Anthony Rogers had just finished a summer internship at 7×7, San Francisco's city magazine, when the idea took hold. Rogers, who is non-binary, had moved to the city from the Pacific Northwest to attend the Academy of Art University for photography, and had fallen in love with the people, the neighbourhoods, and the stubborn, maddening, endlessly inventive culture of the Bay Area. In 2015, Rogers launched Bob Cut as a website — a platform dedicated to San Francisco as seen through original photography, long-form interviews, and personal narratives. The name stuck. The audience grew. Within a year, Rogers had published the first printed issue: a 100-page visual tour of the city's fashion and art scenes, packed with interviews from artisans, designers, and local characters who embodied San Francisco's current creative moment.
The print magazine was image-first by design. Rogers, a photographer at heart, has described the editorial approach as driven by beautiful imagery and a free-flowing, relaxed writing style rather than the formal conventions of traditional journalism. Early issues were distributed through Bay Area boutiques and newsstands — Smoke Signals, Seldom Seen, the ODSY Workshop — and built a readership of people who cared about the soul of the city, not just its tourist attractions. Bob Cut Mag profiled the restaurant that had just opened down the block, the artist whose studio was around the corner, the neighbourhood changing in ways only a local would notice. It was city journalism at its most intimate: made by someone who lived in the community, for people who lived there too.
By 2020, Rogers had grown a staff of nine, mentored their development into successful media careers, and built the readership to 300,000 monthly visitors — a 34 percent year-over-year audience growth that made Bob Cut Mag one of the Bay Area's most-read independent cultural publications. The same year, the magazine won the award for Best Community Cultural Print Media Business. Rogers also launched an e-commerce arm highlighting Bay Area artisans, diversifying revenue and expanding the publication's reach beyond editorial content. In July 2021, the magazine was acquired, and Rogers stepped back from the editor-in-chief role — but not before building something that had become, over six years, a genuine local institution.
San Francisco has always attracted people who want to change it, and Bob Cut Mag documented the results with the affection and specificity that only local media can achieve. Rogers once wrote that the intention was simply to create something worth carrying around, referencing, and gaining a little insight from. For a city whose narrative is as varied as its people, that turned out to be exactly enough.