Having borne witness to some of the biggest events in history over the last 68 years, Magnum Photos is the best-known brand in photojournalism. But it is about to be introduced to a new generation if chief executive David Kogan’s strategy to ensure the survival of the photo co-operative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour pays off, literally.

With a TV drama written by Ronan Bennett and produced by Downton Abbey-makers Carnival, plus a drive for new revenue streams from branded merchandise, media partnerships and leveraging its reputation for quality photographs among the Instagram generation, Magnum is poised to become even more famous.

But why is Kogan – dubbed a “TV rights wizard” by the Daily Mail after advising the Premier League on its multi-billion pound rights auctions – doing it? After all, in Russell Miller’s 1999 book about Magnum, former New York bureau chief Lee Jones said: “The history of Magnum is full of murders. They always kill their kings; they killed anybody who tried to run them.”

Kogan, who last gave an interview around the time Miller’s book came out, says he likes challenges and that “Magnum is too important to fail”. An avid collector of photographs, he loves them so much that when he was asked a year ago if he would advise on a new CEO, he volunteered himself. “It’s an incredible organisation that does incredible work, not just yesterday but today and into the future and the year I’ve spent there has persuaded me even more strongly that not only is it worth saving and prospering, it will be saved and it is prospering. So I’m very, very excited to be there.”

Though celebrated for any number of era-defining photos by Capa, Cartier-Bresson and others, the agency run by its member photographers has nevertheless been in “perennial financial chaos”, as Kogan explains.

In the late 1990s it was known for its members’ tantrums and the infighting between its London, Paris and New York offices. Times have changed, but one of the energetic Kogan’s key initiatives is to streamline the organisation’s offices. “Magnum hasn’t been in profit bar one year for quite a long time. We’re very close to financial stability and I’m not going to predict where those numbers are going to go but the numbers we’ve delivered this year are very good,” he says.

“As much to their surprise as mine, the changes I’ve been able to bring about at Magnum, which are quite radical already in terms of the way the place operates, [meant that] last year’s results were the best in 10 years. The budget for this year has been agreed by the board which involves investment in people and a business to consumer strategy and they are completely supportive. So I don’t know about them killing the people who work for them but I don’t have any experience of that.”

Nevertheless he acknowledges jokingly: “I have the delightful position of being the one warring leader of the organisation. Therefore all the blame is mine and all the strategy I suppose. I’ve got to keep delivering the goods otherwise I’d expect the photographers to have a negative view, so far they don’t seem to!”

Magnum’s revenue streams include selling its images to newspapers, corporate work, print sales, educational workshops and merchandise. Traditionally selling Magnum’s content has been in business to business. Kogan wants to target consumers more.

“You have a world where there are 9bn images uploaded every week. Magnum has nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. We have over 100,000 people who’ve bought something in the last 18 months and we have done very little to develop relationships with that following in a way that we can.”

Its last two $100 print sales done via Instagram made over $800,000, which “shows we have a following. What I want to do is take that principle and expand it dramatically, by creating a platform which will have on it not only old work and books and stuff we currently sell … but also new work so we invest more in content with our photographers, which is after all what they are good at,” says Kogan.

He wants to target “that 20-year-old who’s taking pics on his iPhone, putting them up on Instagram, who’s developing a love of photography and we are that iconic brand and place where he can see Robert Capa but also see Moises Saman.”

Radically he is also, “creating a content and commissioning budget whereby we will be asking and paying our photographers to cover major events, arts and stuff they wish to cover. That’s the first time Magnum has done that in a very long time, so we’re going to completely refresh and regenerate our content delivery and also the content that we’re shooting.”

The other part of the strategy is “the Magnum Photos brand itself” with a deal with the publisher Thames & Hudson to put the name on notebooks and potentially on “things that represent our brand values” such as luggage, clothes and watches. The television drama – which is for one series so far – should also help. Focusing on Magnum’s dramatic history and its coverage of the key events of the late 20th century, it is “a damn good story – and great for us”, admits Kogan. He says they are also “talking to some large media groups about large, strategic partnerships and those would include, potentially, television partnerships as well as photographic”.

Magnum’s photographers seem to continue to live by Capa’s maxim of “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”, with examples including Jerome Sessini getting the first, horrific photos of the Malaysian Airlines crash in Ukraine last year. Despite Capa’s reputation being singed somewhat by the fakery claims about his famous Spanish Civil war image, the Magnum brand remains alluring to new photogrpahers, because “you’re working with other great photographers in a community of photographers, albeit a fractious one occasionally. You have the title you are a Magnum photographer, which still means something. My job is to make the organisation strong so it’s supporting its photographers. That’s why we exist and I’m clear about that to the photographers and the staff.”

Despite his new role he continues to work in sports rights. After Reel Enterprises – the media advisory company he created with partner Sara Munds – was bought in 2011, the pair left three years later by mutual consent and set up a new firm, Exile Enterprises. “We took a couple of clients with us but we were going to be taking it pretty easy. [But] the easier we took it the more people approached us. We never publicise what we do. There’s almost nothing about us in the public domain but people found out we were still around so we have a number of sports rights clients at the moment; but I’m afraid I’m not going to talk about them as I never talk about existing clients and there are some deals on the way.”

In the past his clients have included the Premier League, Football League, Premiership Rugby, the International Olympic Committee and the NFL.

“I’ve never forecast correctly the outcome of a rights process,” Kogan admits. “I’m always too low. And actually I don’t believe it’s a scientific process. I believe an auction produces surprises. Whenever people ask me if there’s an algorithm of how we can assess value my view is you assess value if you’ve got more than one bidder. It then comes down to the bidders’ desire – when you’re doing a rights process and creating the packages of rights you’re trying to sell and the means by which you’re selling them, actually the best way to do it is to do something which most appeals to your buying market which sounds obvious. Actually 95% of what I do is trying to understand what the buyers might want and then creating a sufficiently competitive landscape so they bid high for it. It’s that straightforward.

“Anybody predicting they will always be able to bring in new entrants - that somehow that can happen again and again - I think would be living in a slightly delusional state. You never really know, all you can do is talk to every conceivable interested party and then they will decide if they want to be involved or not.”

As a former BBC man does he find it sad that the corporation has lost so many sports rights, most recently the Open golf? “Whenever I read quotes by television executives about how they haven’t got the money to bid for sport, my first reaction is that’s a choice you’ve made not to spend that money on rights because you’re spending money on something else. I think it’s very difficult for [head of sport] Barbara Slater but it’s a choice that the BBC chooses to make about where it spends its money.“

He was asked to provide advice on a Foreign Office division’s funds – resulting in an OBE for services to diplomacy (“That causes a huge hoot!”) – because he was nakedly commercial, but Kogan believes anyone with the media “skillset” he has and who has been to state school should give something back to education and he has worked with Luton University and Westminster Kingsway college.

While at the BBC he belonged to a formidable generation including his university friend Mark Thompson, whom he helped campaign for a move to Channel 4 and his return as director general.

Kogan calls his career “eccentric”. He could have gone into politics, having written the once again topically titled The Battle for the Labour Party, or publishing – his family’s business. But after Oxford he “blagged my way into the marketing department of the Daily Star and Daily Express in 1979 where I sat on the marketing committee that helped invent bingo for the Daily Star”.

His CV when he applied to the BBC got thrown into a wastepaper bin but was saved by Jenny Abramsky who had read his book and she recommended him to the Today programme. That is his one regret, Kogan says, not running a big BBC news strand such as Today: “People are blessed when editor of Today. Apart from the hours.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 55

Education Haverstock Comprehensive; Balliol College, Oxford (history)

Career 1979 marketing executive, Express Newspapers 1981 County Hall News Agency, local government correspondent, LBC 1982 producer, BBC radio and television, including Today, Newsnight, BBC North America, Breakfast Time 1988 managing editor, managing director global, Reuters Television 1997 executive director, channels, Granada Media Group 1998 co-founder and CEO Reel Enterprises Ltd 2011 managing director, global media, Wasserman 2014 partner, Exile Enterprises; executive director, Magnum Photos International