Do You Know Me?
With Jane Pratt about to leave the magazine she named after herself, Tina Brown off writing a book about Princess Diana, and Bonnie Fuller struggling to keep the Star competitive, it looks like the age of the "star editor" is finally over. Today's newly successful magazines rely far more on a format or formula than the creative vision or buzz factor of a highly publicized, highly paid editor in chief.
For example, during the past six months circulation for In Touch, published by Bauer, increased 49.7%, to 1.12 million copies, compared with the first half of 2004. Newsstand sales for the weekly rose 49.8%, to 1.09 million. But who exactly is the editor of In Touch? He certainly isn't a regular at Michael's, the Manhattan lunchtime media hangout.
He is Richard Spencer, a former soap-opera writer who is hardly known even in the magazine community. He works out of Bauer's suburban New Jersey headquarters and seems less than impressed with the power of magazines or their editors. He once declared about In Touch, "We're the first magazine to be brave enough to say that people don't read magazines anymore."
Circulation also rose 23.7% for Us Weekly, a competitive celeb-a-zine that now sells 1.67 million copies of each issue. Us's editor is Janice Min, better known in publishing circles than In Touch's Mr. Spencer. And Ms. Min does now, it has been reported, pull down a supersized salary. After months of negotiation, Jann Wenner let her contract lapse, but she finally inked a two-year deal that will, reportedly, pay her $1.2 million annually.
But Ms. Min, who is married to a history teacher at Horace Mann and has a toddler son, does not have many "star editor" characteristics. She has been called "hard-working," "unpretentious," and "a good manager." And there are no gossip-column items about her, as there often were about her predecessor, Bonnie Fuller, when she was the editor at Us.
Other magazines that are doing well include Real Simple, which increased its circulation in the latest report 13.4%, to 1.94 million. It is edited by Kristin Van Ogtrop, a former executive editor at Glamour, and was developed after Time did extensive research on what women today want in a magazine. In fact, the magazine has had three managing editors since it was launched in 2000. But its circulation and advertising has continued to grow no matter who has been in the editor's chair.
Samir Husni, chair of the journalism department of the University of Mississippi, and popularly known through the trade as "Mr. Magazine," told me: "If we go back historically to the 1920s and 1930s, there were some magazine editors who were better known than their publications, like Henry Luce at Time and Dewitt Wallace at Reader's Digest. Tina Brown did re-create the importance of the 'star editor' to some degree. But that was really an East Coast and, to some extent, a West Coast phenomenon. Today the magazine brand itself is the star, and the challenge is extending the personality of the ink on the paper, regardless of who is the editor."
There are still some important editors, especially in the Conde Nast stable. Anna Wintour at Vogue is known to the public at large as the alleged inspiration for the Cruella De Ville-like editor in Lauren Weisberger's best seller, "The Devil Wears Prada." (Ms. Weisberger was briefly Ms. Wintour's assistant.) But within magazine circles, Ms. Wintour's power is tied almost entirely to the highly profitable magazine she edits.
The September issue of Vogue is a hefty 802 pages and according to its modest publisher, Tom Florio, has "brought in more revenue for a monthly magazine than probably any magazine ever published in the world - since the cavemen." In contrast, the magazines Tina Brown edited - Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Talk - reportedly never made money while she was at the helm.
Ms. Wintour is overseeing the launch of Men's Vogue, which will hit newsstands the first week in September and is edited by Jay Felden, one of her proteges. Insiders say Ms.Wintour is also developing a possible third Vogue offspring, Vogue Living.
In today's business environment, magazine companies now seem to want editors who make money, not headlines, and tend to promote from within or choose seasoned deputies when the editor in chief slot is open. Recently, when Brandon Holley left Elle Girl to go to Jane as editor in chief, Elle Girl's executive editor, Christina Kelly, was promoted. And last week Lori Majewski, executive editor of Us, returned to Teen People, where she once worked, to take the job of managing editor.
If there are any publishing stars today, they tend to be the "suits" - behind-the-scene executives focused on the bottom line. A couple of weeks ago, Advertising Age, a trade publication, called the heads of Meredith - the CEO Bill Kerr and the president and COO Stephen Lacy - "the sexiest men in publishing." This was not exactly the first adjective that might come to mind about these shrewd businessmen. But Mr. Kerr and Mr. Lacy engineered the purchase of Gruner + Jahr's stable of women's magazines for what is considered a bargain-basement price. That today is a lot sexier than being gossiped about the way former Conde Nast CEO Steve Florio was.
Finally, when Forbes magazine recently listed the most powerful women in publishing, they included Cathleen Black, the president of Hearst Magazines, and Ann Moore, the head of Time Inc.'s magazine division. Both have business backgrounds. Ms. Black came out of ad sales; Ms. Moore was once a corporate financial analyst and has a Harvard M.B.A.
Last week there was even some discussion among magazine insiders whether Jane Pratt had left Jane because of a case of "wanderlust," as she claimed, or because of increasing conflict with the upper management of Fairchild, the magazine's publishing company. Whatever the reason, Mr. Husni said, sizing up the current publishing scene, "People always talk about the golden age of magazines. Well, this is definitely the golden age of business people in magazines."
