The Business of Magazines

[lhhbl]

Anyone knows details?

 

[thenewclassic]

 

[KoV]

I really thought Jisoo would've been a much bigger seller... I feel like those girls have more media than actual results.

I don't know if this is the case with Jisoo, but often I feel celebrities don't promote their covers. Maybe it gets an Instagram post or something, impersonal and authored by their team. If they were speaking about how proud of the cover they are or making it seem meaningful or exclusive in any way to their fans, things might be different. I mean, look at the numbers sold for Beyonce's issue. Clearly the beyhive did not purchase.

 

[heyjaded]

I don't know if this is the case with Jisoo, but often I feel celebrities don't promote their covers. Maybe it gets an Instagram post or something, impersonal and authored by their team. If they were speaking about how proud of the cover they are or making it seem meaningful or exclusive in any way to their fans, things might be different. I mean, look at the numbers sold for Beyonce's issue. Clearly the beyhive did not purchase.

You might be right, I don't really pay attention to her socials. And I also feel like I might have been expecting BTS kind of sales, but the armys are more intense (to not say another word) I guess. At this point BTS, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift are probably the only people that will sell like crazy without having to say anything.

 

[Xone]

I don't know if this is the case with Jisoo, but often I feel celebrities don't promote their covers. Maybe it gets an Instagram post or something, impersonal and authored by their team. If they were speaking about how proud of the cover they are or making it seem meaningful or exclusive in any way to their fans, things might be different. I mean, look at the numbers sold for Beyonce's issue. Clearly the beyhive did not purchase.

It is true, sometimes celebrities don't event post their editorial work...rarely put the cover and if it happens is the last image in a gallery of pictures (apparently an IG trend)....so that's how poor knowledge of those who made those deals with the celebs, and also poor knowledge in how to involve the phyisical with the social media in order to win both parts.

 

[vogue28]

Sergio Kletnoy, American Vogue's entertainment director in hot water:

 

[TerraVera]

Sergio Kletnoy, American Vogue's entertainment director in hot water:

so messy, smh. now we know how she got the cover, though.

still undeserved imo and i won't argue with anyone about it so save it

 

[KoV]

^ so goofy. He’s not well liked by many, I’m sure some of his coworkers are sharpening their knives as we speak lol


February issues are so painfully thin this year. Of the 5 different titles I was flipping through yesterday, only 1 of them was >100 pages.

 

[TerraVera]

STOP THE PRESSES JAN. 26, 2024

The Media Apocalypse​

Condé Nast and other publishers stare into the abyss.

On January 23, Anna Wintour was in Paris, taking in the Armani Privé couture show from the front row at the Palais de Tokyo. Meanwhile, back at the ranch in lower Manhattan, her staff at Condé Nast had broken into open revolt, picketing on the West Side Highway outside the company’s headquarters at One World Trade. A series of union members riled up the crowd. “Be brave, be courageous, do some wild sh*t, because right now, those suits upstairs are at their meeting table, snickering about how all of you are weak,” said one. “Is that true, are you weak?” “Nooooo!” the crowd bellowed back.

It is an especially miserable time to be employed there — and nearly everywhere else in media. Lately it has felt like much of the media industry has been put through a trash compactor: Time magazine had layoffs, and Sports Illustrated was essentially euthanized. The day of the Condé strike, the L.A. Times axed more than 20 percent of its newsroom; two days after the strike, Business Insider announced it was laying off 8 percent of its staff. The Washington Post just bought out 240 employees. It has dawned on journalists that journalism might all but cease to exist in the near future — and that whatever form it takes is being shaped by executives who have no clear idea how to create a sustainable business.

Condé’s unionized staff has been bargaining for a new contract with management, and a list began to circulate in November with the names of 94 employees who will be shown the door once the contract is signed (labor law prohibits canning employees during negotiations). Those people are expected to work until the moment they aren’t employed, and no one knows when that might be. The previous week, Wintour had informed staff that Pitchfork was being folded into GQ; word soon spread that she didn’t bother to remove her signature sunglasses as she told them this news, which didn’t exactly soften the blow. (Although as one person at Vogue pointed out to me, she wears these prescription sunglasses at almost every meeting.) Enough was enough: Some 400 employees stopped working for 24 hours, smack in the middle of Paris Fashion Week and on the day Oscar nominations were announced.


Alma Avalle, a 25-year-old writer and web producer at Bon Appétit who wore a “Free Palestine” patch, delivered a philippic against the C-suite. But when I asked what she thought about Wintour’s stewardship in particular, Avalle grew nervous: “Ummmm, no comment.” I finally found one brave Teen Vogue employee willing to go there. She gave her name and title and said it was time for Wintour to clear out. A few hours later, a panicked union representative emailed me to say the Teen Vogue employee “was feeling extremely nervous about being quoted as saying what she said (particularly about Anna). As you can imagine there is still a lot of fear about repercussions, when it comes to Anna. Would you mind making her quote anonymous?” The union rep added that “my secret goal at conde nast is to get workers confident enough to say f*ck ANNA WINTOUR on the record lol.”

That remains some “wild sh*t” no one seems quite ready to do. Annaconda still inspires fear — and respect. Were it not for her relationships with the luxury advertisers Condé still very much depends on, the company would be in even worse shape. It’s a different story when it comes to CEO Roger Lynch. The employees were more than happy to trash him on the record. “We’ve been pushing to speak with Roger Lynch since bargaining began,” Avalle explained. “We’ve marched on his offices. We’ve gotten no response.” There is a long-percolating panic inside One World Trade that perhaps Lynch has no master plan to keep the business afloat besides trimming editorial budgets.

In becoming a target, Lynch is not alone. Increasingly, journalists have moved on from ascribing blame for the collapse of the news business to “the internet” and vast technological forces beyond their control. They’re blaming corporate executives who seem unable to come up with plans that cobble together revenues from subscriptions, dwindling advertising money, e-commerce sales, and events — which is what successful executives have accomplished at the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. It’s not a business model that’s glamorous or sexy; it’s a slog, scraping together pennies, a reality that no amount of union activity is going to avoid.

Lynch, 61, does not have a background in journalism. He came to Condé in 2019. He had previously run the music-streaming service Pandora — he plays lead guitar in an all-CEO classic-rock cover band called the Merger — and was one of New Yorker editor David Remnick’s suggestions for the top job.

Lynch spent his first few years as CEO building out the in-house video studio, Condé Nast Entertainment. In 2020, he hired Agnes Chu, a Disney executive, to run it. This past October, he sent out a memo that Chu was leaving and CNE was being restructured. The memo included almost no explanation as to why this thing that Lynch had been touting as the future of the company was suddenly being disappeared.

His primary achievement has been in streamlining the international editions of the brands, refashioning the publisher into one global newsroom that reports to New York — and to Wintour. A lot of wasteful spending was cut, many of the more independent-minded foreign editors departed, and last year Condé moved out of Vogue House, the posh seven-story building in London’s Hanover Square that it had occupied for six decades. (In November, British Vogue published a sad farewell issue dedicated to all the fashion history that occurred there.)

The company says plans are to shuffle resources to promising areas of this newly consolidated empire: Lynch just opened an office in Dubai and is launching Condé Nast Traveler in Germany, and Wintour staged a “Vogue World” event in London last year for the first time (it’s coming to Paris this year). But there is only so much to go around, and it is the editorial staff back in New York who are feeling the squeeze. The U.S. titles have had to make do with a lot less for many years now, and this latest round of proposed layoffs feels to many like the breaking point. It has all contributed to the worry that Lynch still has little to no understanding or appreciation of all that must go into making magazine magic.

“There are a lot of execs who are very far removed from those who do the day-to-day work: the writers, the researchers, the editors,” Mallary Santucci, a 39-year-old culinary producer for Bon Appétit, said from the picket line. “A lot of their plans seem opaque,” concurred Gaylord Fields, a 63-year-old copy manager at GQ.

The shuffling and reshuffling has reached the point where Condé is now spitting out the people who were brought in to replace the prior generation of people it spit out. Vanity Fair seems particularly imperiled; ten of its editorial staffers are on the list of 94 doomed employees now circulating. “Everyone has been making do with nothing for years, so for this to happen, it’s like things might just come apart from here,” says senior correspondent Delia Cai, 30, who is on the list. “You would be shocked at how few people are holding it up.” How has VF’s editor-in-chief, Radhika Jones, handled all of this? “Radhika has been a real one,” Cai said approvingly. “I don’t think she has a lot of answers or clarity either. I think she’s saying as much as she can say but openly making her displeasure known as well.” I asked Cai whom she is most furious at for how things have been run. “It’s Roger, right?”

What makes this larger moment in media feel so hopeless is that many of the proprietors above the likes of Lynch appear wholly unconcerned with the way business is going. As Jeff Bezos shreds the Post, our Instagram feeds accost us with photos of Ivanka Trump and Kim Kardashian at his big Beverly Hills birthday blowout; every time Lauren Sanchez posts a freaky picture of herself at another tacky party or on a boat, you half-wonder to yourself, Is that where the newspaper’s “Metro” budget just disappeared to? Patrick Soon-Shiong, the hapless billionaire who owns the L.A. Times, allowed his meddling activist daughter to antagonize one of the most respected editors in the country, Kevin Merida, who, on the eve of brutal layoffs, finally just gave up. The Baltimore Sun was bought in January by a right-wing culture warrior who readily admitted he had never even read the thing before. It really is as it appears: The worst people are dancing together on the lip of the volcano as the journalists fall into the caldera.

But there was something particularly sad about watching the Condé people picket outside their brokedown palace in the cold. Manhattan is supposed to be the media capital of the world. What are we if we can’t even have one elite, glitzy magazine publisher? Wintour has her detractors, but plenty of people at the company told me they were reluctant to diss her, because, at 74 years old, she is still trying her damnedest to keep it all going. She seems to understand that media is a business, yes, but if you don’t have something worth selling — worth subscribing to or advertising with — it all falls apart. “It’s hard for her to see what’s happening,” says one of Wintour’s confidants inside the building. “But I think it’s beyond her job to fix this. We don’t know how it’s going to be fixed.”

Source: The Media Apocalypse

it was clear from day 1 roger lynch had no business taking the realms of CN. interesting that david remnick nominated him for role, so should he hold some blame for unleashing this bulldozer upon CN?

also noting how CNE is folding - there wasn't a need for it, nor did it produce much, so it was just another waste of money that should have been poured into better content creation staff salaries. globalizing the magazine, centralizing HQ in nyc, unionizing, and now the layoffs is both a sign of a declining company and industry, but also the vexing misunderstanding of upper management in running magazine publishing company.

it's all so sad

 

[Xone]

He’s not well liked by many

why?

 

[NYLA22]

STOP THE PRESSES JAN. 26, 2024

The Media Apocalypse​

Condé Nast and other publishers stare into the abyss.


Source: The Media Apocalypse

it was clear from day 1 roger lynch had no business taking the realms of CN. interesting that david remnick nominated him for role, so should he hold some blame for unleashing this bulldozer upon CN?

also noting how CNE is folding - there wasn't a need for it, nor did it produce much, so it was just another waste of money that should have been poured into better content creation staff salaries. globalizing the magazine, centralizing HQ in nyc, unionizing, and now the layoffs is both a sign of a declining company and industry, but also the vexing misunderstanding of upper management in running magazine publishing company.

it's all so sad

I'm wondering what the fallout will be once all the union stuff shakes out. I imagine they'll fold another mag or two and make them online only. Some of the smaller print titles are clearly on life support.

 

[marsnoop2]

It seems the only hope Vogue has is in the franchised international editions . . .

 

[PierreGotha]

I doubt Vogue and CN will recover from this. If they ever settle the strike, they will most likely consolidate further and
even become smaller and less dynamic. Furthering the decline of Vogue's influence as a Fashion beacon.

 

[tigerrouge]

For Vanity Fair, it's not great, coming so close after the SAG-AFTRA strike, and at a time of year when they might be finalising the issue that gets them most coverage, the Hollywood one.

 

[Rigida]

STOP THE PRESSES JAN. 26, 2024

The Media Apocalypse​

Condé Nast and other publishers stare into the abyss.


Source: The Media Apocalypse

it was clear from day 1 roger lynch had no business taking the realms of CN. interesting that david remnick nominated him for role, so should he hold some blame for unleashing this bulldozer upon CN?

also noting how CNE is folding - there wasn't a need for it, nor did it produce much, so it was just another waste of money that should have been poured into better content creation staff salaries. globalizing the magazine, centralizing HQ in nyc, unionizing, and now the layoffs is both a sign of a declining company and industry, but also the vexing misunderstanding of upper management in running magazine publishing company.

it's all so sad

I wonder why Anna didn't use her influence to stop Roger.. instead she supported some of his decision like the shared content strategy. Maybe they are really that desperate to cut cost?

And I think a few years ago there is some news that Conde is finally profitable or not in the red for the first time after years?... back in 2021 or 2022 if I'm not mistaken..

 

[Phuel]

STOP THE PRESSES JAN. 26, 2024

The Media Apocalypse​

Condé Nast and other publishers stare into the abyss.


Source: The Media Apocalypse

it was clear from day 1 roger lynch had no business taking the realms of CN. interesting that david remnick nominated him for role, so should he hold some blame for unleashing this bulldozer upon CN?

also noting how CNE is folding - there wasn't a need for it, nor did it produce much, so it was just another waste of money that should have been poured into better content creation staff salaries. globalizing the magazine, centralizing HQ in nyc, unionizing, and now the layoffs is both a sign of a declining company and industry, but also the vexing misunderstanding of upper management in running magazine publishing company.

it's all so sad

People losing their livelihood is nothing to jeer, nor cheer about. However, Vogue/CN has brought this upon themselves by pushing out all the genuine talents and replacing them with DEI hires. Now with not a lick of talent onboard anymore why is it a surprise to anyone that it’s sinking Titanics all around. I’m sure these DEI employees can find work with the government and non-profit organization, since they never possessed the creative and curative talent nor passion for the fashion world, just virtue-signalling. Frankly, these types seem to hate fashion and prefer their “Free Palestine” patches instead. Good riddance. To both these types and to Vogue.

(Cue Lucky Love’s “Now I Don’t Need Your Love” LOL)

 

[TerraVera]

soooo i was left with more questions than satisfying answers from this.

The millennial women leading a new era of fashion journalism​

Town cars are over, transparency has replaced aspiration and diversity finally exists. Top editors talk about leading a style magazine in 2024.​

From left, fashion editors Sarah Ball, Willa Bennett, Lindsay Peoples, Sally Holmes and Nikki Ogunnaike pose for a portrait in New York last month. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)

For decades, the phrase “fashion editor” has conjured up a certain set of images: luxe oversize offices; constant jet-setting; fleets of assistants; decisive declarations of what’s in and what’s out; daily chauffeured cars for getting whisked from the office to a power lunch to a hyper-exclusive fashion show to a black-tie gala without scuffing a stiletto on the sidewalk. It’s a pervasive enough ideal to have been immortalized in movies (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and on TV (“The Bold Type,” “Ugly Betty”).


Sure, some of these perks still exist. But as the magazine industry has entered the leaner, faster-paced internet era, a diverse and dynamic class of millennial women has risen to the top of fashion media — and armed with a native understanding of the 21st century’s always-online reader, they’re changing what it means to be editor in chief of a fashion magazine. In January, The Washington Post spoke in a roundtable conversation with five of them: Sarah Ball, 38, of WSJ. Magazine; Willa Bennett, 29, of Highsnobiety; Sally Holmes, 37, of InStyle; Nikki Ogunnaike, 38, of Marie Claire; and Lindsay Peoples, 33, of the Cut.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q: In classic millennial fashion, everyone at this table has had several different jobs. Who here has worked together, or crossed paths professionally?

Lindsay Peoples: [laughing, while all of the women begin to point at one another] This feels like that Spider-Man meme.

Nikki Ogunnaike: Sally and I worked together at Elle, and then Sally was the editor in chief of Marie Claire before I was. Willa and I worked at GQ together, and, tangentially, Sarah was at GQ before that.

Sally Holmes: I worked at the Cut, but before Lindsay worked at the Cut.

Willa Bennett: And I wrote for Teen Vogue when [Lindsay] was running it.

Q: What do you think has changed in fashion journalism now that more and more publications are under millennial leadership?

Ogunnaike: This table is the example of what has changed. Everywhere else I’ve worked has either been run by a White man or a White woman. Marie Claire has been around for 30 years in the U.S., with just one other woman of color at the helm before myself. Fundamentally, fashion journalism has changed because of who’s at the helm influencing who else gets to come in and be at the table.

Peoples: When I think about the magazines I grew up loving — I was a huge Lucky person, I loved Glamour with Cindi [Leive, the former editor in chief] — they felt like they had such a conversation with readers. Then there was a point in time where it felt as if magazines were just stuck in being aspirational, telling people what was cool, telling people what to wear. The voice just sounded to me as if it were on a pedestal.

A lot of the publications that people identify with now are more communal. It sounds like your friends. We talk about at the Cut: We want to be the thing you share in your group chats, because we want to be that community. We’re not trying to preach or be judgmental; we just want to have a conversation.

Bennett: When I used to look at [people working in] fashion, I was like, there is no path to get there, at all. Now it’s way more attainable: You follow us on Instagram, you see us on TikTok, you see us behind the scenes. Editors, when I was growing up, I wouldn’t even dream to know anything about their life. So I feel that it’s our responsibility to keep making sure young people are getting through the door and that we’re elevating their voices.

Ogunnaike: The path thing is really important. There’s that idea that governed fashion media before: that there were checkpoints you had to hit along the way. “You have to work in this closet, and you have to work for this creative director, and you have to work for this stylist.” You have to have been, frankly, verbally abused, possibly physically abused.

Ball: There was this “I paid my dues, so you have to pay yours” [idea] that has historically informed a lot of fashion media, and we’ve all had circuitous and totally different paths to our roles. Certainly I don’t come from a super-traditional fashion background. I had never worked for a fashion magazine before GQ. Like Willa said, it’s now more about, what do you have to say? And how can you engage the reader for your brand, rather than, have you served your time?

Q: Do millennials and younger consumers read fashion journalism differently than other prior generations, or do they have different expectations of it?

Holmes: There’s an expectation of transparency. It’s not acceptable to do a shoot with a White model with a White photographer with a White designer. That’s just not acceptable. And I don’t know if in prior generations those questions were even asked.

Ogunnaike: They’re more demanding, they’re more vocal and they’re not as deferent. You go down a rabbit hole online and somebody is like, “That’s what that editor is wearing? That’s how they dress?” And you’re like, “But I liked that outfit!” [laughs] People look at millennial editors and they see their peers, so they’re very comfortable delivering feedback.

Peoples: The visibility, when people are able to see us and we can be more approachable, is great. But also then people don’t realize how hard it can be.

Ogunnaike: Yeah. This job is bigger than it’s ever been before. Prior generations, they had a bit of the internet, they had a bit of social media, but they also could still get away with being like, “I don’t know social media.” That generation of editor in chiefs got to be like, “Those little ‘digi’-gals, we don’t know what’s going on over there.” Now, we have to know everything. It’s print, it’s the websites.

Peoples: It’s video.

Ogunnaike: TikTok, Instagram.

Bennett: Marketing.

Peoples: Events.

Ogunnaike: Twitch. All of the things. Reading [former Vanity Fair and The New Yorker editor] Tina Brown’s memoir was so fab because I was like, “Ohhh, you just got to give parties and also edit amazing, amazing content.” There was no, “Oh, I have to be an influencer and I have to post from this show and run off somewhere else and then check in on the video and — oh, my Slack’s dinging.” None of that. You got to be so focused on the 12 print issues you were putting out a year and the parties.

Ball: And it’s not the way it used to be in the Tina Brown era where you had a publisher who jumped on all the grenades for you, so you could just sit back in a chair with a red pencil and then go to a party. We are constantly bombarded with CEO levels of information that you have [to use] to make a business call, whether or not you thought you were going to be in a position to make a business call. Or a marketing call, an editorial call, a creative call, a social media call.

[When reached for comment, Brown wrote to The Post in an email that while she was indeed able to spend much more time focusing on the quality of writing and photography, “I took over failing magazines and spent a great deal of time on strategy with advertising and subscribers. Social entertaining was always event marketing for the advertisers! Difference today is [[the]] whole industry desperately seeking a business model to survive, burdening the editors with crazy levels of noneditorial stress!”] (lmao this made me chuckle)

Q: You mentioned readers want transparency; they want to know about the sustainability and the ethics behind the products they’re buying. But valuable fashion journalism also necessarily involves designers giving publications access, and nowadays many publications survive financially on advertising dollars and partnerships with brands. How do you handle it when all those objectives are at odds with one another?

Ball: We’re bombarded all the time by companies, people, flacks, representatives who want us to cover certain things, but you have to be ruthless. There’s an expectation, especially if you come from a digital background or a higher-volume-content background, that you’ll just do anything. “Just throw something up.” “Here’s a quick hit, promote this thing.” And that’s just not how it works. If you lose your point of view, that’s all you have. You can’t have this job if you aren’t really good at artfully, elegantly saying no to people that you then have to go have a cocktail with.

Peoples: As I’ve gotten more comfortable in this role, I’ve just really wanted to focus on the work being respected. I genuinely am not thinking, “I want these people to like me.” And I don’t say that as shade.

There’s a Toni Morrison piece in the New Yorker that I keep on my desktop, about her ideas around work. One of them is, “Your real life is with us, your family.” That basically, these people aren’t your family.

Holmes: There are certain designers that we at InStyle choose to shoot and uplift and highlight, and then there are others we don’t shoot as a policy because that’s not something that we want to put in front of our readers or align ourselves with. There are some brands and advertisers that we’ve said no to because it is more important for the audience to feel like I want their trust.

I want that relationship to continue. There are other advertisers. We have great partners that we love to work with. We don’t need a flash-in-the-pan moment that will then hurt our relationship with those readers or make people question our integrity.

Ball: Brand heat is what advertisers are buying. They’re buying a cool brand that’s resonant, close to its audience, hitting its stride. And if you were to say, “Okay, I’m going to do all spon-con [sponsored content], all native ads, all rinse-and-repeat press releases that have no point of view,” you would have no brand heat. So what you’re protecting isn’t just your own ethics and integrity, but also what you’re here to do and build.

Bennett: Something that’s exciting about the younger generations is they sniff that out and are vocal about it, which is a great challenge for all of us.

Q: Across all of media, jobs are more demanding while budgets are smaller than they used to be. And as EICs, you’re doing a lot less gala hosting and a lot more hunching over monthly traffic numbers than your predecessors, plus your readers can now tell you directly that they don’t like your outfit. This job isn’t as glamorous as it used to be. So what keeps you here, doing it?

Holmes: I have to say, it’s so much fun. And —

Ogunnaike: And it’s still kind of glamorous.

Holmes: Right. I’m sitting here in a Prada skirt! [laughs] It’s still glam, and it’s still fun. We just did our Golden Globes coverage last Sunday, and I don’t know how many editors in chief are still in the team Slack on an awards-show night saying, “Let’s cover this!” but I was. I wrote a story. I was like, this is fun. So I get to do that stuff, and go to a dinner and sit next to Nikki, and go to Fashion Week. There’s not a lot to complain about.

Bennett: For me, the ability to inspire young people is just such a gift. I mean, I looked up to Nikki so much when we worked together. When Nikki complimented something I wrote, I would be like, “I could be a writer!” For one of our September covers, I found someone on TikTok and he wrote his first cover story. I followed him on Instagram at the end and he posted his cover and wrote, like, “From my NYU dorm room …” [laughs]

So that’s why I do it. I think about my two teen sisters at home; they read all of these magazines. Putting someone on the cover really changes it for them. It changes how they think about themselves, how they think about their lives. It matters.

Peoples: A lot of it, for me, is purpose-driven. When you’re a Black woman in this industry, your experiences are just very different, so I always felt like it didn’t really matter to me the title — it was more so a vehicle for the kind of stories that I wanted to get out there. I always felt like — whether it was this job, or Black in Fashion Council, anything — how do I use this responsibility wisely? How do I be a ladder for other women of color?

I do feel, though, that you really have to be hungry to do this work and not just for the attention around it. Because when you’re coming at it from the angle of “I just want to be famous” or “I just want to get these likes,” it’s just never a good idea.

Ball: Lindsay’s exactly right. When these jobs were fortified with, let’s say, 100 times the perks, there was a “tear each other down” mentality, the famous Condé Nast “don’t talk in the elevator” [mentality], because we were all in competition with each other and somebody might hear your idea. This industry has gotten small, and if you were in it for the town car, you’re not going to get joy out of the day-to-day. So you have to be in it for way more than the car.

And because it’s gotten smaller, you would be so stupid to root for anybody to fail. You can feel competitive; we can be like, “Oh, we wanted that cover!” But to root for each other to fail, I think that comes from a time and place in the industry when it was maybe too lavish. And maybe it was about the wrong things.

Ogunnaike: When we all started working, it was 2007, 2008. That was kind of the beginning of the end of the magazines as we knew it. We saw that last bit of the golden age. The lights were coming on.

So if you came in during that time and you’ve lasted this long, you love it. There’s no other reason. You love it. You believe in it. You eat, sleep, breathe it because you saw what it could have been and you knew you weren’t going to get that moving forward, but you stuck around. You stayed the course.

Ball: And to Willa’s point, every single one of us has been in an ideas meeting where we have heard an overfunded and unwise idea [come from high up], or seen the whole [attitude], like Nikki said, of [adopts posh accent] “I choose not to care about video. That’s a fad.” You see it enough that, when you get your own chance to have a crack at it, you want to A, be way more deferential to your younger peers and staff and to hear what they have to say, and B, not take it for granted. You can’t get too jaded, because that’s when change happens. And you won’t be ready.

Q: It sounds like you all genuinely enjoy being in the trenches with your staff. Nobody here would rather have the old ivory-tower version of this job, the town-car version of this job, is what I’m hearing.

Ogunnaike: I mean, I would like a town car. [laughs]

Holmes: Sure. Yes.

Peoples: I just don’t think anybody would’ve hired me in that era. I really don’t.

Ogunnaike: That’s a good point. A Black woman who looks like me, with my haircut, would probably not have been hired in the ’90s to be an editor in chief. So yeah, I’m extremely thankful for this landscape now, because I get a chance.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/02/07/fashion-magazine-editors-millennial/

---

okay, but is it working? instyle is out of print, still digital, marie claire is still boring. there's little differentiating them from vogue or harper's because they're all putting out low par work. only a few of the women work for influential publications, despite gaining experience at some such as GQ. The Cut and Highsnobietty are arguably influential even though I don't read them aside from cathy horyn's reviews tbvh. anything else on the cut is because once or twice i year i see something, besides her reviews, interesting enough to read.

my other issue is: i'm fine with diversity, but publications fail to pair diversity with talent! it's a waste of time and space to hire based on race, gender, etc. to fill a quota for representation if the person has no talent. i can't celebrate anything if it is ls lazy, crap work. it's a general metric for everyone - a few western photographers, for example, are the counterfeit version of the guard before them. they lack originality and are clearly just in it for the money, not for improving their craft. where is the talent amongst the diverse pool of people? where???

tina brown's quip was so funny to me (grace mirabella's autobiography is still #1 for me) because it shows these women don't really get it. but what they interestingly made me ponder was, what's the role of publisher now? do they want the publisher to be the protector, to shield them? what they also fail to mention was tina understood content. her vanity fair published good content - content that initiated discussions, grabbed people's attention, and was relevant, diverse, and even transparent for its time. her circulation and subscriber numbers proved she knew what she was doing. are these women's numbers doing the same?

finally, do you have to have a social media presence in order to be a fashion editor or fashion eic? is it necessary? does a career depend on it? anna built a brand without relying on it or really needing it. even in these times, do these women?

there's something lacking in this

 

[NYLA22]

soooo i was left with more questions than satisfying answers from this.

The millennial women leading a new era of fashion journalism​

Town cars are over, transparency has replaced aspiration and diversity finally exists. Top editors talk about leading a style magazine in 2024.​

From left, fashion editors Sarah Ball, Willa Bennett, Lindsay Peoples, Sally Holmes and Nikki Ogunnaike pose for a portrait in New York last month. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)



source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/02/07/fashion-magazine-editors-millennial/

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okay, but is it working? instyle is out of print, still digital, marie claire is still boring. there's little differentiating them from vogue or harper's because they're all putting out low par work. only a few of the women work for influential publications, despite gaining experience at some such as GQ. The Cut and Highsnobietty are arguably influential even though I don't read them aside from cathy horyn's reviews tbvh. anything else on the cut is because once or twice i year i see something, besides her reviews, interesting enough to read.

my other issue is: i'm fine with diversity, but publications fail to pair diversity with talent! it's a waste of time and space to hire based on race, gender, etc. to fill a quota for representation if the person has no talent. i can't celebrate anything if it is ls lazy, crap work. it's a general metric for everyone - a few western photographers, for example, are the counterfeit version of the guard before them. they lack originality and are clearly just in it for the money, not for improving their craft. where is the talent amongst the diverse pool of people? where???

tina brown's quip was so funny to me (grace mirabella's autobiography is still #1 for me) because it shows these women don't really get it. but what they interestingly made me ponder was, what's the role of publisher now? do they want the publisher to be the protector, to shield them? what they also fail to mention was tina understood content. her vanity fair published good content - content that initiated discussions, grabbed people's attention, and was relevant, diverse, and even transparent for its time. her circulation and subscriber numbers proved she knew what she was doing. are these women's numbers doing the same?

finally, do you have to have a social media presence in order to be a fashion editor or fashion eic? is it necessary? does a career depend on it? anna built a brand without relying on it or really needing it. even in these times, do these women?

there's something lacking in this

These people show, for all the world, exactly why the magazine industry has become so insufferable. This quote is especially idiotic and racist: "It’s not acceptable to do a shoot with a White model with a White photographer with a White designer. That’s just not acceptable." The U.S. is a majority white country, why would it be "unacceptable" if those people on a shoot were white? Imagine substituting "white" with any other race. (For the record, I'm Asian American). And ALL of their publications suck, by the way, with the exception of WSJ (but she just started -- RIP Kristina O'Neill's beautiful version -- so I'm expecting the worst).

 

[tigerrouge]

Reading [former Vanity Fair and The New Yorker editor] Tina Brown’s memoir was so fab because I was like, “Ohhh, you just got to give parties and also edit amazing, amazing content.” There was no, “Oh, I have to be an influencer and I have to post from this show and run off somewhere else and then check in on the video and — oh, my Slack’s dinging.” None of that. You got to be so focused on the 12 print issues you were putting out a year and the parties.

Because a memoir that went into realistic detail about how tirelessly someone worked at their job wouldn't actually sell books and enthral the reader.

People associate the words "Vanity Fair" with glamour and gossip - and Tina was still giving them that in her book. She's still in the business of entertaining the reader. She's not going to weigh you down with drab details.

Those 'parties' were how people networked back then, and successful people worked hard to use those opportunities, all under a veneer of 'having fun'.

 

[Phuel]

LMFAO Talent and creative vision is unacceptable— but outright discrimination, prejudice and blatant racism is proudly acceptable… Those 5 women, with their smug smirks and sensible mum-jeans, look like they worked in government jobs as welfare case workers, at the DMV, at youth counselling… not a whiff of the stylish presence of Diana/Grace/Franca/Carine/Emmanuelle that produced fashion imagery that people want to pay for. And they wonder why the print industry is dying LOL