The Business of Magazines

Yea but the piece says it will be her fourth....so I wonder what she started besides POP.

 

Oh sorry

she was also involved in...
Dazed & Confused
Arena
and then she started
Pop

 

Don't forget about The Face. And she was the launch editor of Another.

 

WOW, this is an excellant news, i am very excited about it, wonder what it will be called though...

 

She was not involved with the launch of The Face... she came on much later as a stylist. Thanks for the info about Another.

 

I don't get why Katie is leaving (?) POP.

I mean it won't be the same as when it started.

And I hope this is the right thread for this question - but does anyone have the statistics of how each issue of Vogue, W, Bazaar, POP etc. sells?

I'm interested to compare all the different Vogue's.

 

wwd / october 3.2009

 

That's a fairly precise summary of how it works. You forgot the bit about how publishers are also turning to bloggers to generate text on the cheap, while the unions to which journalists pay membership fees remain completely silent about this. Can you imagine the furore if filmmakers and studios decided to employ non-union actors to save money? The film industry would be brought to a standstill.

Fat chance of that happening in the print media, because the unions are as useful as t*ts on a bull and unethical publishers - who don't give a toss about editorial quality as long as they're getting the ads and advertorial puff pieces in - are perfectly happy to order beleaguered editors to commission work from bloggers at rates that would be decried in the tabloid press if the business involved designer label teeshirts and child labour.

With the exception of a few well-paid journalists and photo-journalists, newspaper and magazine careers involve longer and longer hours for less and less money, which is why you find so many trust fund kids on the masthead, particularly in the fashion media. I'd say that the waiter bringing me my coffee and tartine in the morning probably earns more in half the time than the average staffer on a fashion magazine working 14-hour days to get the magazine out, plus the various advertorial supplements and sundry stand-alones they are required to produce for no extra pay throughout the year.

As a writer and editor myself, I view fashion and style media strictly as showcases for attracting well-paid advertising and consultancy work. Many fashion photographers do the same thing. If I had to rely on magazine work to live, I'd have starved to death by now or gotten a better-paid job, washing chip pans in MacBurger or digging graves. Luckily, I was able to "diversify" as a writer and editor but I am painfully aware that I am really one of the lucky few. One of the particularly depressing tasks regularly confronting me is giving reality checks to young hopefuls who don't happen to have rich parents funding them and don't have the experience of those of my generation, who started when it was still possible to earn a decent living at this game.

Maybe the coming crash will be a good thing in sorting out the wheat from the chaff. With a drastic reduction in "tree-killer" publications, vanity magazines and other dross, a lot of the bluffers in this business will find themselves looking for work more suited to their IQ, leaving the field open to those who are really suited to it. There are far too many magazines and supplements out there. The fashion media needs liposuction. We need to go back to basics, when there were just a few basic mainstream titles, plus a few plucky little indie mags, and having "Vogue" and "Bazaar" on your CV actually meant something.

PK

 

Great news about Katie Grand. I hope this will not have any effect on Pop.

 

Thanks for posting this, very interesting to read the editors thoughts about current economic situation in America.

 

Most of what I read on blogs is the same poorly written recycled content over & over. The bloggers with original fashion content are very few. As far as trust fund kids on the masthead... that's always been a tradition... at Vogue anyway. The coming crash... is here... the US economy is in a free all... where it stops... I don't think anyone knows yet... not even the so-called experts.

Thank you for posting Prosperk... I enjoyed reading your opinions

 

Everything he said is everything I've seen in my own time of working in the magazine/newspaper industry - there are a lot of people who own publications who really don't care about the content as long as the money comes in, whatever the staff might think themselves (it's essential for your own sense of self-respect to believe that content matters).

 

"we'll have a larger format, bigger budgets and broader horizons than ever before. With the wholehearted support of Condé Nast, there will be nothing to limit our imagination."

Sounds very exciting!
Can't wait to see the debut of the magazine!
Hopefully Katie's departure doesn't have any adverse effect on POP

I hope Mert & Marcus will be back shooting for Katie Grand again like before, since the three of them are at Conde Nast now!

 

^^But she wont be involved in POP anymore right?So there will defo be a change, and it will be either good or a disaster, few of the last issues were lackluster alredy, i hope it dosent die down entirely.

 

Yup, hopefully someone great takes over the reins at POP, yup from the Sienna Miller issue onwards, POP was lackluster...I got a bad feeling that POP might just die down without Katie

 

And I guess Glenda Bailey is bumped as well that she lost another one to Anna/Conde Nast.

 

I'd be happier with a smaller, quarterly POP, that kept its high-gloss paper, but which concentrated on producing more original content, rather than printing the cast-off ideas from the ad campaigns the staff have worked on. I don't care about articles, stunning photography will suffice.

 

I bet ANYTHING that Kate Moss will be on the cover. She's a guaranteed success for the debut of any new magazine.

 

^ True, she's like a tried and tested model

 

This the reasons why Anna Wintour won't go anywhere soon.

www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20081005/Trend+Anna+Wintours+Family+Tree