reaction was that ‘senior’ was synonymous with ‘you’re not dead yet,’ and it would have the same marketing problems as 50 Plus, which failed in the 1990s, and Modern Maturity, which the AARP had to put its own name on for its 22 million members in the early-2000s.”
“For many in the demo, NIC means no longer raising children and paying mortgages. That is why [the bimonthly’s] first two covers–Madonna and Barbra Streisand–are so radiant. This is not another platform for ‘anti-aging'; rather, it’s being ‘pro-gorgeous.'” It is an optimism first expressed by Pérez-Feria as the 1993 founding editor of Poz, when the HIV-positive audience were perceived to be under a death sentence. Such contributors as Maureen Dowd and Andrew Sullivan helped earn Poz a 1997 “general excellence” National Magazine Award nomination, and his 2003-2005 stint as People en Español editor brought such People mainstays as Most Beautiful and Bachelors to a magazine endemic to the bilingual Pérez-Feria because his parents had fled Castro’s Cuba. That is why he wrote Longing for the Cuba of My Dreams in the February/March NIC, as the Obama administration’s new “open door” might enable the Boston-born Pérez-Feria to finally “set foot in the country where I am from.”