The Business of Magazines

[caioherrero]

Can't there be one magazine where all of these currently retired monarchs of style can be housed? Otherwise print is truly done, at least in fashion terms. Especially if Sara Moonves has anything to do with it. She's quite possibly the worst stylist to have ever walked this planet.

She and Jorden Bickham.

 

[Xone]

i gonna miss both of them....they helped along with Grace to shape the magazine...and even if its last years wasn't the best of their work we can't forget about the past...

In fact it's time for a book of Tonne's work....Phillis and Grace have their own....

 

[MDNA]

Condé Said Mulling More Cuts, Possible Closures
by kali hays on july 16, 2018

more cuts at condÉ?: Condé nast has been undergoing a restructuring for the last two years — but the process isn’t over quite yet and there could be yet another magazine casualty on the way.

Numerous sources say one possibility being considered is to finally do what has been long rumored: Shutter the nearly 50-year-old w magazine, launched in 1972 by publishing legend john b. Fairchild. It’s unclear if the title would continue to live online in some capacity, but the magazine, now down to only eight issues a year, has been floundering for some time as print advertising has continued to dwindle. Stefano tonchi in 2010 became editor in chief of w, which stayed part of condé in 2014 when fairchild, parent of wwd, was sold to penske media corp.

While the closure of w, which has more than 30 editorial workers on staff, is but one possible scenario that’s being floated as part of the restructuring, if it comes to pass it would clearly mean more layoffs for condé. But there also is talk of even more cuts beyond w in coming weeks. The magazine publisher has steadily winnowed its magazines’ staffs by consolidating content creation, editing, communication and business departments across titles over the last two years, while shuttering the print operations or reducing print frequency of several titles.

The dedicated business staff of glamour, already trimmed down and using content from other titles under samantha barry, could be facing cuts, with those operations heading for general oversight by condé’s business leads said to be under consideration, as is a further consolidation of output at already online-only titles like allure and self.

A spokesman for condé said simply: “we aren’t going to comment on ongoing speculation about every possible business decision the company considers or not.”

but pinching pennies is certainly the new reality for condé, once known to spend lavishly on its editorial talent. Now, more full-time staffers are being shunted into contract positions, meaning they get paid less and don’t receive employment benefits, while even anna wintour, legendary vogue editor in chief and condé’s artistic director, is being used to gather some licensing revenue with a new nike deal to design a pair of air jordans.

Wintour herself is the subject of persistent rumors that she will leave vogue or possibly condé altogether, something the company has repeatedly and emphatically denied.

Things can always change, but it seems probable that come the fall fashion week season, condé could look decidedly different.

wwd.

RIP though we know W’s closure is inevitable.

 

[dodencebt]

Contrary to most here, I think Tonne and Phyllis' departure a la Grace Coddington - first by remaining at the magazine in a limited capacity, and then leaving for good - is a graceful (no pun intended) exit. We all know it is inevitable for a magazine guard to completely change once in a while; a new editor in chief would of course form a new team and these two legendary contributors would be collateral damage. I'd much rather they exit on their own and have time to find new ventures in the upcoming year or two. No one needs another Lucinda moment, which was humiliating enough. I wish them both the best!

 

[Fiercification]

^^ Please tell me WWD didn't publish the article like this? Some of it is written like a post Google Translate job? Thanks for retrieving this at any rate MDNA .

I'm sure we're going to see more and more winding down of titles at Conde. Sad but inevitable. I don't know how anyone enthusiastic about print can see the positive side of this unless CN eventually invest in new titles? Seems highly unlikely in this climate.

 

[Benn98]

^^ Please tell me WWD didn't publish the article like this? Some of it is written like a post Google Translate job? Thanks for retrieving this at any rate MDNA .

LOL!

It's the very first thing I checked, after skimming the article, because I was shocked at the shocking errors. The piece on their site seems fine. A bit staccato, and some sentences are as long as your arm, but fine.

Thanks for posting though, MDNA!

 

[MDNA]

mess... I didn’t notice the case was messed up after copy-and-paste. Sorry for that.

 

[MDNA]

Condé Nast editors once got seriously amazing perks

By Dana Schuster

Nothing could prepare Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky magazine, for the luxe life of a Condé Nast editor-in-chief.

“The perks were really something,” said France, who launched the publication in 2000 and ran it until 2010. “It was like having your entire life shift into a completely different dimension.”

Among the benefits: weekly flower deliveries, a hefty clothing allowance, a driver at her disposal 24/7, diamonds for the borrowing and — one of France’s favorite perks — a mini fridge in her office that a staffer stocked weekly with her favorite libations and snacks, all on the company tab.

In the glory days, Condé even gifted its top editors interest-free home loans, which sources say had to be paid off within 10 years.

“It was unbelievably generous on Si Newhouse’s part to do that for editors,” said France of the Condé honcho, who passed away in 2017. (His family still owns and oversees the company.). France used a loan from her then-employer to purchase a four-story brownstone in Carroll Gardens. “That changed my life,” she told The Post.

But all good things must come to an end. And with the flush days of glossies going down the drain, so too are editors’ cushy perks. While Anna Wintour, the top editor of Vogue, still revels in the subsidized luxe life — including, reportedly, daily hair and makeup styling at her West Village townhouse — it is far from the norm for the new, younger crop of post-recession EICs.

Instead, they are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars less and get around town in Ubers, or — gasp — even via the subway. (The Post’s Keith Kelly reported that Vanity Fair’s new EIC, Radhika Jones, is commanding a $500,000 salary, while her predecessor, Graydon Carter, earned $2 million.)

It’s all part of a larger print industry collapse that has seen once venerable titles, such as Lucky, Self and Details, fold or move to digital-only. According to a 2017 report, the ad buying firm Magna predicted a print advertising decline of around 13 percent in 2018.

The June/July issue of Glamour is said, according to multiple sources, to have sold around 20,000 newsstand copies; in 2010, Glamour averaged more than half a million monthly. With the industry struggling to stay afloat, publishers are cutting back on the big names, big salaries and big extras.

“It’s all mythology now,” said Lesley Jane Seymour, who was the editor-in-chief of More magazine from 2008 to 2016 and, before that, of Marie Claire.

“I don’t think anyone expects perks of any kind any[more]. The whole thing is over,” Seymour said of magazines’ high times. “It’s a bygone era.”

Back in the 1980s and ’90s and the early aughts, there was no industry more glamorous than the magazine world.

Former Seventeen editor-in-chief Ann Shoket (2007-2014) recalls a story she heard from that publication’s former editor Midge Richardson, who was at the helm from 1975 to 1993.

“She told me she used to take [then-publisher] Walter Annenberg’s private plane to Ibiza for a fitness shoot,” Shoket said, laughing. “Not for a cover shoot. Not for a giant [fashion story]. But for a fitness shoot.”

Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, said when she was first brought to Condé to work at Vanity Fair in 1983, she was encouraged to dine with the rich and fabulous on the company dime.

“The editorial director, Alexander Liberman, called me up and said, ‘My dear, I’m very concerned. I heard you had lunch at the Four Seasons.’ I said, ‘Yes, I did. Is that all right?’ He said, ‘It’s quite all right That’s where you were supposed to go for lunch. But I hear you were having lunch in the upstairs gallery. You can’t possibly think of having lunch in the upstairs gallery! You’ll be in Siberia there. I will call the Four Seasons and make sure that you are always seated in the booth,’ ” she recalled.

One high-profile editor-in-chief, who left her post a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous, said her publishing house gave her a car service plus two car leases (she typically got a BMW or Audi) and spots in a Manhattan parking garage — in addition to a hefty salary and performance bonuses.

Five-figure clothing allowances for top editors and fashion editors were de rigueur, as was company-provided hair and makeup for public events, and even some internal ones.

“At Condé, there was a monthly meeting called ‘print order’ if you were an editor-in-chief. It’s when you showed the entire magazine to all the bosses, page by page,” said France. “It was a big, stressful meeting and everyone always wanted to look their best . . . Every female editor-in-chief [except me] used to get hair and makeup before their print order.”

And perks weren’t just reserved for top-tier employees.

“When I was at Condé [in the ’80s and ’90s], if you ate lunch at your desk — everybody from the lowliest assistants all the way to the top — you could expense it,” said Seymour, who said that policy is long gone. “We used to say we were having lunch on Uncle Si.”

France made sure to spread the wealth during the holidays.

“Everyone on my staff got a $100 gift card from Barney’s at Christmas,” said France. “When my editors had babies, I would give them [each] a Marc by Marc Jacobs diaper bag. They easily cost $500.” All of these gifts were expensed to the company, a practice France said Condé had banished by the time she left in 2010.

Former Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Kate White, who headed that mag from 1998 to 2012, said she’d thank hard-working staffers with nice dinners.

“When we wanted to reward people’s great efforts, we would treat them to dinner with their significant others,” White recalled.

Brandon Holley, another former editor-in-chief of Lucky (2010 to 2013), started out at Condé in the late ’90s as a senior editor at GQ. She recalled the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Art Cooper, presenting her with a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels and a Prada bag — on Condé’s tab.

“It was because I had done a good story,” Holley said.

Seymour added that Hearst, which publishes such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire and Seventeen, would often give female editors high-end jewelry as gifts.

“You would get earrings — usually precious stones,” she said. “Looking back, it was inappropriate. No man would have taken it. They would have said, ‘Give me $5,000 and I’ll put it away and send my kid to college or put it in my 401k,’ and the girls were like, ‘Oh, you love me, it’s so great.’

“It got Hearst off cheaply because if they gave you that instead of a raise, they didn’t have to give you more money the next year.”

Editors interviewed for this story said that the publishing companies’ generosity could sometimes be taken advantage of.

“There was something called the ‘scouting trip’ and that was something that could be interpreted very loosely,” said France.

“You could say you were going to London just to . . . look at clothes and the street style and figure out story ideas” — and basically use it as a free vacation. “I was not so abusive, but I know people were,” she added.

The anonymous editor-in-chief recalls an extremely high catering bill for a photo shoot produced by her team.

“It turned out, as part of the catering, the photographer had ordered a carving station,” she said. “There was an attitude of: ‘Hey, I can spend money this way because the company spends money this way.’ ”

Indeed, most every editor interviewed said their expenses were never denied.

“I paid for my own dry cleaning, but I probably could have gotten away with not paying for it,” said France. “If expenses came through from an editor-in-chief, they were very rarely questioned.”

For European fashion shows, when Seymour was EIC of Marie Claire, Hearst would put her and other editors up at the fanciest of hotels.

“We all stayed at the Four Seasons, the Bulgari, and got the top rooms,” she said.

Within Condé, there seemed to be at least two tiers of editors, with those at the top — likely Wintour and Carter — outranking those at smaller magazines.

While editors like Carter famously had their town cars idling outside of the office at all hours, France said her hired driver took other jobs in between her scheduled rides: “It wasn’t like I had him on retainer.”

But the fact that she had a private driver, in and of itself, was vital, as much for convenience as image.

“It was all competitive. You couldn’t run a fancy magazine and not stay at a fancy hotel. It was all the snobbery,” Seymour said. “It was stupid. [But] that’s what the fashion business is all about — it’s keeping up.”

Seymour added that Condé even paid for top editors’ children and nannies to travel with them for the international shows.

“It was a culture that really prized families,” said one former Condé editor-in-chief who asked to remain anonymous, adding that those with children would be given higher pay. “Si, when he determined an editor-in-chief’s salary, he considered if they had children. In a way, there was coverage of [private school and childcare].”

Nowadays, few editors remain from the golden era: only Anna Wintour, Glenda Bailey at Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker’s David Remnick. In recent years, some of the industry’s most influential, including Graydon Carter, Glamour’s Cindi Leive, Allure’s Linda Wells and Elle’s Robbie Myers, have all been replaced by younger — and cheaper — talent.

Remarkably, Glamour was turned over to Samantha Barry, 37, the former head of social media for CNN who had never even worked at a magazine before being named EIC in January.

“The publishers are hiring editors who are less experienced. They are kids [who] don’t expect much. [Publishers] are giving them tiny salaries . . . [The EIC position] doesn’t come with the visibility or authority [of the past]. I don’t even know who’s running Vanity Fair now,” said Seymour of Jones, 45, a former New York Times staffer who took over Vanity Fair from Carter in December.

One insider said the home loans of yesteryear were “a Si thing” and no longer part of the Condé package. Another well-placed source said publishing houses are “studying Travel & Entertainment expenses a lot more closely than they used to,” adding that some editors-in-chief are even losing their multiple assistants and plush offices.

“The cars we would rent [to get around during photo] shoots would be convertible BMWs,” said style expert Mary Alice Stephenson, who worked at Vogue and as Harper’s Bazaar’s fashion director in the ’90s and 2000s. “Whereas today, they would be Honda Civics.”

Current magazine staffers may look longingly to the decadent days of years past, but editors say the benefits were more than well-deserved.

“The perks sound fantastical, but I don’t think it was all that different than men and women who run massive companies,” said Holley. “We weren’t little fashion editors . . . Most of us were really hard-working executives in really high heels.”

nypost.com

 

[caioherrero]

Glamour is going so bad. Thanks God. The work of Sam is horrible.

 

[Benn98]

20K??? That's abysmal for such a mainstream magazine! They won't last if this continue. Why won't Samantha wise up and look at other ways of drawing her audience?

 

[caioherrero]

20K??? That's abysmal for such a mainstream magazine! They won't last if this continue. Why won't Samantha wise up and look at other ways of drawing her audience?

I think CN will close all magazines if Anna stays on board. Every single magazine that she touches go downhill.

 

[vogue28]

Why won't Samantha wise up and look at other ways of drawing her audience?

She, along with all the other Conde Nast suits, must be utterly delusional if they think Glamour's new look would appeal to the masses. I've already noticed they've trimmed down the border size with the August cover - and rightly so!

 

[YohjiAddict]

Has W already folded? I can't remember the last time I saw a new thread regarding that mess of a magazine and I need some place to discharge my vitrol.

 

[tigerrouge]

Magazines need to have the confidence to stand aside from social media and exist in their own right as a source of content.

And in terms of your audience, it never does any harm to remember that even the most ardent activist has moments where they dream about looking like a L'Oreal advert and having a well-organised wardrobe.

 

[WeberFanatic]

Has W already folded? I can't remember the last time I saw a new thread regarding that mess of a magazine and I need some place to discharge my vitrol.

W is still around but barely, they’ve been still shooting stories.

 

[YohjiAddict]

With those numbers, it's not surprising to see that sophisticated image making has gone down the drain.

 

[mepps]

Anna is getting out at the right time.

 

[Deleted member 130879]

Magazines need to have the confidence to stand aside from social media and exist in their own right as a source of content.

And in terms of your audience, it never does any harm to remember that even the most ardent activist has moments where they dream about looking like a L'Oreal advert and having a well-organised wardrobe.

Thing is, you can't expect to sell nowadays if you are offering pieces that are easily available online... and with that I mean fashion shoots too. It's all about slow journalism. People still want to pay for slow journalism. Nobody cares about the "10 pieces you need to buy this summer" as you can get 1000 different articles online about that. Deep investigation made a very good journalist? Now that's another story.

 

[dodencebt]

Thing is, you can't expect to sell nowadays if you are offering pieces that are easily available online... and with that I mean fashion shoots too. It's all about slow journalism. People still want to pay for slow journalism. Nobody cares about the "10 pieces you need to buy this summer" as you can get 1000 different articles online about that. Deep investigation made a very good journalist? Now that's another story.

Yes! I mentioned the same in a Glamour thread I believe, as a response to an article where Samantha talked about how they're going to cover "pressing topics" such as #MeToo and the gender pay gap - that's great, but are you going to offer something more than what we can read online? Why would anyone pay for a puff article that they can find for free anyway? We need high quality shoots and journalism, that's the only way to get people to spend money I think.

 

[Benn98]

My theory is that there's no balance. Bulking up your magazine with loads of heavy text is ok, but if there's no visual, aspirational or even frivolous component to counter that then you may as well pack up shop! Frivolity is like, I dunno, Moschino. There's no real creative need for it. I personally think the industry will be fine without Scott, yet the demand for the brand is tremendous. People want to look tacky. It's the same reason why the Jade roller is such a big seller, why so many celebrities have beauty ranges and literally all of them are selling. These things are happening, people are reacting to it, and money is being funneled into it, despite editors thinking the modern woman ONLY cares about hard-hitting features and imagery. Anyone who would run such a dull shot for a dual month issue and expect people to actually buy it must be deluded. I've always been against the idea of stylists running magazines personally because the result ended up so hollow. Just a bunch of glossy images and visual storytelling. Yet Samantha proved that the polar opposite to that is just as bad actually. An all-rounder like Anna or Justine (yes, groan away, Miss Dalloway! ) know that.

If it wasn't for CN, Glamour would've gone bust under Cindy already. They're lucky enough to still have the luxury industry backing them with ads, although I'm sure it's not by choice. They're probably block booked with Vogue etc.

Samantha can do well to just look at the story of Mirabella who went under despite having a very distinct vision for their readers, remarkable journalism and a 500K-odd newsstand & subscriber base (astonishing, even for 2000!) But all that counted for naught without marked fashion content and campaigns. Glamour may have the ads in this case, but they're far worse off because they don't even have an audience beyond 20k. Laughable.